Cinema Experts

"The worst thing you can do to a filmmaker is to walk out of his film and go, "That was a nice movie." But if you can cause people to walk out and then argue about the film on the sidewalk ... I think we're all seeking dissension, and we love to affect an audience."
Haggis is the son of Ted and the late Mary Haggis, onetime owners of London Ontario's former Gallery Theatre at 36 York Street where the younger Haggis cut his teeth in theater production, directing, and playwriting in the early 1970s. He attended St George's Public School, HB Beal Secondary School, and Fanshawe College in London before leaving for Los Angeles in 1975 to follow his dream of writing television and movie scripts. According to his father Ted, it was 'three years two months and 10 days' before his son sold his first TV script (father Ted had been sending his son Paul $100 a week during these lean years during which Paul landed odd jobs including moving furniture).
As a television writer/producer, he created or co-created the series Walker, Texas Ranger, Due South, Family Law, and the celebrated, if quickly cancelled EZ Streets. In 1989, he received two Emmy awards for his work on the show thirtysomething-one as a writer, and another as a producer. He returned to television in the spring of 2007, after NBC picked up a 13-episode order for his crime drama, The Black Donnellys. The show was canceled by NBC on May 14, 2007. HDNet will air the remaining six episodes and Haggis is in talks with the network to pick up season two.
In addition to directing multiple episodes of the above-mentioned television shows, Haggis has directed several feature films and written several successful screenplays. Red Hot, his directorial debut, had a limited video release in 1993.
Around the turn of the century he came into his own as both a writer and director in films. As a film writer, he received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for 2004's Million Dollar Baby, directed by Clint Eastwood, which won four Oscars, including Best Picture.
His second directorial effort performed equally as well. Crash, which he co-wrote, directed and co-produced debuted in September 2004 at the Toronto Film Festival. Lions Gate Films purchased the distribution rights for $3 million and released it internationally in May of 2005 to mostly positive reviews, with Ebert & Roeper giving it "two thumbs way up" and Roger Ebert naming it the best film of the year.
The film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay categories. He won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the film itself received the Academy Award for Best Picture. Overall, he has won two Academy Awards and been nominated for four. He lost the directing prize to Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain, but he became the only man in history to have penned two consecutive Best Picture Oscar-winners.
Haggis' fourth film as a feature film director, which he also wrote, is entitled Honeymoon with Harry and is scheduled for release in 2008 although production has yet to commence.
Haggis also adapted, for director Eastwood, James Bradley's book Flags of Our Fathers, about the Battle of Iwo Jima. The film was released on October 20, 2006.
Haggis was hired in August 2005 to revise the screenplay for the James Bond film, Casino Royale, which was also released late in 2006. The original screenplay had been written by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, based on the novel by Ian Fleming. Haggis has confirmed that he will return to polishing the script for the follow up, under the working title of Bond 22. He was asked to direct but declined.
He received a fifth Academy Award nomination for his role in writing Letters from Iwo Jima, alongside Japanese writer Iris Yamashita.

"My most annoying question is 'Hilary, are you ever going to play a pretty girl?'"

Hilary was discovered as a child by producer Suzy Sachs, who coached her in acting. When she was nine years old, she starred in her first play as "Mowgli" in "The Jungle Book". She began to appear regularly in local theater and school plays. She went to school in Bellingham, where she lived with her family, until she was 16. She competed in the Junior Olympics and Washington State championships in swimming; she ranked 5th in the state in all-around gymnastics (which would come in handy for starring in The Next Karate Kid (1994) years later). In 1990, Hilary and her mother moved to Los Angeles, where she enrolled in South Pasadena High School, and started acting professionally. She appeared in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) but The Next Karate Kid (1994), where she got the part competing against hundreds of other actresses, was her breakout role.

In September 1997, Swank was cast as single mother Carly Reynolds on Beverly Hills, 90210. She was initially promised it would be a two-year role, but saw her character written out after 16 episodes in January 1998. Swank later said that she was devastated at being cut from the show, thinking, "If I'm not good enough for 90210, I'm not good enough for anything." As it turned out, the firing was the best thing to happen to Swank, as it freed her to audition for the role of Brandon Teena in Boys Don't Cry. Swank dropped her body fat down to seven percent in preparation for the role. Many critics hailed hers as the best female performance of 1999; her co-star of the film, Chloë Sevigny, had her performance singled out for praise also, Swank and Sevigny were often ranked as the best two leads of 1999 in film. The performance ultimately won her the Golden Globe and Oscar for Best Actress. She subsequently won the Best Actress Oscar again for playing a boxer in 2004's Million Dollar Baby, a role for which she underwent training and gained 19 pounds of muscleSwank's Oscar success meant that she had joined the ranks of Vivien Leigh, Helen Hayes, Sally Field, and Luise Rainer as the only actresses to have been nominated twice and win both times (both times she won over fellow actress and nominee Annette Bening). She is also the third-youngest double Best Actress Oscar winner (after Luise Rainer and Jodie Foster).

"Frankie likes to say that boxing is an unnatural act, that everything in boxing is backwards: sometimes the best way to deliver a punch is to step back... But step back too far and you ain't fighting at all."
The film stars Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, and Morgan Freeman. It is the story of an under-appreciated boxing trainer, his elusive past and his quest for atonement in helping an underdog amateur female boxer achieve her fragile dream of becoming a professional. The film won four Academy Awards: Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Achievement in Directing (Clint Eastwood), Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Hillary Swank) and Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (Morgan Freeman). The screenplay was written by Paul Haggis, based on short stories by F.X. Toole, the pen name of fight manager and "cutman" Jerry Boyd. Originally published under the title Rope Burns, the stories have since been republished under the movie's title.
Eastwood uses his multiple talents to make films that have something valuable to say. In the emotionally powerful, Million Dollar Baby, he tells an allegorical tale of boxing to subtly express themes of hope, redemption, sacrifice, persistence, and belief in one's self.
Eastwood brings the same grizzled toughness to Frankie that he does to all his roles, but stretches his acting muscles thanks to his relationship with Maggie, which eventually brings out something affectionate and vulnerable in him we haven’t seen in a long time, if ever. There’s nothing here to challenge Morgan Freeman in any way, and he settles easily into a well-worn role that he wears as comfortably and casually as the threadbare socks Frankie nags him about in one of their many scenes that suggest an old married couple rather than a pair of aging pugilists.

The movie emphasizes that failure is a more honorable and personally fulfilling trait than never having tried, while also frowning upon laziness and leeching off others.I personally consider great films as the ones where I leave the theater with a better understanding of human nature, or a desire to improve the world by even a little bit. Eastwood's latest more than succeeds on those counts. 10/10

"I'm not intimidated by lead roles. I'm better in them. I don't feel pressure - I feel released at times like that. That's what I'm born to do.”
Freeman made his acting debut at age eight, playing the lead role in a school play. At age twelve he won a statewide drama competition, and while in high school he performed in a radio show based in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1955, he turned down a partial drama scholarship from Jackson State University, opting to work as a mechanic in the United States Air Force.
Freeman moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s and worked as a transcript clerk at Los Angeles Community College. During this period, he also lived in New York City working as a dancer at the 1964 World's Fair and in San Francisco where he was a member of the Opera Ring music group. Freeman made his acting debut in a touring company version of The Royal Hunt of the Sun, and also appeared as an extra in the 1965 film, The Pawnbroker. He made his off-Broadway debut in 1967, opposite Viveca Lindfors in The Nigger Lovers, before debuting on Broadway in 1968's all-black version of Hello, Dolly!.
Although his first credited film appearance was in 1971's Who Says I Can't Ride a Rainbow?, Freeman first became known in the American media through roles on the soap opera Another World and the PBS kids' show The Electric Company, (notably as Easy Reader and Vincent the Vegetable Vampire) which he claimed he should have left earlier than planned.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Freeman began playing prominent supporting roles in many feature films, earning him a reputation for depicting wise and fatherly characters. As he gained fame, he went on to bigger roles in films such as the chauffeur Hoke in Driving Miss Daisy, and Sergeant Major Rawlins in Glory (both in 1989). In 1994 he portrayed Red, the redeemed convict in the acclaimed The Shawshank Redemption. His star power was already confirmed as he starred in some of the biggest films of the 1990s, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Se7en, and Deep Impact. In 1997, Freeman, together with Lori McCreary, founded the movie production company Revelations Entertainment.
Freeman is recognized for his distinctive voice, making him a frequent choice for narration. In 2005 alone, he provided narration for two of the most successful films of the year, War of the Worlds and the Academy Award-winning documentary film, March of the Penguins. After three previous nominations (a supporting actor nomination for Street Smart, 1987, and leading actor nominations for Driving Miss Daisy, 1989, and The Shawshank Redemption, 1994), he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Million Dollar Baby.
In 2006, Freeman began filming Rob Reiner's The Bucket List, opposite Jack Nicholson, playing terminal cancer patients who must fulfill their lists of goals. The film is scheduled to be released in 2007.