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• Q&A with Mr. Haggis
• Washington Post article on Mr. Haggis
• In the Valley of Elah
• Mr. Haggis' bio

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Tavis: Paul Haggis is an Oscar-winning writer and Oscar-nominated director whose credits include back-to-back best picture winners - "Crash" and "Million Dollar Baby." He's also enjoyed success in television, winning two Emmys for his work on "Thirty-Something." His latest project is the first feature film whose story is rooted in the Iraq war, and the film is called "In the Valley of Elah."

It opened this past weekend in New York and L.A. Here now, a scene from "In the Valley of Elah."

[Clip]

Tavis: Well, for starters, Paul Haggis, you can't do much better than Tommy Lee Jones.

Paul Haggis: Isn't he amazing?

Tavis: He's an amazing actor.

Haggis: Great actor.

Tavis: Yeah. Nice to see you again.

Haggis: Good to see you.

Tavis: You been okay?

Haggis: I've been good, yeah.

Tavis: Is it just you, or - wrote, produced, directed?

Haggis: I had a lot of help in all those things.

Tavis: (Laughs.) You did all of this on this one project. Was there a particular reason for doing that on this project?

Haggis: I did most of that on "Crash," as well. I like - I like getting my hands all over it.

Tavis: The storyline is about what?

Haggis: It's about a man, Tommy Lee Jones, who goes searching for his son. He gets a call that his son's gone missing his first weekend back, and Tommy Lee Jones' character Hank doesn't even know his character is back - his son is back from Iraq. And so - based on a true story - he goes searching for him to find out some really troubling truths about his son and what was happening in Iraq.

Tavis: As I read it, though, it's really about - as I view it - it's really about whether or not - the question it raises for me is whether or not soldiers returning from Iraq really are getting the kind of treatment that they need.

Haggis: That's true, and it's a simple answer; they're just not. I've interviewed a lot of veterans to do this story, and had them in front of the camera and behind the camera, and they'll all tell you that - they'll tell you two things: we don't know what's going on there, and secondly just no one's helping them, and no one wants to hear what they have to say when they come back.

We want to pat them on the back and say, “Job well done and you look great,” and these guys are saying, “I look great? Can't you see what I've seen?” And of course, we can't. The highest rate of suicide in forever in our troops and the highest rated homelessness - it's really disgraceful.

Tavis: It raises a fascinating question for me, which is how you treat somebody. If the question is are they getting the kind of treatment, the kind of help they need when they return, that again assumes that you have some sense of what they're going through while they're there.

Haggis: Yeah, and we don't.

Tavis: Exactly. So if we don't know what they're going through while they're there, then how does any veteran coming back from Iraq get what he or she needs?

Haggis: And that's the real tragedy. These men and women - these are brave men and women, and they are going into an impossible situation and dealing with things ever day that we never want to have to look at - in fact, we don't look at it. We don't see these images that they have to see on the nightly news, and the civilian deaths are so high.

And what they deal with - they're being asked to be policemen and social workers, things they've never been trained to do over there. And so they're coming back haunted, a lot of them. No, a lot of them are coming back just fine, and you say, “Thank God.” But way too many - and even by the Pentagon's statistics, they're saying that one in six troops are suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Well, what, 1.5 million troops have served there so far? What is that, 250,000? And even if you boiled that down, because there's multiple tours, it's still - 100,000? We had Legionnaire's disease, and it killed 29 people, I think - something like that - and it was worldwide headlines. Here's 100,000 men and women - our men and women - and they're coming back deeply scarred, and we're just not doing anything for them.

Tavis: When you say deeply scarred, what troubles me - and this is not a phenomenon that's only Iraq-specific - it is always the case that young men and now young women are the persons who fight these wars on our behalf. What's your sense of having interviewed and talked to a number of people and made this project - and the storyline is, of course, about a father in search of his son - but what's your sense of what this does to these young minds? If you're going to get screwed up, to get screwed up this way in your youth doesn't sound like the best strategy for trying to -

Haggis: No, and I think it's going to be a huge problem in years to come, because we're living in a state of denial. We like to think that they're coming back and just fine, and we understand those that are disabled come back without an arm or a leg; we understand that in some way. But we don't understand this, and we don't want to.

And I think that that's why I tried to make this film a very political film, but a nonpartisan film, because I try to say first of all, we can't vilify these troops. I was protesting against the war, others were supporting the war - it doesn't matter. They're representing us. They're there doing jobs that we asked them to do, and so we better support these men when they come back (inaudible).

Tavis: On this particular project, relative to this particular war, help me understand how you juxtapose doing a film that's political but nonpartisan. There are a lot of folk who can't even see how that's possible, given how strongly held our views are about this war.

Haggis: Well, I think we, as Americans, love to point a finger and blame someone, and if we can't blame the enemy, then we blame our own troops sometimes and say, “Well, look at Abu Ghraib.” And we love to say, “Oh, it's six or seven bad people” - it's just not the truth.

This is endemic; these are kids who by their training and by their experience and by the example we set for them and with our leadership they're dealing with inhuman situations and sometimes having to become less human in order to meet the objectives that they think we're setting for them.

Tavis: And you don't think there's somebody to blame for that?

Haggis: Oh, yeah, I think we're to blame. I think I'm to blame.

Tavis: Who's the "we?"

Haggis: I think America. I think we sent them there. I think the -

Tavis: I'm not sure I buy that, though. I am as - Dr. West was on this program a couple nights ago - Cornel West - and he made the point in a conversation that I'm as American as George Bush is. And George Bush is as American as I am. So I don't buy that we part. I didn't send these troops there, and I'm not in the chain of command allowing them, telling them, whatever, to torture troops. You say we're to blame, I don't (inaudible) that.

Haggis: What we aren't doing is enough. Those who oppose the war aren't doing enough, obviously, to stop it.

Tavis: And that's fair.

Haggis: So whatever our stance is, we look at our Democrats and we can't say, “Oh, yes, the Democrats are right and the Republicans are wrong,” as you said earlier. Petraeus is splitting the Democrats, and we're allowing that to occur. We're refusing to learn from history. Now we're looking at an honorable withdrawal?

Did we not learn anything from Vietnam? It's impossible. We've created a terrible mess, and we should be dealing with that mess over there and at home.

Tavis: Talk to me about the joy, the pain, the possibility, the challenge, of doing a film about a war that is still, in fact, ongoing.

Haggis: Yeah, well, it was tough. I truly wanted to do a film that was popular entertainment. I want to package it in a mystery, I wanted you to feel like you got your $10 worth when you went to the film, because I don't think it does anyone any good to start thumping our chests and saying, “You see?” Or, “We're right,” or proselytize, or make huge speeches.

I think we have to see the impact this is having, and so I chose to take the impact on one family and see the destruction of an American family. And the destruction of a very proud man, which is, I think - I at least view as our national sin; the same sin I have, which is pride. There's a reason why it's one of the seven deadly sins.

It's with excessive pride comes blindness. We know right from wrong, so we don't have to really look at the evidence or the truth because we already know we're right, and that's a sin we've had in America for a long time. This is a particularly gruesome war because of the civilian nature, and we've known what happens in civilian - in urban wars for 2,000 years. There's bad guys over here, shooting at you. You're over here, and you unleash hell in that direction and you hope there's nobody in between.

But then you have to walk through that village afterwards, and you have to pick up that child who's now dead, and that mother who's cut in half, trying to save her baby, and the grandfather who dies trying to save his grandchild. And if these are bad kids, if these are bad men and women, it wouldn't bother them.

These are good men and women who have to deal with this stuff, and yet we aren't willing to see that stuff on our nightly news. We aren't willing to show those images and to be as haunted as they are, and that's a terrible shame.

Tavis: Well, again, we disagree on this. I'm not so sure of this, that we aren't willing, if it is the State Department that doesn't allow us to see the pictures, to see these dead bodies coming back to Dover, what do you do?

Haggis: Well, you know what? I think that's nonsense. I don't think it's just the Pentagon. I think that the media corporations have said, “You know what? No one wants to see a picture on the nightly news of a baby with no head, and then try to sell commercial stuff after it.”

Tavis: That's fair; that's fair.

Haggis: No one wants to do that. And so no one wants to see it, period, but certainly you don't want to see it just before you went to eat dinner. So there's a conspiracy, but it's a corporate - people want to make money. And so we're not showing these truly disturbing images because they are agreeing - the media is agreeing that it would be just too uncomfortable for us.

Tavis: Speaking of making the money, this is what I call a host prerogative question, so it's because it's so inside Hollywood, but it fascinates me, so forgive me if the question doesn't turn you on, but I'm curious about this. So you're the writer, producer, and director on this. You're sitting down with the studio; you make a decision to put this movie out.

While, again, we are in this, what convenes you and the studio that people are interested in going to see a movie about something that even if they're not being given an honest view of it, they are seeing it in the news already 24/seven?

Haggis: Well first of all, I'm not the only producer, and Mark Boal did the story with me, so there's a lot of other people who were doing this. But I think - people said, “Oh, you're very brave for doing this.” I don't think that's true at all. Thank the people who put their money up (laughter). Warner Independent, Summit, Samuels (inaudible).

These people put their money up, banking that this could be - that people want to see this. And if anything had happened in the three years since - well, four years since I started and three years since we started making the movie - that if there had been another attack on our soil, if the war had gone well, like the president said, no one would ever see this picture. It would be buried right now.

Now, I don't know if people are going to want to see it. That's why I say, it packages a good mystery, make it a compelling experience on its own. But yeah, there are considerations. Our men and women are in the field over there. But I think it's our responsibility to look at these things now, so we can make wise decisions in the future rather than just, again, blindly following what our leaders say.

Tavis: Let me ask a personal question about your writing style and about the way you go about this. Do you feel any pressure when you sit down to write these days, when you've got two Oscar winners back-to-back - you got "Crash," "Million Dollar Baby" - you feel any pressure when you sit down?

Haggis: Oh, yeah, absolutely. The pressure here, though, wasn't how can I go out and do another great picture, or how can I do something that's as good as what Clint did in "Million Dollar -” which I can't. I just can't. The pressure here was I wanted the troops to be able to see this; I wanted veterans to be able to see this and say, “Well, you know what, that's my experience.” Or, “If it's not my experience, it happened to the guy next to me or the woman on this side.”

And that's why we started showing this eight weeks ago. And then with my rough cut, we just sent it around the country with Patricia Foulkrod, who did "The Ground Truth." Took it around and started showing it to veterans three at a time or six at a time or two at a time, and got their input and reactions.

That's why I had so many veterans on the set, both in front of the camera and behind it. If I had done a film that made a lot of money and got a lot of awards attention and yet the veterans looked at it and go, that's not the truth; I would feel it was a terrible failure.

Tavis: I got 10 seconds, right quick. If a person were to see this movie and did what afterwards, you'd be happy?

Haggis: Ask really tough questions. Ask questions of themselves, ask questions of their leaders.

Tavis: That's what I try to do, and I'm glad you came to answer them. Glad to have you here.

Haggis: Thank you.

Tavis: The movie from Paul Haggis and others is called "In the Valley of Elah." "In the Valley of Elah" tells the story of what it's like to come home and have your father looking for you. It's a good project, nice to see you.

Haggis: Thank you very much, Tavis.