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.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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