Paul Haggis

Paul Edward Haggis (born March 10, 1953) is a Canadian screenwriter, film producer, and director of film and television. He is best known as screenwriter and producer for consecutive Best Picture Oscar winners Million Dollar Baby (2004) and Crash (2005), the latter of which he also directed. Haggis also co-wrote the war film Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and the James Bond films Casino Royale (2006) and Quantum of Solace (2008). He is the creator of the television series Due South (1994–1999) and co-creator of Walker, Texas Ranger (1993–2001), among others. Haggis is a two-time Academy Award winner, two-time Emmy Award winner, and seven-time Gemini Award winner. He also assisted in the making of "We Are the World 25 for Haiti". In November 2022, he was found liable in a civil trial which alleged he raped publicist Haleigh Breest and he was required to pay $10 million in damages. Early life Paul Edward Haggis was born in London, Ontario, the son of Mary Yvonne (née Metcalf) and Ted Haggis, a World War II veteran and Olympic sprinter in the 1948 Summer Olympics. He was raised as a Catholic, attending Catholic school and facing confrontations with children from Ontario's Protestant majority. His family had stopped going to Mass after finding their parish priest driving a Cadillac, and he considered himself an atheist by early adulthood. The Gallery Theatre in London was owned by his parents, and Haggis gained experience in the field through work at the theatre. Haggis attended St. Thomas More Elementary School. He started secondary school at Ridley College in St. Catharines, but began getting into bad behavior by skipping his required Royal Canadian Army Cadets drills, breaking into the prefect's office to erase his demerits, and reading the radical magazine Ramparts. After a year, Haggis's parents transferred him to a more progressive preparatory school in Muskoka Lakes. Haggis was taught by a producer of the CBC Radio One news program As It Happens, who allowed him to sit with him as he edited John Dean's testimony to the Watergate hearings for broadcast. After being inspired by Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Luc Godard, Haggis proceeded to study art at H. B. Beal Secondary School. He opened a theater in Toronto to screen films banned by the Ontario Board of Censors such as The Devils and Last Tango in Paris. After viewing Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blowup in 1974, he traveled to England with the intent of becoming a fashion photographer.