Word: greengrass
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...need to be butch! Butcher and more intense." That's darned good advice for an NFL lineman, a carjacker ... or an action-movie star forced to start filming while awaiting pivotal script pages. It was Paul Greengrass's direction for Matt Damon when they commenced shooting this summer's globe-galloping thriller The Bourne Ultimatum without a finished screenplay. "I didn't know where I had come from. I didn't know where I was going--which are things you really need to know as an actor," says Damon, who reprises his role as conflicted assassin Jason Bourne...
...silences in his roles as shadowy figures in films like The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Departed. The director's signature is his spare and painstaking re-creation of historical events, as in 2002's Bloody Sunday and last year's Oscar-nominated United 93. As individuals, Damon and Greengrass never, ever overdo it. But as a team, these gurus of understated storytelling have flourished in and elevated the most bombastic of genres, the summer action-movie franchise...
They just finished their second and probably last Bourne film together. This one answers the question Bourne has been asking since the beginning: How he got so good at killing. "It's not about looking at a woman in a bikini coming out of the sea," says Greengrass. (Take that, James Bond!) "You get the dark past and this powerful search for redemption." And, fear not, plenty of hairy-chested action sequences too, including a car chase in midtown Manhattan, a shootout in London's Waterloo train station, and a sweaty foot chase and fistfight in Tangier, Morocco...
Outside the multiplex, these guys have kept it real as well. By marrying a civilian--a bartending single mom--instead of an actress and raising his family quietly in Miami instead of Hollywood, Damon lives a pretty grounded life for an A-lister. After attending Cambridge University, Greengrass spent the 1980s aiming his handheld camera at global hot spots for the British documentary series World in Action. Before moving to dramas, he co-authored Spycatcher, a book that so controversially depicted the British intelligence service that the British government banned it and attempted (unsuccessfully) to ban it in other countries...
...language and choose to do it again and again onscreen. The Bourne movies, unlike most meticulously planned and elaborately staged action pictures, are filmed guerrilla-style in the chaos of the urban world, a process that demands more than the usual team mentality. "It's like going to war," Greengrass says. "Who's going to be there? You want to know that someone's there every step...