Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon's next collaboration has had another casting shot in the arm today with the news that Greg Kinnear and Amy Ryan are to join Damon for the film, based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran's non-fiction book Imperial Life In The Emerald City, which has been (probably - it's not officially confirmed yet) retitled The Green Zone.
The focus of the film will be on the search for WMDs in Iraq, it seems (whereas the book focuses on the rebuilding of Iraq, or failure there to do), with Damon playing "an officer who teams with a senior CIA officer" (so, wait, does that make him CIA too? Or not?) to search for WMDs. Ryan will play a New York Times foreign correspondant sent to the country to investigate the WMD claims, and Kinnear will play another CIA officer. Antoni Corone, late of We Own The Night and Reservation Road, will play an army colonel.
Greengrass worked on the script with Brian Helgeland, of **LA Confidential **and, er, A Knight's Tale fame. With shooting starting in Spain today, more casting news should follow pretty quickly.
For those of you who haven't heard of Ryan before, she appeared in You Can Count On Me and War of the Worlds, but it's her recent role in Ben Affleck's **Gone Baby Gone **that has really put her on the map, making her a Best Supporting Actress frontrunner through awards season. That film's release remains on hold in this country because of the plot's similarities to the Madeleine McCann disappearance, but do check it out when it's released, because Ryan's performance as a desperate and rather delinquent mother is well worth a look.