Suggested by Rajiv Chandrasekaran's IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY, Paul Greengrass's GREEN ZONE places the viewer at Clusterfuck Center during the early days of America's occupation of Iraq, where lies and sheer incompetence combined to touch off a bloody insurrection that left thousands of soldiers and civilians dead. Had the film been strictly "based on" Chandrasekaran's tome, it probably would've been a minutiae-laden docudrama depicting the institutional failure that nudged the door open for the insurgency. But Greengrass and screenwriter Brian Helgeland are more interested in the larger conflict of the Bush administration versus the CIA, and how the former wrecked a country by buying into their own invented reality - concocted to justify the invasion of Iraq in the first place - wholesale. It's big-picture stuff (To De-Baathify or Not De-Baathify), with the build-up to the disbanding of the Iraqi Army playing as one long, surprisingly tense (given that we know the outcome) suspense beat. At the center of GREEN ZONE is Miller (Matt Damon), a Mobile Exploration (MET) officer who begins to question his WMD-hunting mission when, time and again, his team risks their lives to infiltrate an empty, dust-caked factory space. The intel is consistently wrong, yet everyone - his superiors, his fellow officers, the media - seems to believe it's only a matter of time before the weapons magically turn up. Miller, however, has had enough of following bunk orders, so he strays from the reservation in order to chase down the truth; this puts him in league with the CIA - which, for the first time ever in a left-leaning film, comes off as a semi-competent, non-nefarious organization. Greengrass openly admits that he's embraced thriller conventions to entertain his audience; as for whether he wants them to feel anything more than satisfaction at having been entertained (i.e. the indignation that books like Chandrasekaran's provoked), he ain't saying. Mostly, he's just proud of his work, particularly the execution of the final action sequence - a frantic twenty-minute pursuit of a moving target which outdoes anything he pulled off in the BOURNE movies. And, yes, he is done with the BOURNE franchise. He explains why in the below interview.

Mr. Beaks: Do you see GREEN ZONE as a merging of your docudrama and mainstream action-filmmaking sensibilities?

Paul Greengrass: Yes, I do actually. I think that's bang-on. In fact, that was sort of a conscious thing, to see if I could do it and what would be the result. I would say that I wanted it to be leaning more towards the action-thriller. To marry the two.

Beaks: But you do have an obligation to the historical record, obviously.

Greengrass: Right.

Beaks: How do you keep that in sight while still delivering a film that entertains in a relatively conventional manner?

Greengrass: If you make films, you're telling stories. That's what you're doing, really. And you're trying to find stories that people want to listen to. It's not journalism or history: it's making movies. So when you're thinking about "Where can I make a thriller..." thrillers thrive on extremity, don't they. Whether it's extreme physical environments - dangerous places - or extreme moral environments. Preferably, you want both. That's kind of where I started. You don't start with the historical record in that sense. It's important down the line, but you've got to start with the story. And the story always was a story of a guy who shows up in that place with a very noble mission. His mission is not his own; he's doing his duty, which is to find the weapons and disarm the dictator. And when he gets there, there's nothing there. That's where I started. That was exactly where we all started with this thing - at least, I did anyway, as did, I suspect, a vast majority of people across the world. We had that feeling of "Here it is, we're going to go in and [find the WMDs]," and nothing's there. That felt entirely at one with the historical record. That's what those guys did: they went in with pieces of paper telling them to go to Places X, Y and Z, and there they will find [the WMDs]. And when they got there, they didn't find them. I talked to many of those MET guys - all of the soldiers who are part of Miller's team [in the film] are ex-MET guys who did that job, who went across the border. They had to fight their way through dangers, and then found there was nothing there. Here's the point: that's such a great premise for a thriller. What you get is a character who walks out and says, "Wait a second. You told us they were there. What's going on?" That's a great premise for a thriller because that's what you want your hero in a thriller to be: a guy who bucks the system, asks the question and won't let go; he'll go to any lengths to get his answer to find the truth. That's the true answer to your question: you start with a premise that is entirely realistic, and then you unfold it in the most dramatic way that you possibly can. It's one man's search for the truth. That's as old a plot as thrillers have ever had. And it's always a great one because it takes your hero into darker and darker conspiracies, and inevitably into more danger. So you've got a great thriller unfolding, but then you're trying to set the background to the world as accurately as possible. For instance, the debates between the CIA guy who's saying, "Look, if we get rid of the Army, there's going to be civil war in six months," and the Pentagon guy saying, "We beat the Iraqi Army. We're going to [disband them]." Those were the debates at the time. The decision to de-Baathify was the crucial decision; it was a very dramatic moment, as anyone who's read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book knows. That's both true, but also a fantastic backdrop to a thriller because it raises the stakes - which is what you always want in a thriller. You feel like the hero is standing at a vital moment. Lastly, the real backdrop of Baghdad, going back to what I said about thrillers thriving on extremity, that world was a surreal world. One of the things I'm proudest of with the film is that you really feel that environment in a way you've never felt it before: the Green Zone and the palace... that's all incredibly well-drawn and true-to-life. You've got to tell a great story. You've got to tell a story that is a thriller. But along the way, you're harnessing it to a real backdrop. I can point you to a hundred thrillers that have done that. It's always great because your audience is then pitched into an exciting environment that means a lot, but, front and center, they're getting a great story of a heroic guy searching for the truth.

Beaks: Having read the book, you've presented the Green Zone exactly the way I imagined it. For me, the book provoked laughter first, and then sheer outrage at the avoidable folly of it all. What exactly are you trying to provoke or elicit from the viewer emotionally with your film?

Greengrass: Honestly and truly? You've got to give them a rewarding experience in a movie theater. That means you've got to deliver for them a genre that they understand and love - i.e. the conspiracy action-thriller genre. It's got to work on that level unquestionably. Along the way, I believe that audiences also like that genre delivered with some intelligence and ambition. That's what I tried to do in the BOURNE movies, and that's what I'm trying to do here. They're different pieces, of course, but I think that that's what you're trying to do. In any given year, how many big action movies are there? They're a tried-and-tested movie that people want to go see. But you can't make them all samey; guys like you would rightly criticize us if we did. You've got to find a way to do those kinds of pieces in fresh ways. Personally, I think these pieces get enormously re-engergized when you reintroduce them to what's really happening out there - because they're getting the genre piece that's very tried-and-tested and incredibly satisfying, but also getting some sort of originality and intelligence in with it. Hopefully... I mean, it's for you to judge... but hopefully you're getting the really rewarding night in the theater, and then you'll talk about it afterwards. It will stay with you. That seems to me to be a really great ambition to have in the action-thriller genre. I believe these things can be of really good quality; they draw strength from being set in the real world. But am I trying to make people angry? Not at all. You're trying to give people a rewarding experience, and part of what makes it rewarding is that it's a take on the real world.

Beaks: Anyone who was watching television will be familiar with the issues being argued here, so your film then has to give us a deeper look into it.

Greengrass: You're propelled through it in a way that you've never been before.

Beaks: Speaking of "propelled", I want to talk about the editing of the final action sequence, which has two men frantically chasing the same target for very different reasons. What's fascinating about this sequence is that, even though we're never entirely sure where we are geographically, we're never struggling to get our bearings. We're as focused on the target as they are, so their movement makes sense. How do you keep that straight?

Greengrass: The way you keep it straight, and it's always imperative to me to keep it straight so that you are clear, is by a lot of hard work, careful planning, careful shooting and careful editing. That's the honest truth of it. What makes an action sequence great in my view - and I've done a few, but I'm very proud of that twenty minute sequence at the end - is that your action has got to support character and not the other way around. In other words, your characters can't just run around willy-nilly. Your action is designed to take your character from one type of person to another, so the action movements have got to reflect substantial growth in the character. Then you marry that with thematic development, narrative development, so that the story changes and moves on through the action. Lastly, you've got to render that action sequence with two things that fight each other radically: one is, with the most intense energy, the pace you can summon with the most scrupulous attention to detail so that you understand, as every beat in the action sequence unfolds, what every character in that action sequence is reacting to, or what his or her thought process is. You track it accurately. If you can marry all of those things into one, so that you've almost got a piece of music with acceleration and deceleration and obstacles to overcome, and then a blinding kind of finale flourish... if you can do all of that, then you've got a great action sequence. The clarity is absolutely imperative. Otherwise, it's just a load of movement and you've no involvement in it or ability to live with it; you're just watching it as spectacle, and that's not exciting. What's exciting is when you're inside it as an immersive thing, and you're within the character's thought process. "He's run there because of that and is now intent on doing this, and this character has now got to do that because of this in order to do that." You're getting the collision of detailed thought processes, and that is the difference between looking at something that's rendered at pace but within pure focus, as opposed to something that is rendered out-of-focus, that is blurred and unsatisfying.

Beaks: How long did it take to pull that sequence together in the editing room?

Greengrass: A long, long time. (Laughs) I couldn't put a time on it, but several months. There were so many complex strands that we were pulling together.

Beaks: What would make a return to the BOURNE franchise rewarding for you?

Greengrass: I've moved on from the BOURNE franchise. I enjoyed my time there. It was fantastic. I am the number one fan of the franchise, but I just felt at the end of [GREEN ZONE] that I wanted to move on to do different sorts of things, and making another BOURNE film was not one of my priorities for the foreseeable future. I explained that to the studio, and they were incredibly understanding. You know, this is actually what should happen in a franchise. A franchise shouldn't belong to one director. You're just guesting; you come to the franchise and give it whatever you can contribute. And when you've given it your all - as I think I did with those two films - you go "Well, I've done what I can do, and now I need to move on, do different things, and learn some new tricks!"

Beaks: Would that be to continue in the vein of GREEN ZONE, with stories based on reality?

Greengrass: No, I think I need to do something completely different. It's time for my romantic comedy.

Paul Greengrass's GREEN ZONE hurtles into theaters Friday, March 12th. Faithfully submitted, Mr. Beaks