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Who is Paul Haggis
Paul Haggis was born in London, Ontario, in 1953.
He is an Academy Award-winning Canadian screenwriter, producer and film director who spent his early career in the television field writing, producing and directing various American and Canadian television network series.
Haggis attended St Thomas More Elementary School, St George’s Public School, Mitchell District High School, and Fanshawe College in London before leaving for Los Angeles in 1975 to follow his dream of writing television and movie scripts.
As a television writer and producer, he created or co-created the series Walker Texas Ranger, Due South, Family Law, and the celebrated, if quickly cancelled EZ Streets.
In 1989, he received two Emmy awards for his work as a writer and as a producer on the show thirtysomething. He returned to television in the spring of 2007, after NBC picked up a 13-episode order for his crime drama, The Black Donnellys.
In addition to directing multiple episodes of the above-mentioned television shows, Haggis has directed several feature films and written several successful screenplays. Red Hot, his directorial debut, had a limited video release in 1993.
Around the turn of the century he came into his own as both a writer and director in films.
As a film writer, he received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for 2004’s Million Dollar Baby, directed by Clint Eastwood.
His second directorial effort performed equally as well. Crash, which he co-wrote, directed and co-produced in 2004, received the Academy Award for Best Picture.
In 2007 he then directed another picture, In the Valley of Elah, which presented in Competition at the Mostra di Venezia.
In 2006 Haggis also adapted, for director Eastwood, James Bradley’s book Flags of Our Fathers, about the Battle of Iwo Jima, and the following part of the project, Letters from Iwo Jima, written with Japanese writer Iris Yamashita, for which he received a fifth Academy Award nomination.
He was also hired to revise the screenplay for the James Bond film, Casino Royale. The original screenplay had been written by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, based on the novel by Ian Fleming. He was asked to direct but declined.
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