It was not long ago that people would talk of Paul Greengrass as one of the most exciting TV directors of his generation. Now, in an amazingly short space of time, he is one of the most exciting Hollywood directors of his generation, trusted by studio chiefs to spend their millions in the best way he sees fit.
Greengrass, born in Cheam, south London, was this week nominated for a best director Oscar. For some his documentary-style re-enactment of the hijacking of flight United 93 was the best film of last year, albeit one of the most harrowing. The film critic of the London-based Guardian, Peter Bradshaw was not alone when he wrote that he had difficulty breathing while watching it. Greengrass' previous film was a franchise blockbuster, The Bourne Supremacy, with Matt Damon as the CIA-trained assassin with a conscience, Jason Bourne. Now Greengrass is filming the third Bourne film, The Bourne Ultimatum, entrusted by Universal with an eye-popping US$125m budget. And it was announced on Wednesday that his next project will be Imperial Life in the Emerald City, based on the book about life in Baghdad's green zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran.
He may look scruffy, with his laid-back demeanor and straggly hair, but he is, in Hollywood terms, a major player.
PHOTO: AP
Tim Bevan, United 93's producer and co-founder of Working Title Films, believes we have not yet seen the best of Greengrass. "I think he will get better and better. He's gone from zero to hero very quickly — he's now A-list Hollywood. Hollywood was probably surprised by how well he did with Bourne Supremacy, and then they saw United 93 and they can see the directorial artistry behind it."
Greengrass' ultra-realistic style of film making is very much based on his documentary background: he worked for 10 years on Britain's Granada TV's World in Action team after graduating from Cambridge University. But he was catapulted into the world spotlight not for filmmaking but for book writing.
Greengrass had been sent to New Zealand to track down the former assistant director of British counter-intelligence (MI5) Peter Wright after Anthony Blunt was exposed as a Soviet spy, and he ended up co-authoring Wright's memoirs. Spycatcher became notorious for the British government's attempts to ban it rather than for its contents.
From there Greengrass quickly moved into feature film directing. His first film, Resurrected, starring David Thewlis as a soldier left behind in the Falklands, won acclaim at the Berlin film festival.
There followed a steady and growing career as one of the UK's best directors — there was the odd episode of Kavanagh QC on TV, but also films including The Theory of Flight, starring Kenneth Branagh and Helena Bonham Carter (one of the rare times when he put a foot wrong). It was his dramatizations The Murder of (black London teenager) Stephen Lawrence and then Bloody Sunday (followed by Omagh, which he co-wrote and produced) which made people take even more notice of him. Three immensely powerful films, so good that it seemed strange they were being shown on ITV.
After that Hollywood came knocking and he has admitted that the decision to direct The Bourne Supremacy in 2004 was not a difficult one. "I wanted to have an adventure in films, to do something completely different. You just think it would be fun to do a car chase."
Greengrass has fitted easily into the sometimes crazy world of Hollywood. And the studios trust him. He told a Bafta audience last year: "I think an awful lot of bunkum gets talked over here about Hollywood. They see it as this place where devils with horns on their heads massacre your films. On the two experiences I've had, and this is the third now, I've been treated with great respect."
And he seems to have been given as much space and control as he would want with United 93, surely the most daunting project imaginable to take on, with some believing it too early for Hollywood to tackle Sept. 11.
Khalid Abdalla, who played the lead terrorist, Ziad Jarrah, said: "Paul does work differently to other directors. We weren't working with a text for one thing. We were all standing there with our call sheets one day, and Paul said, 'If you're looking at the call sheet, then you've never worked with me.'"
The actor, who has just finished filming the lead role in a version of Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner, is full of praise for Greengrass. "It's almost like he's trying to extend himself and everyone follows him and it always seems to turn out right. He takes you to the limit of your faith and you love him for it."
Bevan, too, believes no one could have made United 93 as well as Greengrass did. "There was a vibrancy on the set of United 93 which I don't expect to experience ever again. He is fun and he is bright. There are very few feature film directors around who have a brain the size of Paul Greengrass.'"
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby