Green Zone

Paul Greengrass (born 13 August 1955) is an English film director, screenwriter and former journalist. He specialises in dramatisations of real-life events and is known for his signature use of hand-held cameras.

Personal life

Greengrass was born in Cheam, Surrey. His mother was a teacher and his father a river pilot and merchant seaman. He is the brother of noted English historian Mark Greengrass. Greengrass was educated at Westcourt Primary School, Gravesend Grammar School and Sevenoaks School and attended Queens’ College, Cambridge. In October 2012, he received an honorary degree from Kingston University in recognition of his ‘outstanding contribution to television and cinema’.

Career
Early career in journalism

He first worked as a director in the 1980s, for the ITV current affairs programme World in Action; his investigation of timber-framed house construction has been cited as preventing its widespread adoption in England. At the same time he co-authored the notorious book Spycatcher with Peter Wright, former assistant director of MI5, which contained enough sensitive information that the British Government made an unsuccessful attempt to ban it.

Film

Early films

He then moved into drama, directing non-fiction made-for-television films such as The One That Got Away, based on Chris Ryan’s book about SAS actions in the Gulf War, and The Fix, based on the story of the betting scandal which shook British football in 1964.

His 1998 film The Theory of Flight starred Kenneth Branagh and Helena Bonham Carter, who played a woman with motor neurone disease. The film dealt with the difficult issue of the sexuality of people with disabilities.

Greengrass co-wrote the screenplay for Omagh, which depicted the 1998 bombing of Omagh, and directed The Murder of Stephen Lawrence (1999), which told the story of Stephen Lawrence, a black youth whose murder was not properly investigated by the Metropolitan Police and his mother’s investigations, which led to accusations about institutional racism in the police.

Bloody Sunday

Bloody Sunday (2002), depicted the 1972 Bloody Sunday shootings of Northern Irish anti-internment activists by British soldiers in an almost documentary style; it shared First Prize at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival with Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Bloody Sunday was inspired by Don Mullan’s politically influential book Eyewitness Bloody Sunday (Wolfhound Press, 1997). Mullan was a schoolboy witness of the events of Bloody Sunday. The book is credited as a major catalyst in the establishment of the new Bloody Sunday Inquiry chaired by Lord Saville. The inquiry, the longest running and most expensive in British legal history, lead to an historic apology by Prime Minister David Cameron on 15 June 2010. Mullan was co-producer and actor in Bloody Sunday.

The Bourne Supremacy

Based on that film, Greengrass was hired to direct 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, a sequel to the 2002 film The Bourne Identity, after the first film’s director, Doug Liman left the project. The film starred Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, an amnesiac who realizes he was once a top CIA assassin and is now being pursued by his former employers. It proved to be an unexpectedly enormous financial and critical success, and secured Greengrass’s reputation and ability to get his smaller, more personal films made.

United 93

In 2006, Greengrass directed United 93, a film based on the September 11th hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93. The film received immense critical acclaim, particularly for Greengrass’ again quasi-documentary-style directing. After receiving many Best Director awards and nominations from critics circles (including the Broadcast Film Critics Association), Greengrass won the BAFTA award for Best Director at the 60th British Academy Film Awards and received an Oscar nomination for Achievement in Directing at the 79th Academy Awards. For his role in writing the film, he earned Writers Guild of America Award and BAFTA nominations for Best Original Screenplay.

The Bourne Ultimatum

He followed this with a return to the Bourne franchise. The Bourne Ultimatum, released in 2007, was an even bigger success than the previous two films and provided him with yet another BAFTA nomination for Best Director at the 61st British Academy Film Awards.

Green Zone

Green Zone stars Matt Damon as the head of a U.S. military team on an unsuccessful hunt for weapons of mass destruction in post-war Iraq. It was filmed in Spain and Morocco and released in 2010. The film was first announced as being based on the bestselling, award-winning non-fiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by the Washington Post’s Baghdad bureau chief, Rajiv Chandrasekaran. However the final film is a largely fictionalized action thriller only loosely inspired by events in the book.

Captain Phillips

Greengrass is currently in post-production on a film about the Maersk Alabama hijacking in 2009. Based on the book A Captain’s Duty and starring Tom Hanks, the film was shot in the Summer of 2012 in Massachusetts, Virginia and Malta. It will be released on 11 October 2013.

Future projects

The Fear Index

He is next set to direct an adaptation of Robert Harris’s bestselling novel The Fear Index, a thriller centering on the connection of a fictional Geneva hedge fund to the 2010 Flash Crash. Harris has adapted the novel himself. The film will be produced by Twentieth Century Fox.

In May 2012, Greengrass announced his plan to make to make a documentary about football giants FC Barcelona. Entitled Barça, the film will examine the process and legacy of one of the world’s most famous sports franchises, focusing primarily on the four years in which Pep Guardiola guided the club to 14 trophies. The movie is expected to be finished ahead of the 2014 World Cup, when public attention will begin focusing on international event in Rio de Janeiro.

Directors UK

In June 2008, he was one of many British directors to set up Directors UK and is currently the president of the board.

Unmade projects

Greengrass was initially attached to direct the film adaptation of Watchmen. Greengrass’s version was not set in the alternate 1980s of the graphic novel, but in the modern world. However the production was shut down a few weeks before filming was due to start and the eventual Watchmen film, far closer to the graphic novel, was directed by Zack Snyder. —Wikipedia