News

Paul Haggis Talks Third Person Film & 'Intelligent Cinema'

The current golden age of television has benefited from mainstream cinema’s inability to accommodate challenging subject matter.

However there are still a few filmmakers who have aspirations of emulating the art house heroes of the 70s, such as Lumet, Coppola, and Cimino.

Paul Haggis, who wrote and directed Best Picture winner Crash, has launched a scathing attack on modern American cinema, while promoting his new movie Third Person, alongside star Liam Neeson.

He said, via Toronto Sun: “It's a movie that asks a lot of questions, and you want people to answer them for themselves.

"I love those films where you walk out on the sidewalk and argue with your friends about the meaning of this, the meaning of that. You really have to think about it."

Neeson agreed: "That's too rare nowadays."

The director continued: "In the '70s we'd see these films and then we'd talk about them for weeks and weeks. And now we get confused by Spider-Man 2."

Third Person premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and was well received by critics. Also starring Adrien Brody, Kim Basinger, Olivia Wilde, Mila Kunis, and James Franco, the film consists of three different stories which are all intertwined, similar to the structure of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, or indeed Haggis’ Crash.

The filmmaker insisted that writing such a complex script was an extremely difficult task and one he struggled with.

He said: "I was dealing with questions I couldn't answer about myself and relationships, and I just put those three questions in three different sets of characters, and then put them in different parts of the world.

"Balancing those three stories and finding answers for myself in those characters took a long time."

He added: "I think studios and financiers and producers and writers and directors don't have enough respect for the audience anymore.

"You have to write for smart people, and damn those who want simple answers and condemn you because you aren't feeding them that. Go see another film."

Here is the trailer for Third Person:

Here is a story synopsis, via MSN:

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael (Liam Neeson) is still reeling from the recent separation from his wife Elaine (Kim Basinger) when he retreats to a Paris hotel room to finish his latest novel. As Michael searches for inspiration, his fiery affair with smoldering journalist and aspiring writer Anna (Olivia Wilde) awakens an intense passion deep within him.

Meanwhile, in Rome, unscrupulous American businessman Scott (Adrien Brody) ducks into a place called the Cafe Americano searching for a taste of home. There he encounters captivating Roma beauty Monika (Moran Atias), who claims to have just lost the ransom she intended to pay her daughter’s kidnappers.

As Scott ventures toward an uncertain fate in an unfamiliar country, former soap-opera starlet Julia (Mila Kunis) fights her prolific, ex-husband artist Rick (James Franco) for custody of their six-year-old son in New York City.

Source: Toronto Sun

The post Paul Haggis Talks Third Person Film & ‘Intelligent Cinema’ appeared first on Doddle.