The man behind Jason Bourne
From the Falls Road to Sin City, director Paul Greengrass is equally at home with reality or blockbuster, writes Anne Marie Scanlon
WHEN I meet director Paul Greengrass to discuss his latest film, Jason Bourne, he does a double take. “I know you, don’t I?” he says, reaching for my hand. “We have met, right?”
We hadn’t. Greengrass and I live in the same area and I know him to see — with his long, grey curls and round-rimmed spectacles, he’s a distinctive figure. I hadn’t expected the compliment to be returned and was quite flattered, but then again, this is a man who pays attention to detail.
At the screening of Jason Bourne, I was sitting in front of a very well known TV political pundit. Before the film began, he told his companion that, in his opinion, the Bourne films are “better than Bond”.
I pass this nugget along to the director but Greengrass, who began his career in broadcast journalism, is too savvy to gloat. “It’s very kind of him,” he replies, talking about the TV pundit. “Bond is fantastic; you can’t argue with a franchise that has been around for 50 years.”
Jason Bourne, which stars Matt Damon as the eponymous hero, is the fifth Bourne film. Greengrass directed the second (The Bourne Supremacy) and the third (The Bourne Ultimatum). With Jason Bourne, he also wrote the script.
I have to agree with the famous political pundit — to my mind Bourne is better than Bond. Perhaps one of the reasons for my preference is that although the Bond franchise now employs women in roles other than ‘girlfriend’, ‘dolly bird’ or ‘victim’, it sometimes feels a bit forced.
Starting with Greengrass’s first Bourne film, the franchise has featured women in strong, hitherto male, roles. “I’m not noted for my films with women in bikinis,” Greengrass tells me. “In fact, I’ve never done one.”
Joan Allen, who played the high-ranking intelligence official Pam Landy in the last three Bourne movies, is gone but Jason Bourne introduces Heather Lee, an ambitious intelligence operative, played by Alicia Vikander.
The director and I agree that Vikander is a gifted actor, he calls her “brilliant”. But when I mention Vikander’s stunning beauty, he replies “she doesn’t feel glamorous (in this film), though does she?” And this is true. Nothing, short of putting a bag over her head, could disguise Vikander’s beauty. Yet Heather Lee is not a woman who trades on her looks, her wardrobe is functional and, brilliantly I think, at a stressful moment her hair, which is always pulled up in a banana clip, becomes ever so slightly frizzy. Greengrass didn’t initially write the part with Vikander in mind but she agreed to play the role early on.
Greengrass began his career in Granada Television with the ground-breaking show World in Action. He had no links with Ireland (“despite my mother coming from Liverpool”) but soon after joining Granada, he was sent to Northern Ireland to cover the hunger strikes.
“I was very young and that had a really profound impact on me. It set up a lifelong love of Ireland. I travelled all round and kept going back.”
During the course of his journalistic career, Greengrass directed many television films but it was his 2002 film Bloody Sunday, starring James Nesbitt, that catapulted him into the consciousness of both film-goers and filmmakers.
“I remember Bloody Sunday vividly,” he tells me. “It was shocking but the conflict seemed remote.
“Then at the end of the 1970s, early 1980s, I started going (to Northern Ireland) and suddenly it wasn’t so far away. I had a good time, made friends and started to understand something of it.
“Bloody Sunday was made at a moment of high optimism — it was made as the conflict was ending, which was very inspiring. One of the results of conflict is you very quickly lose history, shared history and never more so than Bloody Sunday because wherever you were in the islands of Ireland and Britain and whichever tradition you came from in the North, whatever your political persuasions were, you would have different views on that event.
“I said at the outset, the mission of this film is, can we as a group take the known facts and make an account of that day, that seems to all of us from all of our different backgrounds, traditions, perspectives, that we can collectively look at and say ‘it must have been something a bit like that’.
“The first screening in Derry, we had everyone from Sinn Féin to the Apprentice Boys, we had the Bishop of Derry, and it felt like it was fair and in being fair and truthful it sort of released the toxic energy that it had.”
Greengrass has grown quite intense while recalling Bloody Sunday but after a brief pause he smiles and adds: “That’s a high faluting way of putting it, but that was the hope, that was the mission. I’m proud of it.”
The climax of Jason Bourne occurs in Las Vegas, a far cry from Derry, and not a location usually associated with spies. What drew Greengrass to Sin City?
“There’s places you think of for Cold War stories to take place, like Vienna, the streets of Berlin, right? So I was asking myself ‘in 2016, where is the intelligence action?’ You could argue that it’s Ankara or Kabul but not really because those are conflicts of today.
“Then I read about these conventions in Las Vegas, these giant technology conventions — it’s where the CIA go to recruit new cyber people, where Goldman Sachs go to recruit — finance is all algorithms, and the great social media companies, which literally dominate the globe, they also recruit there. And, the hacking underground, they go too. So Las Vegas is really like the cafes of Vienna in 1952, in 2016 it’s where the action is, it all happens in these convention centres two or three times a year.”
While Ireland gets its fair share of screen time in films, according to Hollywood, spies don’t visit the Emerald Isle. In The Bourne Supremacy there is a ‘blink and you miss it’ reference to Dublin. Isn’t it time, I ask Greengrass, for a big car chase through the streets of Dublin? Or Belfast? “Oh, that would be fantastic,” he replies enthusiastically. “I’d like that. That would be good. Down the Liffey. I have such happy memories of shooting in Dublin.”
‘Bloody Sunday, in being fair and truthful it ... released the toxic energy’