Director to the manner ‘Bourne’

With his long, stringy, gray-streaked hair, sideburns, faded blue jeans, tennis shoes and tiny, round glasses, Paul Greengrass has the sort of off-kilter look of a nonconformist.

So it is not surprising that the films that have thus far defined his career -- the critically acclaimed “Bloody Sunday” and “The Murder of Stephen Lawrence” among them -- have been outside the mainstream, drawn from the stuff of history with Greengrass creating the narrative as well as the visual style. Now, at 48, for Greengrass the challenge has changed. He takes his first shot at a big-budget Hollywood project with Universal’s “The Bourne Supremacy,” an international espionage thriller that lands in theaters this week. It’s the sequel to the 2002 hit “The Bourne Identity,” and Matt Damon once again stars as Jason Bourne, a former assassin who gets pulled back into working for the U.S. government to catch a killer who impersonated him.

On the Berlin set of “Supremacy” this year, and still very much in the process of seeing how -- and if -- he can take it to the next level, Greengrass found himself “in the middle of a great love affair with it. I’ve had a ball. It’s not been at all as I thought. It’s a director’s town, Los Angeles, without a doubt. The people have been incredibly nice and supportive with me.”

In some ways Greengrass is like a stepfather moving in with a new family. In addition to Damon, back from the first “Bourne” are Franka Potenta, Brian Cox, Julia Stiles, producers Patrick Crowley and Frank Marshall, cinematographer Oliver Wood and first assistant director Luc Etienne. But this isn’t “The Brady Bunch.” Oddly, Greengrass brought no one on board with whom he had worked before except costume designer Dinah Collin, and that was after someone else backed out.

“It exposes you to different ways of working, new people,” he says. “It’s exciting to work with new people.” No one insinuates a power struggle occurred. Instead, everyone says it was simply Greengrass being impressed enough with the first “Bourne” to say he wanted to work with as many of the same people as possible -- perhaps wise when one is a newcomer to Hollywood.

“I’ve made quite a few films over the years,” says the director, who has written five of the nine movies he has directed. “You get used to running things the way you want them run. Sometimes it’s nice just to have a whole adventure. It’s like going on a luxury cruise. That’s what it feels like. You go, ‘Fantastic.’ Making movies is the same whether they’re big films or small films. It’s all about getting great performances and telling the story and kind of trying to make it more coherent as a piece.”

He’s certainly proved he can do that. “Bloody Sunday,” which he wrote and directed, is a documentary-style drama about the massacre by British troops of civil rights marchers in the Northern Ireland town of Derry on Jan. 30, 1972. Greengrass and the film won a slew of awards, including tying for the Golden Berlin Bear at the 2002 film festival here and an audience award at the Sundance festival. His 1999 television docudrama “The Murder of Stephen Lawrence” told the story of a black man’s racially motivated killing by a gang of white youths in London in 1993 and the ensuing convoluted investigation. That too received recognition in Britain and Canada. But “Bloody Sunday” is the film that would become his calling card to Hollywood.

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‘Incredible promise’

At a meeting to discuss who should direct the “Bourne” sequel, it was agreed that fresh blood was needed (Doug Liman helmed the first one). There was a longish definition of what exactly “fresh blood” meant. The rundown read something like this: The ideal person would not have a formal style or a commercial background, preferably a new, young director whom people hadn’t seen before. Screenwriter Tony Gilroy, who wrote the first “Bourne,” suggested Greengrass to Crowley, Marshall, Damon and Universal brass.

“I said, ‘I feel like an idiot, but I don’t know who that is,’ ” Damon recalled. He and the others were told to watch “Bloody Sunday” and afterward, “I called and said we’d be crazy not to hire him,” Damon said.

While Greengrass didn’t exactly qualify as young, as far as Hollywood was concerned he was a relatively unknown quantity. “We all sort of simultaneously looked at it sort of on a weekend,” Crowley said. “We called each other up and said this guy’s got incredible promise.” Crowley and the others were enthralled by Greengrass’ ability to capture what looked real while maintaining control over everything shot.

The director’s focus was the characters, not an expensive hotel or ocean liner. Greengrass had watched “The Bourne Identity” at a London theater and found it a fresh and interesting mix of a mainstream American commercial movie and a European indie sensibility.

His cinema verite-style is a good match for “Bourne,” most of which was done with a hand-held camera or a Steadicam. The director believes that increasing the paranoia in the film and the idiosyncratic movement possible with a hand-held created a better sense of immediacy, putting the audience almost in the movie but never ahead of Bourne.

Greengrass was drawn to the emotional realism of the first film and the anti-establishment character. “It wasn’t like the creation of a superhero or comic book hero,” he says. “It was just a guy out on the streets. He didn’t have a lot of high technology. He wasn’t blessed with superhuman powers. He was just a well-trained guy who used his intelligence, his sense of timing and physical training, but he was facing a hostile world. Because of that duality, there’s the good Bourne and the old assassin Bourne.”

The challenge of taking Bourne to new places both emotionally and physically excited him. The first film was set in cluttered Paris, the sequel in wide-open Berlin, Moscow and Goa, India. As for himself, Greengrass was also looking to scale new heights.

“I suppose I was at a place workwise where I kind of wanted the adventure,” he said. “When ‘Bourne’ came along it’s like, ‘What an adventure to have.’ ”

Although he said everything felt right from his first meeting with Marshall, Crowley and Damon, the director’s main concern was whether his distinctive style of realism would be lost in Hollywood studio process. Working with new people leaves one vulnerable to being influenced as well. As it turns out he needn’t have fretted.

“Probably my style quite suits the Bourne world, which is a kind of edgy, realistic-streak kind of world,” Greengrass says. “It’s not the superhero’s land. It’s not James Bond. It’s got some grit and reality to it -- that worked in my favor. People believe in their directors. Their directors may not always be right, but they definitely start in a position of wanting them to be.”

Damon joked that outside of “holding his hand” he did nothing to facilitate Greengrass’ Hollywood debut. He knew the first day of their five-month shoot that he was going to enjoy working with the director. Shooting took place in a crowded tunnel in Moscow and Damon’s character had been hurt. The script called for Bourne to walk through oodles of extras, touch where he had been hurt and check his hand for blood. Before shooting the scene Damon asked Steadicam operator Klemens Becker about the frame line because he wanted to make sure the audience would notice when he pulled his hand back to check for blood.

“ ‘No, just do it naturally,’ ” Damon says Greengrass told him. “ ‘We’ll go down. Klemens, move down for that shot. Go down and catch it.’ It was huge to have a director who was putting you first and saying, ‘Be as natural and real and honest as you can and it’s our job to capture it rather than yours to adjust for the sake of my shot.’ That’s the thing an actor wants to hear.”

That’s high praise from Damon. The list of directors he has worked with reads like a Who’s Who: Anthony Minghella (“The Talented Mr. Ripley”), Gus Van Sant (“Good Will Hunting,” “Gerry” and “Finding Forrester”), Steven Soderbergh (“Ocean’s Eleven”), Robert Redford (“All the Pretty Horses”), Steven Spielberg (“Saving Private Ryan”), Francis Ford Coppola (“The Rainmaker”) and Ed Zwick (“Courage Under Fire”).

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Comparisons to Van Sant

Damon says Greengrass is most like Van Sant. Greengrass is much more communicative (he and Damon talked for hours on and off the set about what the director was trying to accomplish) than Van Sant but the two are similar in that they both prefer to watch what their actors are doing and figure out how to encapsulate it rather than come in with a specific idea and not stray.

The actor wasn’t contractually obligated to make this second film nor is he should there be a third installment. Damon chose to participate based on his satisfaction with the script and everything else. For the first go-round he trained feverishly and ended up in the best shape he’s ever been in during his 33 years. For “Supremacy,” there was little time to prepare. He’d been working in Europe since January 2003 and now, more than a year later, he’d not returned to the United States for more than a week at a time.

“I really miss my home and New York,” said Damon, who is shooting Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s Twelve” and will next team with the same director on “The Informant.” Last year while filming “The Brothers Grimm” with Heath Ledger in Prague, Damon turned a basement room in the Barrandov Studios into a gym and boxed every day to regain his fighting shape for “Bourne.” Here in Berlin, he was seen jogging through the park during production. He’s done most of his own stunts and fighting in the sequel, managing to avoid injuries except for pulling a muscle during a foot chase up the stairs at a train station.

He’s 70% of the movie but wasn’t on a star trip. Damon invited the cast and crew to his rented penthouse apartment in Berlin’s sophisticated Mitte district to watch his New England Patriots win the Super Bowl, which began here at midnight.

That aside, the question for both Damon and Greengrass becomes: Can the sequel be as good as the first one? Two years ago moviegoers went to the cinema not knowing what to expect from “The Bourne Identity,” which strayed from Robert Ludlum’s 1984 book. Audiences and critics were pleasantly surprised, and the film ultimately did well at the box office. There are high expectations for the sequel, which is a direct continuation of the first and thus also veers from Ludlum’s work.

“If I get publicly stoned then I’ll know that we let people down,” Damon says, “but as of now I don’t think I did or we did.” As for Greengrass, Damon thinks he will end up being like Soderbergh, someone who does a combination of big- and small-budget projects, basing his decision on what he finds interesting -- not the money.

Now that’s he experienced his first taste of Hollywood, Greengrass thinks he’d like to hang around a while. “It suits me, I think,” he says. “You think, ‘Do I like working on the bigger scale?’ Because you never know. I think I’d like to spend a period of time doing it and then maybe go back and do some smaller ones after that.

“You never plan. You must always be driven by material. In the end it’s not a matter of how big or how small, it’s just about the subject matter that excites you, whatever it is.”