Crash-Course in Collaboration

Writer-producer Bobby Moresco.

Writer-producer Bobby Moresco is no stranger to multiple points of view. For more than a decade, he has collaborated with writer-director-producer Paul Haggis on a handful of projects. But their toiling away has proven most fruitful in recent years: After winning big at last year’s Academy Awards ceremony with Million Dollar Baby (which Moresco co-produced and Haggis wrote and produced), Moresco will stand at Oscar’s altar once again this year, with a Best Original Screenplay nod (alongside Haggis) for Crash. (The film received six nominations altogether.)

In the days leading up to the ceremony, Moresco spoke with MM about his early days in the business, he and Haggis’ collaborative process and whether or not he’s got that Oscar speech ready.

Jennifer Wood (MM): First off, I have to congratulate you on the Oscar nod (along with the slew of other awards and nominations). Can you talk a little bit about how the idea for Crash originated?

Bobby Moresco (BM): Paul Haggis called me one morning and said “I have this idea for a story…” There were some pages that he had written down, utilizing a couple of the major characters. He said “Nobody will ever pay us to write this and nobody will ever make it,” but I read the pages and agreed it was a story worth telling. So we went to work.

MM: You co-wrote the script with Haggis, who also directed the film. What was your process of collaboration? Did you work in the same room all the time or were you each responsible for different aspects of the script?

BM: With me and Haggis, it’s always been different. Over 11 years, each script has told us the way to work. On this one we were in the same room every minute of every day—12 to 14 hours a day. After about two weeks we had the first draft. We took that draft to the Theater Company, The Actor’s Gym and workshopped it with a bunch of wonderful actors who gave us some good ideas and took it home and did another rewrite. That draft was pretty much the script that we shot.

MM: Did you ever find that, with so many characters, it was almost easier for you to each take charge of individual characters and/or storylines? How difficult was it to keep track of each character and his/her story—while all the time working toward the main goal/conclusion of the film? It almost seems like a maze, where it could be easier to start at the end.

BM: No, it wasn’t more difficult than writing any other script which, of course, is always difficult. We usually do map out every character, every plot point, every storyline and we put it up on 5 x 7” cards. But with this one it was totally different. We just soaked ourselves up in the world by reading lots of books and talking to lots of people. Anita Addison in particular, an African-American woman who was a marvelous human being and a great artist, was most helpful (the film is dedicated to her).

We did know that we wanted to start the film at the end of Act II, the moment when Graham finds his brother. We also had two guiding ideas: Paul wanted to explore the notion of how strangers affect each other in ways we have no awareness of and I wanted to explore the notion of how fear pushes people to do or say things they wouldn’t normally do or say. The idea of contradiction is always something interesting to both of us. There’s a line from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that we always keep; “If I contradict myself, I contradict myself. I’m large; I contain multitudes”.

MM: Which character do you relate to most in the film and why?

BM: Matt Dillon’s father, played wonderfully by Bruce Kirby, a good man who’s done everything right in his life and somehow it all turned out wrong anyway. And yet he tries desperately to hold on, and force his son to hold on, to ideals he always believed in: Justice and equality.

MM: How did your producing partnership with Paul play into the screenwriting collaboration, if at all? In other words, how did it help to already know so much about each other’s work habits as you’ve collaborated for so long, most recently on Million Dollar Baby?

BM: Paul and I started working together 11 years ago on a show called “EZ Streets.” Partnership evolved naturally over a long period of time. I think we have different strengths and that helps.

MM: Looking back, what posed the biggest challenge to you in writing Crash?

BM: The biggest challenge was to try and stick to the truth of the characters in the given situations—and to say the hell with what anybody thinks, this is the truth of how we see things. Because we really thought people would hate us, or at the very least not understand what we were trying to get at, which is to try and shine a light on that part of the human condition that maybe some of us think we’ve gotten past. There are a lot of people in the world today who think that racism doesn’t exist anymore because of the gains we’ve made since the Civil Right Acts of the 1960s. And we have made gains, but it might also be true that in some of us, racism has dug deeper and hidden itself in ways that are much more dangerous and insipid.

MM: What’s the most important lesson you’ll take with you into your next film, 10th & Wolf?

BM: 10th & Wolf is already shot; we open in May. But in terms of lessons I’ve learned, the biggest came from the point of view of directing. When the whole world and every fiber of your being is telling you that you need to move on to the next scene, but you know it’s not quite what it’s supposed to be, then get another take. You have to trust the notion that if you think you need more on the day, you’ll find out in the editing room that you did need that extra shot and you should have gotten it. In the editing room, it’s the shots you didn’t get that kill you.

That doesn’t mean I’m saying you should be fiscally irresponsible—when you’re doing an independent film there’s only so much money and then it’s gone. So, while you’re getting that extra shot, you better damn well be figuring out how you’re going to make it up later in time and money. That usually means cutting a scene or location.

MM: Most importantly: Do you have your Oscar speech written?

BM: I don’t have my Oscar speech written. I do know I want to thank my parents, my family and everybody I grew up with on Tenth Ave and 51st in midtown Manhattan.