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PAUL GREENGRASS AND BARRY ACKROYD BSC JOIN FORCES AGAIN FOR IRAQ-SET THRILLER GREEN ZONE
rom the frying pan into the fire. Barry Ackroyd BSC had barely drawn Fbreath after what would eventually prove to be an award-strewn stint on The Hurt Locker when he was plunged back into another recreated
Iraqi frontline for Green Zone.
Inspired by journalist Rajiv Chandrasekeran’s remarkable non
fiction exposé Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone,
set in the aftermath of the coalition invasion in 2003, the film re-unites Ackroyd with director Paul Greengrass.
Their first collaboration was 2006’s United 93, a harrowing recreation of the final flight of one of the doomed passenger aircraft on 9/11. United 93 left Greengrass and fellow producers, Working Title’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner as well as Lloyd Levin eager to develop another project together. “This time, we decided to make a bigger film, but still set against a real backdrop,” notes Bevan. “That was our starting point.”
The initial idea that Greengrass discussed with screenwriter Brian Helgeland was to develop a thriller about the failed hunt for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Along the way, they sought the active collaboration of many participants in the Iraq drama, including key figures in the WMD hunt, two dozen U.S. combat vets who served in Iraq, a half-dozen ranking former CIA officers with first-hand experience and an elite CIA paramilitary team leader who captured several of Iraq’s “Most Wanted.”
The resulting film is a mixture of those elements.
However, Green Zone, says Greengrass, firmly, “is not a movie about the war in Iraq. It’s a thriller set in Iraq, and that’s a very different proposition. In my experience, thrillers are at their best when they’re in extreme environments where the moral challenges are acute.”
Of course, Greengrass, whose background is news and documentary drama (Bloody Sunday, The Murder Of Stephen Lawrence), had also honed
Photo main: Jason Isaacs and Matt Damon on set
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