Paul Greengrass
Paul Greengrass
Paul Greengrassis an English film director, film producer, screenwriter and former journalist. He specialises in dramatisations of real-life events and is known for his signature use of hand-held cameras. His early film Bloody Sunday won the Golden Bear at 52nd Berlin International Film Festival. Other films he has directed include three in the Bourne action/thriller series: The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Jason Bourne; United 93, for which he won the BAFTA Award for Best Director, and received an...
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth13 August 1955
amongst band controls drawn final flying group haunts image innocents machine physical religious struggle suicidal
That final image haunts me -- a physical struggle for the controls of a gasoline-fueled 21st-Century flying machine between a band of suicidal religious fanatics and a group of innocents drawn from amongst us all. It's really, in a way, the struggle for our world today.
fashion hope necessary serious
They'll see it's been made in a responsible fashion by serious people. And I hope they will see it's making a contribution to a very necessary debate.
jobs journey skills
Acting is many things. Acting is playing lines, of course, but it's much more profound than that. Acting is truth-telling, and trying to find the truth in a human situation, which will be sketched out by a screenwriter with all the skill that a screenwriter can do; but in the end, that's just the map of the journey. The actor's job is to divine and embody the truth, and find it.
challenges fundamentals faces
That's one of the central challenges we face - how to stay true to events and compress the fundamentals.
jobs actors divine
The actor's job is to divine and embody the truth, and find it.
views way scripts
All directors make films in individual ways. But the classical kind of view of filmmaking is that you have a script and it's very linear.
cutting scripts film
There's a script, then you're going to shoot the script and then you cut that and then that's the end of the film. And that's never really been how I've seen it.
film made written
Most of the films that I've written, made in my life, I've written. Not all, but most I would say.
character giving trying
You're trying to create a screenplay and your screenplay is there to give you a structure, rigidity, situational awareness, who the characters are, what do they want, what's the shape of the thing.
real mean thinking
I think when you think of my films, I think hopefully you think of an extreme sort of real unfolding, real-time, performed, feeling semi-improvised, you know what I mean, all that.
editing trying shooting
I always try and bring screenplay, shooting and editing into a sort of symbiotic - as close into alignment as you possibly can get them, consistent, obviously, with the resources that you've got and the time you've got available.
firsts productions posts
You sort of can't talk about the post production unless you talk about what comes first.
thinking talking people
Why are people saying it's too soon? Like the people on that flight, we need to agree about what to do about terrorism. And I think we need to have that conversation now.
airplane people aeroplanes
The people who went on that airplane were unexceptional.