The L.A. Times has a brief interview with director Paul Greengrass (‘Bourne 2 & 3’) about his upcoming Iraq war film movie, “Green Zone,” starring his perennial muse, Matt Damon.
It obviously includes a new photo of Damon from the film. It’s been touted as a war film set in the Middle East in a country we won’t mention because Greengrass seems to want nothing to do with the bad ju-ju that those films have engendered at the box office.
“It is not a movie about Iraq,” Greengrass insisted. “The hope is to make a strong, contemporary thriller that is set in Iraq. Thrillers thrive on extremity, and there is no more extreme environment than immediate post-invasion Baghdad.”
Apparently the cinematograher’s slate had the movie as “Green Zone Thriller” to denote this wasn’t going to be a boring, political war film (sounds like shades of “The Hurt Locker” – an action war film).
Still, it’s undeniably Iraq-war set. Loosely based on the nonfiction bestseller “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone,” Damon plays a officer who leads a team looking for WMDs.
Apparently “Green Zone” still has no release date from Universal, but an end-of-year date is being looked at. Greengrass is well aware of Middle East War films’ reputation as box-office poison. “I don’t accept the proposition that cinema can’t look to Iraq and bring people to it. I am a born optimist. I know from experience how hard it is to make any film — it’s hard to do, let alone succeed. The pressure is on, and nobody is insulated from the pressure. The studio bosses are no more insulated than I am.”
With the previously mentioned “The Hurt Locker” also coming into theaters this year, it’ll be interesting to see how two action-thriller centric war films based in Iraq compare to many of the past, Iraq-fallout films (“Stop-Loss,” “In The Valley of Elah”) of the last two, three years.
