So far, Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass have been very tight-lipped on The Green Zone, their follow-up to The Bourne Ultimatum. The film is based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book about the American reconstruction of Iraq after the war. We quizzed Damon earlier today.
"We didn’t really have an agenda when we set out to make it other than we wanted to make a really good movie and a really honest movie," Damon told us of the tone on the red carpet of the Sony Ericsson Awards this evening. "We have all these real soldiers in the movie and that’s really interesting .You know there’s not really one opinion that the movie puts forward and there’s not one opinion from the soldiers themselves. People have very different views about what went on and what our role in the war is. One thing that Paul does really well in films like United 93 and Bloody Sunday is that he simultaneously puts forward a number of perspectives and you can just sit there and watch an event unfold in a way that feels really real and authentic; hopefully the movie will do that".
We don't expect there to be any easy answers from Green Zone. Greengrass isn't given to making films with pat opinions; he presents different sides of the story and lets the audience try to force the pieces of the puzzle together. We're hoping for something along the lines of Bloody Sunday, but with, we hear, an action sensibility akin to The Bourne Ultimatum. Is this pair capable of making a bad film? We doubt it, even if they tried really, really hard.
The Sony Ericsson Empire Awards 2008
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