IBC
Paul
Greengrass, the director of 22 July, Captain Phillips and The Bourne Supremacy has damned the
nepotism and public school cliques which he says continue to dominate the UK’s
creative industries.
“The entrenched
networks that prevail in modern Britain have a very deep presence in film and
television and will always privilege those in the industry,” Greengrass told
the Sheffield International Documentary Festival. “Recent social advances have
made the industry much more open with far more women than when I was starting
out but the distance you have travel from a working class background is
profound.”
He said an
industry “that is awash with money” was not doing enough to encourage
diversity. “School kids do not think of film and TV as somewhere where they can
go and make their mark. It’s still far, far too reliant on who you know.”
Greengrass speaks as one who broke the glass ceiling, rising
from a working class background to A list Hollywood director but apportions
part of his career to luck and another to his own rage and frustration at being
unable to break into the club at the BBC in the nineties.
“I tried to
enter the world of drama and found it a tremendous clique,” he says. “I
submitted scripts to the BBC on several occasions only to have them passed on
to established screenplay writers [Michael Frayn, Alan Bleasdale] and I
struggled with that a lot. It was an institution I wasn’t going to be invited
to and I didn’t belong in.”
By his own account, Greengrass has always struggled to fit in.
Born in Cheam and growing up in Gravesend and the Thames Estuary “a tough place
with a strong, rebellious anti-metropolitan identity” he recalls “all the
intense anxiety I felt as a young person – girls, socialising, insularity. I
found institutions tremendously hard.”
Having been
“quite a bolshie, arsey kid,” he was lucky, he says, to have found his métier
at secondary school. “That’s where I learned that I had eyes that I could use.
I’d found I could draw and paint and print. The art teacher encouraged me to
use an old dusty Bolex camera. Suddenly I’d found what I was meant to do. The
camera allowed me to speak at some level.”
There was
nothing in his family background to suggest an affinity with moving images.
“I have a
theory that my becoming a filmmaker is to do with being quite isolated as a
child and my childhood experiences of cinema,” he says. “If you have these
incredible powerful experiences in a dark space it creates a fugue state that
mainlines to your cortex. I can recall those experiences more vividly than many
others. Filmmaking is essentially a psychological effort to recover the
intensity of childhood experiences - which is why all filmmaking is one of
disillusionment and deep self-loathing.”
TV roots
The route into the industry for aspiring filmmakers like Greengrass in the 1980s was television and with only three TV channels and no insiders to call on, that narrowed the choice down to ITV. He mailed his CV dozens of times requesting work experience, eventually landing a job as a researcher on the sports desk at Granada.
The route into the industry for aspiring filmmakers like Greengrass in the 1980s was television and with only three TV channels and no insiders to call on, that narrowed the choice down to ITV. He mailed his CV dozens of times requesting work experience, eventually landing a job as a researcher on the sports desk at Granada.
From there he
gravitated to the hard-hitting current affairs series, World in Action. “You were taught that London
was the enemy, that Manchester was where it was at,” Greengrass says. “Granada
had that ‘we don’t care attitude’ which spoke to me. The attitude was ‘we make
programmes that people want to watch. The BBC makes programmes they think you
should watch.’”
World in Action was an eclectic mix
of traditional documentary filmmaking (stemming from founding fathers John
Grierson and Humphrey Jennings) and observational filmmaking “wedded to a
strong journalistic ethos which gave it a political edge. Plus, it had this
weird almost agitprop Private Eye quality to it in which they’d use gimmicks
and devices to tell a story.”
Greengrass
flourished, directing and producing stories on the Thatcher-era coal mining
industry, on M15 investigator Peter Wright (for whom he co-authored the book
Spycatcher which the British government attempted to ban) and behind the scenes
with Bob Geldof in the weeks leading up to the Live Aid concerts.
“[WIA] enabled
me to shoot, cut, write, to tell a story, do it under pressure. There’s nothing
so intensely terrifying in having to cut a WIA in two days.”
He believes the
process of filmmaking will always tend toward a vacuum and that the essence of
the job of the director is to not let it form.
“You cannot stop, you
must move forward. Indecision creates a toxicity which destroys the dream which
you set out to achieve.”
As important,
his decade working for WIA taught him how to make films for an audience. “You
are having a conversation with someone. You ‘ve got to be clear and direct
about what it is you want to say.”
Although he
never admitted to his colleagues at the time, Greengrass had a hankering to
make fiction and tried and failed to transition into the format to the point of
considering giving up on his career altogether.
It started well
enough. His first film, for just launched Film4, was Resurrected (1989)
an anti-war tale based on real events about an MIA soldier in the Falklands
(David Thewlis) who turns up alive weeks after everyone thinks he’s dead. It
was nominated for the main award at the Berlin Film Festival.
His next steps
weren’t so assured. “I did learn the language of TV drama which is authorial
storytelling and different to shooting docs - but I always felt that it wasn’t
me,” he reveals. “I worked through my thirties but I never quite felt I was
being true to myself.”
It became
increasingly difficult as he struggled to translate the vision in his head to
the screen.
“I’d see a film
in my mind and shot it using conventional film grammar. This means you are
filming in the third person but it’s not got the first person urgency to it and
it didn’t connect me from where I’d come from in terms of documentary
filmmaking or connect with me emotionally in terms of things inside me which are
attack and pace and drive.
“But I didn’t know how to bring those things together. I went
through a couple of films feeling unbelievably frustrated.”
This included
TV movie The One That Got Away, about
an SAS raid in the first Gulf War based on Chris Ryan’s book. “I was on
location banging my head against a Humvee thinking this is not me. Why I am
seeing the film that I want to make in my script, but the filmmaking process
just puts a wet blanket over it?
“It was a lack
of courage, a lack of knowledge and a lack of breakthrough in finding a voice.
I hope that’s only truly disastrous film I’ve made. The sense of failure I felt
about not imposing myself on that film gave me a rage.”
Take no prisoners
He took that anger into his next film, a docu-drama account of the racist murder of schoolboy Stephen Lawrence.
He took that anger into his next film, a docu-drama account of the racist murder of schoolboy Stephen Lawrence.
“I came to that
film with some sense of crisis,” Greengrass says. “I’d reached a place where I
thought I should give up. The rage and the frustration and fear that I felt at
that point gave me a ‘take no prisoners attitude’. On the first day on set I
started to shoot in a way that I always do now but then I backed off. I was
terrified.
This was the
beginning of Greengrass’ now signature handheld, kinetic, micro-cut style that
lend his movies the feel of reportage.
“You are almost
gambling everything on the one moment. It only lives in that moment, that way,
that shot. It is unsettling because your rushes don’t look like ordinary rushes
– there is no safety about it.”
Without the
encouragement of producer Mark Redhead, Greengrass might have remained stuck.
“He said just ‘go for it’. So, we did.”
What Greengrass
says he realised is that the screenplay was not ever going to be the template
for the film he wanted to make.
“The screenplay is fundamental, but the film exists beyond it
and you have to get to that point and the only way of doing that is by speaking
in your own voice. Finding your voice as a filmmaker is something that is hard
won, and you can only win it by trying and failing.
“In the end,
it’s about moving toward being true to yourself in your choice of subject, in
the way you handle that subject and the aesthetic choices you make to render
that subject. All of those have got to come together.”
Bloody Sunday, his meticulously
researched and frenetically paced recreation of the 1972 Derry massacre, shared
first prize at the Berlin Festival in 2002 and caught the attention of producer
Frank Marshall.
“I’d never
thought about making a commercial movie. I’m not an obvious candidate but when
they asked me to do Bourne, I remember going to
see Doug Liman’s [franchise starter] The Bourne
Identity. I thought, I know what to do with that.”
You would
imagine that Marshall knew what he was getting with Greengrass but apparently,
he was shocked when he saw rushes during the first week of shooting.
“I was sitting
in the back of the theatre and I could see Frank jerking around – ‘why the fuck
is he shooting the stuff like this – its horrendous.’”
Story through action
When it came to reshooting some scenes for The Bourne Supremacy the studio ordered Greengrass to shoot it both the way he wanted and in a standard locked-off way.
When it came to reshooting some scenes for The Bourne Supremacy the studio ordered Greengrass to shoot it both the way he wanted and in a standard locked-off way.
He says though
that his experience with Hollywood executives contrasted favourably with
clashes with the BBC.
“Studio execs
are not scary. They want filmmakers to tell them how to do things.”
Another key aspect of Greengrass’ style is the ability to tell a
story through action. This is most evident in the action sequences of the Bournefranchise including Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Jason Bourne (2016).
In a scene in Supremacy, Bourne is trapped in a hotel room
and recalls a horrific murder that he committed in his past as an assassin. The
next sequences show him escaping from the room, running across Berlin to evade
Swat teams and CIA goons, eventually getting away on a metro train with a look
of resolution on Matt Damon’s face.
“That is quite
an accurate psychological state of the character’s mind because when you
remember something that is deeply shaming you run away from it,” Greengrass
explains. “He is being chased by his own demons and the sequence ends with a
realisation that Bourne must face up to them. He cannot run anymore. He has to
atone for what he has done.”
He is however
dismissive of using shaky-cam simply for effect.
“Action pieces
like car chases should all have a character root that is truthful otherwise it
is just eye-candy. You want the images you’re capturing to rise authentically
arise out of the environment you’re shooting in — so, if you’re running it’s
going to feel like what it feels to run. It doesn’t work when you’re not
showing detail or developing the moment. It only works when you can get action
to enact character.”
