Art & Creativity Quote by Paul Haggis

Haggis is admitting that his best material comes from a deficit, not a thesis. The line is clunky on purpose: the repetition of "trouble" and the almost circular phrasing ("things about which I have no answers") reads like someone thinking out loud, circling an anxiety until it shows its shape. For a director best known for interlocking moral collisions and social friction, that’s not accidental; it’s a statement of method. He’s not selling insight, he’s staging unease.

The intent is to claim an ethic of inquiry over certainty. In an entertainment economy that rewards clean takes and neat arcs, Haggis frames writing as a place where ambiguity gets to breathe. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the audience’s demand for closure: if the artist doesn’t have answers, the viewer can’t outsource their own moral labor. That’s a canny posture for a filmmaker whose work often invites accusations of being didactic; he’s preemptively repositioning himself as an arranger of questions rather than a preacher with a moral.

Context matters here: directors operate in a medium obsessed with resolution, where scripts are engineered to land the plane. Haggis describes the opposite impulse: letting the turbulence be the point. The doubled "These things trouble me" functions like a heartbeat under the sentence, insisting that the motivation isn’t intellectual vanity but genuine disturbance. It’s also a brand of credibility in Hollywood terms: the artist as someone who’s still haunted, still porous, still compelled to look where comfort ends.