Having turned the Jason Bourne series into a billion-dollar franchise that’s now spinning-off into television, Academy Award-nominated director Paul Greengrass (“Captain Phillips,” “United 93“) can pretty much make whatever he likes. He’ll get offered things like a James Cameron-produced sci-fi film (“Fantastic Voyage” which he turned down) and consider a serial killer procedural crime film (“Torso“; not happening any longer), but given the agitated state of the world, the filmmaker instead decided to make to “22 July,” a drama about the infamous 2011 domestic terrorist attack in Norway by a lone wolf gunman who shot up a summer camp full of kids in protest of elites, Islam and immigration.
READ MORE: Paul Greengrass’ ’22 July’ Is Overloaded, But Viscerally Assaultive [Venice Review]
Greengrass’ film is harrowing, a blistering look at how hatred manifests, but also, a personal film that looks at how we as people can persevere through family, love, and hope. The attacks claimed a total of 77 lives and included a car bomb explosion placed next to the tower block housing the office of the country’s Prime Minister. Over 65 children were killed in the attack.
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“I made it because I’m a parent of young adults and who could not be disturbed by the last two years,” Greengrass said last night at a screening of the film at the SVA Theatre in New York that included some of the Norwegian cast including first time actors Jonas Strand Gravli, Seda Witt and Anders Danielsen Lie (“Reprise“), who plays the killer in the movie to chilling effect.
Discussing the rise of authoritarian and fascism in Europe, Greengrass gave a laundry list rundown of the shift towards hard-right politics, including in, Sweden, one of the most famously liberal countries in the world that has moved towards the alt-right.
“The one country that seems to have escaped it is the U.S., oh no, sorry,” Greengrass said morbidly. “Your good friend Steve Bannon, as we speak, is going around Europe making alliances with all the far-right groups.”
This troubling shift in thinking and politics is part of the reason Greengrass took on such dark, arguably unpopular material. “We have a big, big problem and I want to make it clear this is not between conservative and liberal [parties], every country has that [split]. I’m talking about anti-Democratic movements on the far right, populist movements that are sweeping up everything before us.”
Given where we are today politically, Greengrass said he’s even more convinced he made the right choice in making “22 July,” and feels as though we can trace many of today’s incendiary political issues back to the roots of what happened in Norway seven years ago.
The troubled terrorist’s manifestos were filled with screeds about the betrayal by the elites, the sham of democracy and what he viewed as enforced multi-culturalism. “Those would have been extreme views in 2011,” he said. “Today, there’s no right-wing populist politician in this country or Europe who has any problem with that analysis. And there are millions of people that agree with it very fervently.”
“Of course, they don’t agree with [the terrorist’s] methods,” he clarified, “But that’s really not the point. Once you’ve got this huge movement towards that way of thinking, we’ve got a problem.”
Greengrass was originally thinking about making a movie about the global migration crisis, but once he read the book “Once Of Us” about the attack and the aftermath by Åsne Seierstad, he decided, “there was a bigger story here… I saw the story of how Norway fought for its Democracy as a very instructive story for today. The movie is, of course, about that country then and those people [that went through it], but I think it’s also about all of us today. At least in my mind.”
“22 July” is almost three movies; the terrorist attack, the aftermath, and recovery of the nation seen through the eyes of one family whose son miraculously survives five mortally-wounding gunshots and the trial that rocked and wrenched a nation for months. Lie said he grappled with the idea of playing the terrorist in the film, Anders Behring Breivik, a monster depicted as someone quite normal, even confident and cocky. Breivik is even given, much like in real life, time to espouse his propaganda in court. He, like the filmmaker, worried about giving the terrorist’s views a renewed platform. Ultimately, he decided, through several conversations with Greengrass, that they had to face and confront the ideas of hatred with reason. “If there was one director who could make a meaningful film about a meaningless tragedy, it was Paul,” Lie said.
“It comes down to whether the building is on fire,” Greengrass said, recalling the struggles about giving Breivik any kind of voice. “I’m old enough to remember various times in the U.K. where we’ve had fringe right-wing groups and they’ve had little blips of visibility. There’s always a constituency way out there on the far right. But I’ve never seen anything like this. Never, never.”
“This not about normal political discourse,” he continued. “Liberal democracy, that’s the democracy we all understand, that I was lucky enough to be grow up in and raise my children in. Many of these people oppose it and feel as though all of it should be swept away. I don’t know how we begin if we don’t face it. So, if we pretend that the building’s not on fire, we’re in trouble.”
Greengrass spoke about a brief moment when Breivik delivers a Nazi salute in court. The moment is mechanical, almost perfunctory form of provocation on the killer’s part. But the director insists it has extra, deeper, frightening resonance today and he’s seen it run a chill through the audiences that have seen it already.
“It speaks to our anxiety as parents, young people, that the world is unmoored at the moment.”
“22 July” opens in theaters and is available on Netflix starting tomorrow, Wednesday, October 10.