Paul Greengrass (b. August 13, 1955 in Cheam, Surrey) is an Academy Award-nominated, BAFTA Award-winning English writer and film director. He specialises in dramatisations of real-life events and is known for his signature use of hand-held cameras. He was educated at Queens' College, Cambridge University.
He first worked as a director in the 1980s, for the ITV current affairs programme World in Action. At the same time he co-authored the notorious book Spycatcher with Peter Wright, former assistant director of MI5, which contained enough sensitive information that the British Government attempted (unsuccessfully) to ban it. He then moved into drama, directing made-for-television films such as The One That Got Away, based on Chris Ryan's book about SAS actions in the Gulf War, and The Fix, a fictional story of corruption in football.
His 1998 film The Theory of Flight starred Kenneth Branagh and Helena Bonham Carter, who played a woman with motor neurone disease. The film dealt with the difficult issue of the sexuality of people with disabilities. Greengrass helped write the screenplay for Omagh, which depicted the 1998 bombing of Omagh.
The Murder of Stephen Lawrence (1999) told the story of Stephen Lawrence, a black youth whose murder was not properly investigated by the Metropolitan Police, and led to revelations about institutional racism in the police. Bloody Sunday (2002), depicted the 1972 Bloody Sunday shootings of Northern Irish anti-internment activists by British soldiers; it shared First Prize at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival with Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away.
2004's The Bourne Supremacy, a sequel to the 2002 film The Bourne Identity, starred Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, an amnesiac who realizes he was once a top CIA assassin and is now being pursued by his former employers. Greengrass has also directed the next sequel in the Bourne series, The Bourne Ultimatum, due for release in 2007.
In 2006, Greengrass directed United 93, a film based on the September 11th hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93. The film received immense critical acclaim, particularly for Greengrass' directing. Greengrass won the BAFTA award for Best Director and received the Best Director award from several critics awards circles. In addition to also receiving many other runner-up citations and nominations from critics group (including the Broadcast Film Critics Association), he earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Director. For his role in writing the film, he earned Writers Guild of America Award and BAFTA nominations for Best Original Screenplay.
Greengrass is next tipped to adapt and direct They Marched into Sunlight, a book by David Maraniss which revolves around the controversy surrounding the Vietnam conflict. He has also signed on to adapt and direct Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a book by Rajiv Chandrasekaran that details the mistakes made in post-war Iraq. Greengrass was also initially attached to direct the screen version of Watchmen, but the production was shut down a few weeks before filming was due to start and the film will now be directed by Zack Snyder instead.
