Paul Haggis, the Director Success Didn't Spoil

Paul Haggis, Academy Award winner, wants to help de-roach our apartment. This is after he's offered us a sip from his water bottle, the stash of cashews from his Ritz-Carlton suite, and after he's suggested we meet for drinks later because we didn't get through all of our interview questions. We say that would be great -- otherwise our biggest weekend plan involves pest control. So Paul Haggis says, "Oh, do you need help with that?" Staggering niceness. Decency overload.

Paul Haggis, what are you trying to pull?

Maybe it's because, as so many profiles love to point out, he's Canadian, pronouncing at all as uh'tall. Or maybe it's because he's still grateful -- having spent 30 years in television land's relative obscurity before landing at the Oscar podium in 2005 -- to be getting name recognition uh'tall.

You may know him as the baby-faced writer whose first two screenplays scored back-to-back Best Picture awards. "Million Dollar Baby" (girl boxing, euthanasia) swept four major categories in 2005. In 2006, his directorial debut, "Crash" (racism, intolerance), also won for Best Original Screenplay. ("In the Valley of Elah," his next writer-director project, opens Friday and follows a father -- Tommy Lee Jones -- on his lump-in-throat search for his missing Iraq vet son. Charlize Theron is the cop who helps him; Susan Sarandon, his long-suffering wife.) Entertainment writers were enamored of the outta-nowhere wunderkind: In 2005 the Los Angeles Times described him as an "overnight sensation."

Here's the thing, though. The wunderkind is 54. And he's actually been in the business for three decades as a television writer, churning out hard-to-stomach human story lines that struggled to find audiences. Without his quickly canceled series "EZ Streets," TV-philes postulate, there would have been no "Sopranos." He paid the bills with mass-market work -- gigs on "One Day at a Time" and "Walker, Texas Ranger."

"What can I say," Haggis says bashfully. "I've sort of failed my way upwards really successfully."

So how do you become a late bloomer in a youth-worshiping field? You start, Haggis says, by getting totally disgusted with yourself. "I'd approached some people about doing a really dark, complex show with lots of hard questions, and they went, 'Hmm. How about instead you do a law show?' " He agreed to develop "Family Law." Then, in 2001, a revelation: "I'd just been fired from [the show] and I realized that I'd started to do really bad work."

He dropped the backwards approach of trying to guess what would sell and instead used his sudden unemployment to write "Million Dollar Baby" on spec. Bada-ching. Insta-fame.

(For the three Haggis fans who saw his only pre-"MDB" attempt, 1993's straight-to-video "Red Hot," here's your tidbit: "We filmed in Latvia, there was no money, the sound guy called his wife back home and she said the check had bounced. In the middle of a scene he wrapped up his equipment and walked off. . . . Rent it only if you want a really, really bad movie.")

For both "Family Law" and "Million Dollar Baby," Haggis drew on personal experience. Episodes of the former were inspired by a nine-year divorce from his first wife. (Nine. Years.) In "Million Dollar Baby" Clint Eastwood's estranged relationship with his child was reportedly based on Haggis's with his daughter (they're close now). Even "Due South," a fish-out-of-water drama series about a Canadian Mountie in an American city, has wisps of Haggis: He moved to Los Angeles from London, Ontario, at 22 after his father told him he wasn't so good at the family construction business.

The small-screen power players he's now eclipsed say they bear no grudge against Haggis's sudden household-name status, citing the superhuman work hours and exacting standards that went into his success. Says Paul Gross, who starred in "Due South," "I always had this picture of Paul getting home to his apartment, immediately falling on the floor asleep, and then coming back the next day and whipping everybody."

And the big-screen power players seem to have welcomed him into their sandbox with open arms. Tommy Lee Jones says it was Haggis's reputation and writing that drew him to "Elah." Josh Brolin -- who had hoped for a role in "Crash" -- accepted a cameo as Theron's boss just for the privilege of a Haggis credit: "He said, 'It's not a big role. I can pay you no money.' With the hype he has he could basically do anything he wants and people will want to work with him."