Word: crashing
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...Crash wins on Oscar night next Sunday, Haggis, 52, will have achieved a unique honor: he'll be the first man to write two consecutive Best Pictures. That should make him smile. So should the notion that Crash was helped by an anti-Canada vote--for Haggis is a native of London...
...Haggis has to consider himself lucky that his film has even a chance at Best Picture, considering the odds against it. Crash was shot in late 2003 and early 2004 on a pinchpenny $6.5 million budget--a pretty amazing bang for the buck, given its handsome look, huge cast and dozens of locations. During the shoot, Haggis suffered a heart attack. "I think it was my mom's fault: bad genes," he says wryly. "We stopped shooting for two weeks while I recovered from the surgery. It wasn't that big a deal." When Crash premiered, at the 2004 Toronto...
...Crash plays this sort of ethical Ping-Pong with most of its characters and with the audience's sympathy. It stretches coincidence and credulity, but it is less a realistic picture than an updated morality play. The people in it are archetypes if you like the movie, stereotypes if you don't, but creatures seen from above by a compassionate, partially complicit outsider...
...That would be Haggis, the Canadian abroad. "After living in L.A. half my life," he says, "I now feel like an outsider in both communities. And that's a good thing in my line of work. With Crash, I thought it important to be a part of that world--because I wanted to look at my fears, my intolerances, not those bad people over there--yet I needed to be far enough away to see what most affluent people in L.A. will tell you doesn't really exist. And I don't mean just affluent white people. Class...
...Cheadle, a producer of the film as well as one of its stars, seconds Haggis' insistence that Crash doesn't play the race card. "To say it is about race is reductive," he says, "and is the problem we have with race in this country. To me, it's really about power--people's fear of losing it and trying to gain it, and what they will...