2008 Woodie Awards
Writer and Producer of "Crash" Speaks to UVM, Breaking Race Down
Dave Sachs
Issue date: 4/4/06 Section: News
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Casually clad in jeans, tennis shoes and a fresh-from-the-bookstore UVM sweatshirt, Moresco looked more like a big kid than a successful Hollywood producer. His informal attire would compliment his unorthodoxly informal writing approach though, of which he told the audience, "Don't ever write a movie this way."
Moresco was referring to the fourteen-hour days he and co-writer and director Paul Haggis endured while writing the film. Don't feel too bad for the duo though, it only took them two weeks to complete the socio-political success.
"We soaked ourselves up in the world then wrote the first scene," Moresco said when asked by an audience member about the recipe for such a though-provoking story. "We just took it from there."
The world in which Moresco and Haggis soaked themselves was Los Angeles-a city that they felt represented a dense mix of race and ethnicity, and an ideal setting for their story in which a cast of racially diverse strangers crash into one another (via fender benders and random social interactions) affecting each other's lives in unexpected ways.
The film begins and ends with a car crash scene and Moresco says that in a place like L.A. where people essentially live in their cars, chance crashes like theses are some of the only occasions when different races will interact.
But if there is a real meaning behind Crash, Moresco was adamant in denying an intentional one. Rather, he says that his job as a screenwriter is to pose questions to an audience and let them decide for themselves what it means.
"We didn't try to write a 'message movie,'" Moresco explains modestly. "I wanted to write something about the human condition; how fear drives otherwise good people. If there's a message in it for you, that's fine."
The Academy got the message, and so did millions of moviegoers worldwide, that the dynamics of race politics create a supple plane for attention-grabbing stories like Crash, perhaps because every one can relate to the nuances of racial interaction, especially within the diverse landscape of American cities.
Such interactions generate the spine of the movie, as characters are developed around interracial and intercultural exchanges. Moresco says that he wanted to create characters that are tested in tough situations in order to reveal who they really are.