Paul Greengrass

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Music, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Music Commentary

4.3 • 14.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2017

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Paul Greengrass has directed three Jason Bourne films, starring Matt Damon, Captain Phillips with Tom Hanks in the title role, and the 9/11 film United 93, which earned him an Academy Award nomination. He won a Bafta for the film The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, and he wrote and directed the acclaimed Bloody Sunday.

His father was a merchant seaman and his mother a teacher and he grew up in Gravesend in Kent. Expelled from his first secondary school, at his next he made his first film at the age of 16. After learning the craft of documentary-making on World In Action at Granada TV, he turned to making feature films.

In October 2017, Paul will receive the BFI fellowship, the British Film Institute's highest accolade.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:03.0	Hello, I'm Kristi Young.
0:05.0	Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item
0:12.0	that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.
0:16.0	For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast.
0:22.0	You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website.
0:30.0	Music
0:50.0	My cast away this week is the film director Paul Greengrass, truly a storyteller from modern times.
0:56.0	His movies are culture shifting in their impact, uniting pace and thrills and threat with a deep-seated sense of where the world is now.
1:05.0	His blockbusting Jason Bourne trilogy alone has netted a billion dollars in ticket sales, but beyond the bone-crunching stunts and gut-twisting intrigue lies the repeated theme of willful establishment amorality.
1:18.0	It was ever thus, as a young TV documentary maker at World in Action, he told stories of IRA hunger strikers and the Ku Klux Klan and filmed in a part eight South Africa and on the streets of Beirut.
1:30.0	By the early 2000s, he was directing highly acclaimed television dramas, including The Murder of Stephen Lawrence and Bloody Sunday.
1:38.0	By his own admission, he's not much one for the establishment, which might explain why he was kicked out of school at 14.
1:44.0	He says of his work, I don't want spectacle, I don't want people watching from the outside, I want them to be participants.
1:51.0	Drama can take you there in a way that the facts can't and so Paul, I wonder, that's counterintuitive really, why do you think drama can do that?
2:00.0	Well, I think cinema does it because you can be immersed in it.
2:06.0	You know, I still believe in the power of that big screen in the dark room.
2:12.0	You know, it had a profound effect on me as a small boy and I've never lost that thrill, the power of it all.
2:22.0	I mean, it's a turbulent thing to do, of course, and it takes a toll on your life and on your family's lives, for sure.
2:30.0	And of course, it's ultimately rather a puny life because you're making something out of sound and light, which is nothing, you know.
2:38.0	And you're trying to craft something that has power and power to connect and move people.
2:42.0	So it's a paradox and that paradox is intoxicating and I've never lost my love from the very first step inside a television company to today.
	...

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