Paul Greengrass, the shaky-cam, quick-cut director who redefined action

By N.B.

IF YOU were to switch television channels and happen upon a Paul Greengrass film, you could tell within a few seconds that it was directed by him. Mr Greengrass, 60, made the hugely acclaimed “Captain Phillips”, “United 93” and “Green Zone”, but he is better known for “The Bourne Supremacy” (2004) and “The Bourne Ultimatum” (2007), a pair of spy thrillers, starring Matt Damon, which reinvented the Hollywood action sequence. A typical Greengrass chase scene or fight scene—and there isn’t much else in the Bourne films—is a hurly-burly of bone-jarring impacts, dynamic hand-held camerawork and stroboscopically fast editing. They create the breathtaking illusion that they were shot on-the-hoof in real locations, and that the camera operators were only just keeping up with the chaos exploding around them.

Not everyone is a fan of Mr Greengrass’s hyperactive “shaky-cam” style, but dozens of directors have copied it. “Casino Royale” (2006) and “Quantum of Solace” (2008), to name but two, were naked attempts to turn Bond into Bourne. Now, nine years after “The Bourne Ultimatum” made $442m at the box office, as well as earning a 93% Rotten Tomatoes rating, Messrs Damon and Greengrass have reunited for another globe-trotting, politically charged espionage caper, “Jason Bourne”.

Mr Greengrass himself is almost as recognisable as his work: at any film awards ceremony, it’s easy to spot the smiling, burly six-footer with the mane of grey hair and the pair of owlish wire-rimmed glasses. Lounging in a London hotel room in trainers, jeans and an untucked shirt, Mr Greengrass is warm and down-to-earth, but he isn’t flippant about his adrenaline-pumped visuals. They were the result, he says, of a long process of soul-searching and experimentation. “I always tell young film-makers,” he says, “‘Find the song that only you can sing.’ It doesn’t just come to you. It’s trial and error and disappointment before you find, slowly but surely, the confidence to express your film-making identity.”

Born in Surrey and educated at Cambridge University, Mr Greengrass’s own film-making identity began to form in the early 1980s when he was employed by Granada Television’s hard-hitting investigative journalism series, “World in Action”. At Granada, he says, he was taught “how to observe”, even if that meant resorting to rough-and-ready guerilla camerawork. “If you’re in the middle of Beirut, as I was in 1982, and it’s all kicking off, you’re not going to be putting your tripod down.” But his “secret dream” was to write and direct feature films, and so, after a decade at “World In Action”, Mr Greengrass moved onto one-off television dramas.

He learnt, he says, “the language of filmed drama—the dolly shot, the close-up, the two-shot, and so on”, but he was never happy with the programmes he made using this language. “I would write pieces and then go and shoot them quite conventionally, and they didn’t feel truthful to me. They didn’t feel like my films.” When he reached his forties, this feeling culminated in a mid-life crisis. “I made a film that really didn’t work [“The Theory of Flight” in 1998], and I thought, this is all wrong. I thought about giving up.”

The turning point came when he was commissioned to write and direct “The Murder of Stephen Lawrence”, a television docudrama about the racially-motivated killing of a black teenager in South London in 1993. Mr Greengrass saw the film as an opportunity to return to the handheld camerawork and immersive documentary techniques he had used on “World in Action”, but he had his doubts. “It was scary,” he says, “because the paradigms of conventionality in television are very very profound. It’s not easy to do something different, something radical. But the producer, Mark Redhead, made me do it. I was ready to bottle out. I remember at the end of the first day, I was filming a scene with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and I started to cover [ie, shoot the scene] conventionally. Mark said, ‘What the fuck are you doing? You said you wanted to do it your own way!’”

“The Murder of Stephen Lawrence” went onto win a BAFTA. More importantly, Mr Greengrass was learning that confidence in his own way. He pushed his gritty, spontaneous style further on another award-winning film, “Bloody Sunday”, which dramatised the shootings of Irish protesters by British soldiers in 1972. Next came the chance to direct “The Bourne Supremacy”, a sequel to Doug Liman’s hit, “The Bourne Identity”. The offer came as a shock to Mr Greengrass. “I never thought that I was ever going to work in the commercial mainstream,” he says. But he was even more surprised when other Hollywood directors adopted his quick-fire approach. “I would have said that my aesthetic was very, very old-fashioned, with its roots in the tradition of British documentary social realism.”

His own theory as to why this aesthetic caught on came to him in 2007. He was in London’s Waterloo Station, shooting a sequence for “The Bourne Ultimatum”, when he noticed that he, in turn, was being filmed. Groups of young people, “the 18 to 25-year-olds who are the movie audience”, were capturing what was happening on their mobile phones. “What had happened,” realised Mr Greengrass, “was that technology was allowing young people to make their own images, and their images were much more permissive, much more raw than the images that conventional drama gave them. So when these young people started to see movies made using those same, more permissive images, they recognised them.”

Greengrass had found the song that only he could sing. Now everyone else was singing along.

“Jason Bourne” is released on July 27th in Britain and July 29th in America.