Paul Greengrass

Paul Greengrass is a filmmaker true to himself, consistent when it comes to finding his own voice when telling stories. Surely the home where he was born in Surrey, in 1955, helped him to have a well-furnished head. His mother was a teacher, and his father a merchant ship pilot, while his brother Mark has become a well-known historian in England. He, who studied literature at Cambridge, and opted for journalism in his first professional steps, had his feet well anchored in reality. Proof of his interest in current affairs that took place around him is his television dedication on ITV to the program “World in Action”.

Investigative journalism has always attracted him greatly, as he lived through the Watergate case in his youth. It is therefore not surprising that he participated in the publication of a book, “Spycatcher”, which he brought about by revealing dark aspects of the British secret services, due to Soviet infiltration. Some of his early dramatized television films would be based on real events that some tried to put down, whether they were rigged sports bets ( The Fix ), heroic soldiers who were not so heroic ( Resurrected ), racism in the application of justice ( The Murder of Stephen Lawrence ). His way of approaching cinema was undoubtedly influenced by having seen some political films such as Z and The Battle of Algiers.

The temptation to shoot reality with a more or less Hollywood melodramatic touch played a trick on him with Strange Request , with Kenneth Branagh and Helena Bonham Carter , a film he has always regretted. But he learned his lesson, and when shooting with stars in the future like Matt Damon and Tom Hanks , he would manage to apply his rules, with notable results, there are the Bourne sagas (three more than notable titles, where fiction meets political criticism), Green Zone. Protected District and Captain Phillips , on the Somali pirates.

In any case, before Hollywood fell at the feet of Greengrass, Bloody Sunday had to arrive , perhaps his best work, which plunges the viewer into the notorious 1972 protest in Northern Ireland over the way in which that terrorism was being fought, and that it turned into a bloodbath. The film, which won him the Golden Bear in Berlin, combines documentary rigor with emotion and tears. Omagh , for which he wrote the script, was in the same vein, as was United 93 , where he recreated the tragic fate of the only plane on 9/11 where the courage of the passengers managed to thwart the final objective of the terrorists.

Greengrass, a man jealous of his privacy, has been married twice and has five children, three from his current marriage to Joanna, an agent for television actors.