Men's Journal

Blockbuster director Paul Greengrass sets aside a franchise to tell a real-life thriller.

Interview by Phil Zabriskie

In Green Zone, director Paul Greengrass turns his skeptical eye to the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, revisiting the themes — the chaos, deceit, and paranoia of the post-9/11 world — that pervaded his two previous films with Matt Damon, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. Greengrass has, in fact, been telling similar stories for years. A print and television journalist in his native England, he co-wrote Spycatcher, a then-unprecedented look inside the British intelligence services (the book was banned in the U.K. — officially, the MI5 and MI6 programs that Greengrass reported on didn’t exist). Later he wrote and directed docudramas about British military operations in the Falklands (Resurrected) and the first Gulf War (The One That Got Away), racism at home (The Murder of Stephen Lawrence), and political violence in Northern Ireland (Bloody Sunday). Those led to United 93 — and the Bourne franchise.

-
MJ: Why quit something as big as Bourne?

PG: It was a hard decision to make, because I loved doing them. But you get to a point where you need to move on. What struck me with increasing force — certainly in 2004, having made a Bourne film — was the way in which events in the world seemed to be filled with as much paranoia and mistrust and intrigue as you found in a Bourne movie. So I wanted to make a thriller set in Iraq about the hunt for WMD. I thought if I could create a character who had a noble mission, and his mission was to find WMD — and he went believing, like we all did, they were there, only to find that they weren’t — that would create a character who was essentially speaking for all of us. We all went on that journey.

MJ: But instead he finds that there’s some other agenda being pursued.

PG: Exactly. And then you’re halfway to a thriller, because you’ve got a character who can ask, “What’s going on? I want to know the truth.” That’s the classic thriller setup. Thrillers also thrive on extremity, whether it’s moral or physical. In the case of Iraq just after the invasion, you had both. I just felt — and feel still — that there’s no reason why audiences won’t accept a thriller set in that world.

MJ: But I keep reading that Iraq films don’t do well because the war is still going on, the way some said United 93 came too soon.

PG: I think that what counts is whether you deliver a great, cinematic story with a certain visceral power. If you do, I don’t think people are going to say, “I don’t like that because it’s set in Iraq.” They’re going to say, “That rocked.”

MJ: Many of your films seem to be about what happens when things go horribly wrong.

PG: That’s probably true. On a good day, we like to think that our life is very safe and very secure, but I think there’s a feeling out there that it’s a thin membrane between us and everything collapsing, you know?

MJ: What feels better, ultimately: Bourne elevating your career to new levels or getting a thumbs-up from the families of people killed on Bloody Sunday or on United 93?

PG: It’s not that I prefer one or the other. But if you’re going to stand any chance in this insane world of making movies, you’ve got to start with a real, real passion for the movie. You’ve got to know why you’re making it and feel the fire in your belly. That’s what makes you get up every day and hunt, against the odds, to get something that makes sense and conveys a world.

MJ: You feel that way about Green Zone?

PG: Very much so. All of the films I had made up until The Bourne Supremacy were very small films in Britain, so I’m totally struck and very grateful and in love with the idea of making really good mainstream movies in America. My fantasy was to end up where I am now. I don’t know what I’m going to do next — something interesting, I hope — but I think I’m going to have a little rest from war for a bit.

—-

This article originally appeared in the April 2010 issue of Men’s Journal.