Paul Greengrass may no longer be a journalist, but he has successfully brought a journalistic style to both action films and historical dramas over his career. The filmmaker is best known for his hand-held, cinéma vérité style where the camera moves like a cameraman embedded in the scene, struggling to capture real events. His style is often imitated, though few are able to match the subtly precise way that Greengrass constructs his sequences through quick cutting and frenetic camerawork. Despite being famous for a specific filmmaking technique, Greengrass’ filmography is still quite diverse, which should be apparent in the gallery below.
He began his career working for the audacious British current affairs program “World in Action.” He transitioned to fiction filmmaking with a series of TV movies based on historical events. His breakout hit was the historical drama “Bloody Sunday,” chronicling the 1972 Bloody Sunday shootings. Greengrass was then hired to helm the second film in the Jason Bourne franchise with "The Bourne Supremacy," and he went on to direct two more films in the series. The filmmaker has been nominated for six BAFTA awards, winning once in the Best Direction category for his 9/11 drama “United 93.” He received a nomination for the Best Director Oscar for “United 93” as well. He was nominated once for the Best Director Golden Globe for the Somali pirate thriller “Captain Phillips.” His most recent film was the western “News of the World,” starring Tom Hanks.
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In his second feature, Greengrass tells the story of a young woman with ALS (Helena Bonham Carter) who asks her artistic caregiver (Kenneth Brannagh) to help her lose her virginity. The film is cute and funny, but also lacks the edge and depth present in other Greengrass films.
The director’s first feature is based on the true story of a British soldier (David Thewlis) who was left behind in the Falkland Islands after the end of the Falklands War. Like his more famous later works, the war film is a stark portrait of the real people caught up in major conflicts.
After a spinoff starring Jeremy Renner failed to take off, Matt Damon and Greengrass were brought back for the fifth film in the action franchise. The plot once again finds amnesiac spy Jason Bourne trying to piece together his past while on the run from shady government forces. Despite several thrilling action set pieces including an impressive car chase down Las Vegas Boulevard, the movie still feels like a retread of the previous films.
Greengrass teamed up with “Bourne” star Matt Damon for this thriller set during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Damon plays an army officer on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction who becomes increasingly disillusioned with the war. For better and for worse, the movie can’t help but feel like Jason Bourne in Iraq.
With an entirely Norweigen cast, the film chronicles how Anders Behring Breivick (Anders Danielsen Lie) carried out his attacks on July 22, 2011 in Norway that left 77 people dead, and his subsequent criminal trial. The film is gripping and emotional, but feels more like a well-produced play-by-play reenactment than something that might offer some deeper insight into the tragedy.
Tom Hanks reunites with his “Captain Phillips” director in this western about a Civil War veteran (Hanks) who finds a young white girl kidnapped and raised by a Native American tribe and seeks to return her to her family. Greengrass adopts a much smoother, more traditional style of camerawork for this expansive drama which is anchored by a strong performance by Hanks.
Greengrass adapted his trademark handheld style for the action genre in the sequel to “The Bourne Identity,” and the result is one of the most influential action flicks of the period. The shaky camerawork perfectly matches Jason Bourne’s (Matt Damon) paranoid, always alert mindset as he rampages across Europe to solve the puzzle of his past while evading government agents. Many subsequent action films have tried to imitate its gritty feel, but few filmmakers are as good at it as Greengrass.
The director’s signature style was perfected in his breakout film, a cinéma vérité retelling of the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre. During the height of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, British soldiers fired on a protest march, killing 14 people. Greengrass drew on his experience as a journalist to recreate the feeling of being right in the middle of the tragedy, and the resulting work feels more like a newsreel of real events than a staged non-fiction film.
When a group of dirt-poor Somali pirates hijacks his ship and takes him hostage, a captain (Tom Hanks) fights for his life in this drama based on real events. Greengrass takes great care to humanize the pirates and help us understand their plight, even casting a then-unknown group of Somali immigrants, and when they are killed by American snipers it feels more like a tragedy than a victory. The film was nominated for six Oscars including Best Picture, four Golden Globes including Best Director, and nine BAFTAS including one win for Barkhad Abdi’s portrayal of the pirate captain.
Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) returns home to the United States to finally root out the truth of Operation Treadstone, the secret government program that created him. Arguably the strongest film of the series, “Ultimatum” wows with its thrilling action set pieces shot on-location, including a suspenseful game of cat and mouse at London’s Waterloo Station and a car chase through the streets of Manhattan. No doubt the sequences led to its three Oscar wins, for Film Editing, Sound Mixing, and Sound Editing; the film also nabbed 6 BAFTA nominations, including a Best Direction nom for Greengrass, with two wins, also for Film Editing and Sound.
Greengrass tells the story of the passengers of United Flight 93, one of the four planes hijacked by terrorists on 9/11, which crashed into a field after the passengers stormed the cockpit. The docudrama was the first Hollywood feature to dramatize any of the events of 9/11, and Greengrass chooses to portray the event through the lens of one of the lesser known stories of that day. His style captures the experience of those on the plane with a startling immediacy, while also chronicling the moment-to-moment events, to create a feeling of being there, watching everything unfold. Also, much like with the pirates in “Captain Phillips,” he avoids portraying the terrorists as stereotypes; in fact they are suprisingly normal in appearance. “United 93” is perhaps the best example of Greengrass’s trademark style, using the handheld camera of a journalist to recreate and capture a real historical moment.
