OF ALL the English directors who’ve headed to Hollywood, Paul Greengrass is perhaps the most unlikely émigré. A veteran of the seminal Granada documentary series
World in Action, he co-wrote
Spycatcher, the banned memoirs of former MI5 officer Peter Wright, and is best known for his trio of fact-based TV dramas based on controversial tragedies:
The Murder of Stephen Lawrence,
Bloody Sunday and
Omagh, which he co-wrote and produced.
So it’s a shock to find him behind the camera on The Bourne Supremacy (see review), the $89 million sequel to the 2002 hit thriller The Bourne Identity. “After Bloody Sunday I felt I needed a change,” says Greengrass, “because I’d made three films back to back that were all quite political and stripped down and spare. I wanted to do something new and meet new people. Then this came along and I thought I could do something with it because it’s close enough to me; it’s real and it’s edgy.”
In the wrong hands, The Bourne Supremacy could be mere mainstream studio fodder. Loosely based on Robert Ludlum’s novel and featuring a dour Matt Damon as a fugitive CIA assassin, it’s been updated from its original Cold War setting and turned into a brooding revenge drama. There’s nothing glossy about the film. Mostly filmed on the snowy streets of Berlin and Moscow, it’s shot in the semi-documentary style that made Bloody Sunday so compelling.
“What I wanted to do was make a film that tapped into what I think is going on out there, which is doubt, mistrust and questioning,” Greengrass says. “It’s quite clear that the Government hasn’t been telling us the truth about the most important issues of all, like why we went to war. It’s quite clear that the secret parts of the Government let us down profoundly. I think there’s a colossal tide of mistrust coursing through our culture as a result of us being let down and not told the truth.”
Greengrass may have gone to Hollywood, but he still wears his politics on his sleeve. A tall, burly and long-haired 48-year-old in John Lennon specs, he’s verbose and opinionated. “It’s the most calamitous decision of our generation,” he says of the Iraq war, and he sees The Bourne Supremacy as being in the same tradition as paranoid Seventies spy movies such as Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View.
With Christopher Nolan, another English director known for his cerebral thrillers, currently shooting the latest instalment of the Batman series, it seems that Hollywood is taking a risk with two of its most treasured franchises. In truth though, Greengrass wasn’t such a bizarre choice for The Bourne Supremacy. The American director Doug Liman, who made his name with the indie hit Swingers and Go, a take on LA youth culture, directed the first Bourne and he established the anti-authoritarian tone that Greengrass has maintained.
Bourne is a hero after Greengrass’s heart and very different from 007. “Bond is an insider, he loves being a secret agent, he worships at the altar of technology, he’s a cruel character who kills without regret and remorse, he’s a misogynist, he’s an imperialist, all the values I wouldn’t accept, even if they make for great entertainment,” notes Greengrass, who can’t keep still in his smart LA hotel suite. “Bourne is the reverse of all that. He’s an outsider, mistrusts authority, he’s not misogynistic and he’s filled with doubt and anxiety.”
Nor has Greengrass suffered the fate of many first-time Hollywood directors, who can find their film taken away from them in the editing suite. “I did wonder if I could translate my voice to this but it’s been a great experience,” he insists. “There’s not a single scene that I would take out or add. I’m not saying it’s perfect but it’s what I wanted to make, and I think it’s what the studio wanted to see.”
That he kept control of The Bourne Supremacy is partly down to the kudos that Bloody Sunday has given him. Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival, the film opened to rave reviews in the States. “It was a hip film and I was shocked by that,” he admits. In contrast, the film’s TV debut in the UK was almost overshadowed by a war of words between Greengrass and Jimmy McGovern, who had made a rival project about Bloody Sunday.
“He wanted to make a polemical film. What I wanted to do was create a version of that day so that, whether you were a British soldier, a demonstrator or you lived in Dublin, you could say, ‘Well, it must have been a bit like that.’ It wasn’t a conspiracy, it was definitely a most terrible thing, but it’s what happens when you get trapped in these things; you dance to the edge and then over.”
His interest in Northern Ireland goes back to his World in Action days; he first visited the province in 1980 to make a film about the dirty protests in the H-Blocks. Brought up in Gravesend, he joined World in Action after Cambridge and, even though he left in 1986, he gets all misty-eyed talking about his time there. “You were expected to be a maverick and what they taught me has never left me. It’s about observing and listening to the world. Looking back, I have a sense of wonder that such a place existed.”
More populist than its rival, Panorama, World in Action is long gone now. Its demise might have something to do with the advent of the fact-based dramas that Greengrass has helped to make so popular.
Resurrected, in 1989, based on the true story of a soldier who went missing in the Falklands War, was his first feature. It would be another nine years before he made his next movie, the unimpressive Theory of Flight. “There are learning films and achieving films and that was a learning film,” shrugs Greengrass. “It wasn’t a happy experience, but it taught me to listen to my own voice. I vowed from then on that I would never make a film that I didn’t feel from the outset was going to be mine.”
He’s kept his promise.
More laughs than any British comedy to appear over the past decade
