Happy Sad Confused - Paul Greengrass

Episode Date: December 30, 2020

We wrap up a memorable (mostly for the wrong reasons) 2020 with a memorable (for the right reasons!) conversation with a versatile and fascinating filmmaker, Paul Greengrass. In his first visit to "Happy Sad Confused", Paul confronts the reasons why he believes he makes movies, how he almost lost the Bourne job before he got it, what his vision of "Watchmen" was, and how he came to direct his first western in "News of the World". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Make an appointment online at bigotires.com or stop by one of your locally owned and operated Greater Colorado Springs Big O Tires today. Big O Black Friday savings going on now. Big O Tires, the team you trust. Prepare your ears, humans. Happy, sad, confused begins now. Today on Happy, Sad, Confused, filmmaker Paul Greengrass on bringing his brand of filmmaking to the Western and News of the World.

Hey, guys, I'm Josh Harwood. Welcome to another edition of Happy, Sad, Confused. This is our final show of 2020, and quite a 2020. It's been for all of us. we made it, guys. Thank you for all of your patronage. You're listening over this last year. It's been a journey for us all. And needless to say, I'm thrilled that 2020 is coming to an end. That being said, let's not delude ourselves. January 1st, 2021, it's not like everything turns to pixie dust and everything turns out okay. We've got a long road back. But I, for one, do have some optimism heading into the new year.

And I'm thrilled to say that. Happy Second Fuse and Sir Crazy and all of my endeavors have been great distractions for me on a personal level. You guys know if you've been with me through the podcast. You know I've talked about this. I lost my dad earlier in the year and that was and will always be a traumatic life-changing event. But I can say truthfully that my work and hearing from you guys throughout this year has meant. the world to me, and I am so, so appreciative. So I wanted to end the year on a hopeful note looking to the future, and I think we have that in our guest today. Paul Greengrass is

one of our most unique and finest filmmakers. He is, of course, known for the Bourne films, for United 93, for Captain Phillips, for Bloody Sunday, and his new film is News of the World. It is a, in some ways, a classical Western. It is based on a novel. It stars Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks, first Western, too. Paul Greengrass is first Western. So that's unique. And tells him of kind of a newsreader, a guy that goes from town to town in 1870 spreading the news of the world. And he comes to meet a child who he feels he must protect on this journey. It's a very kind of classic Western journey, as Paul says, a bit of a reverse story of The Searchers, if you're familiar with that classic John Ford film. But anyway, this film is out in theaters where it's possible

to be out in theaters and is a bit of a hopeful film. And I know Paul talks about wanting to make something a little more hopeful after making a pretty dark story in 22nd July dealing with terrorism. Paul Greengrass's work has really stood apart from most filmmakers, I think, in the last 20 years, and that he really balances being able to tell a creative and entertaining story with topicality, not being afraid to confront the big issues of our day, terrorism in all its forms. You know, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, films like Captain Phillips or 993 or 22nd July feel really off and off-putting and just inappropriate, yet he somehow finds a way to make the impossible possible and make these into, you know, worthy pieces of art.

Not to mention, he can make a cracking great action movie. His born films are fantastic. So this was a rare treat, someone I've wanted to have on the podcast for a while. And as I've said in recent weeks, this has been such a fun run of filmmakers for me. and I'm thrilled that we end the year with a new guest on Happy, Say I Confused and someone that I have the utmost respect. Also worth mentioning for the geeks out there like myself, we do get into one of those famed, would-of, could-have projects that I'm always fascinated by, Paul Greengrass for a time was supposed to direct a watchman movie before Zach Snyder got a chance to do it.

So I had to pick his brain about what that movie was going to be, and that's kind of fascinating. So stay tuned for that. Um, that's about all the preamble, as I said, a rough year, a year that, um, I will never forget that changed us all. But, um, I'm still standing. You're still standing. We're still here. And, um, and I thank you for being along with me on the journey. Um, remember to review rate and subscribe to happy say I confused. We're going to keep going into the new year. Already got some episodes bang for 2021. And, uh, stir crazy will continue. I'll try to entertain you with my silliness over on Comedy Central. And, um,

And, yeah, again, thank you for the support. And I hope you guys enjoy this conversation with Paul Greengrass. So I've been pretty spoiled lately, Paul, with filmmakers that I admire. I've had everyone from Chris Nolan and Patty Jenkins, George Miller. But no one I've been more excited to talk to than you, sir. I'm a great admirer of your work. Thank you for being on the podcast today. My pleasure.

Talk to me a little bit about, you know, I mentioned some of your contemporaries. others that are at the top of their field. I'm curious, like, the old adage about directors is, you know, you don't see how another director directs. You're not on their sets. Have you visited other sets and have you kind of learned from how others do it? Because I think there's a fascination with how you do your thing. I remember I visited J.J. Abrams.

He was very kindly invited me when they were shooting Star Wars. I was there for an hour, you know. I remember I took my kids to the Muppet set. to see all the Muppets, which was absolutely magical. No, the short answer, the serious answer is the strange thing about directing is that you almost never see your colleagues and contemporaries at work. You hear about them all the time, of course, because you're working with people who've just come from a movie

that Sons So's worked and they're going on to a movie that such and such is making. So you hear about them a lot, but you never see them. And you also very rarely, in my experience, meet them other than, you know, some festival or something. And it's always lovely because, of course, you know, if you're an actor, you're surrounded by other actors. If you're a DAP, you've got your entire department of people who service camera. You know, filmmaking can be quite lonely, I think. It depends where you want to go with this conversation. We can get into something which does interest me quite a lot and has always, which is,

Why do filmmakers end up making films? Because it's one of those strange occupations. Nobody, to my knowledge, ever gets tapped on the shoulder in the street or approach. I'd say, you'd be a great person to make a motion picture. So at a certain point, it has to be something that you self-select for, which means by its nature, the people who self-select are going to have strangenesses about them, you know? And the lives and desires that are probably, that they more than usually respond to, if I can put it that way. And I also think, is this interesting to you, by the way?

Absolutely. Because, I mean, part of what I want to get out with you, I mean, anybody that knows a little bit about you, is the path, the very unusual path that you took towards the last 20 years of your career. You basically, you lived a life. You lived a whole different life prior to Bloody Sunday would, yeah, go ahead. To end up making films, I do believe is intimately connected to your childhood. I do believe that. I can't prove it statistically, though I do remember having a conversation with Scorsese about. I have had occasional conversations with filmmakers about it.

It is often connected to childhood loneliness. And I think it's also often connected to watching movies in movie houses in cinemas. And it's something to do with the fusing of those two things when you're very young, the great David Lean said that when he sat in a cinema as a boy, and he had quite a lonely childhood, loneliness issues when he was young, he said, and this may not be the exact quote, but this is fundamentally it,

that he felt like a pious boy as he watched the beam hit the screen. He felt like a pious boy looking at the light, flooding in through the cathedral window. I can relate to that. I think there's something about those childhood experiences where the movie theatre becomes a place of sanctuary and a place of wonder and a place of communion and a respite from your anxieties.

And the two fuse in this incredibly intense experiences of the silver screen. And you never lose the vividness of those dreams, those experiences, not dreams. Those experiences are so unbelievably vivid that movie making itself becomes your attempt psychologically to recreate experiences that are as vivid as the ones that you experience as a child. Now, the interesting thing about that is it can never be done because no film that you can ever make, you know, I remember I would have been about 11, my dad taking me to Dr. Chivardo. I can tell you exactly the seat I was sitting in in the theatre, literally. And he was away a lot when I was young, and it was a big thing for me to go out with him as a small boy,

and he liked to go and see David Lee movies. I can remember that as one of the most intense moments of my life. And no film that you can ever make can recreate that. So the filmmaking process is sort of Sisyphian. It's like pushing a boulder up ill. Have you ever come close to getting back to that feeling? And when in the process would it even come? Is it on a set?

Is it seeing the final cut? Is it at the premiere? Like when do you even come slightly close to that feeling of being an 11-year-old in that theatre again? Well, then we come to the question you asked about, I was very lucky in that school as a teenage I got to make my first film, which was pretty unusual. It just was to do with the fact that I was.

was quite troubled as a teenager and the only place that I really felt safe was I got lost in making paintings in the art room and he had a little camera and he said I wanted to try making a film and I made a film and I just loved that. Later when I left college I ended up working in documentaries and having as you say a different life which was much more active and you know involved really in my 20s kind of documentary character affairs, seeing the world, seeing the world in conflict, going to wars and famines and all the rest of it. And, you know, it was a very intense time in my life.

I suppose the answer to your question is that when I saw things where the world was happening in front of your eyes, you know, if I went as a young man as I did to Northern Ireland at the time of the troubles when it was very violent, and you'd see riots and the rest of it, or if I went to the Middle East or, you know, or Central America or wherever, wherever, you know, those sorts of places where there was violence and danger.

The shooting that sort of moment did create a sense that that was what I was meant to do. As those years went along, as I got to be maybe 30, 2930, you know, had lost a marriage and not been a very good father and the rest of it because I'd been travelling for so long, you know. I realised that I wanted to make my own realities, which is what I'd done at school, because I wanted to make movies, which is what I'd always wanted to do,

but never dared to really admit to myself, that the facts of the world weren't going to... I wanted to try and find my own way of telling those stories, you know what I mean? I mean, that became really then a long period of apprenticeship, I guess, and learning to make films and learning the language of dramatic storytelling, you know, on film and all of that. And failing before he succeeded.

Yeah, it was all used together. It sort of made sense, I suppose, when I started to make those kind of films. But it doesn't get you away from the fact that I remember the scene in Chivago where Chivago looks out the window at the marches. coming down the street and they want land bread and peace and there's a brass band children and women

and workers and the rest of it in the snow and you know lean in that classic parallel cutting gives you the Cossacks waiting round the corner and the you know the horse brass is rustling

and the hoof stamping and the swords being unsheed and you know that these two worlds are going to collide violently and they do of course and Javago sees it and he sees at that moment as he watches from the balcony and these two forces collide

he knows the world's changed forever well many years later without ever thinking about it I made a film called Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland which was born out of my experiences of being in Northern Ireland it was years later that I realised that that must have been informed by Jivago must have been

even to this day of news of the world where I mean we talk about these kind of fusing of sensibilities this is arguably and inarguably I think your most classical kind of film you're you're you're operating these classic tropes of the of the western and yet it has the immediacy the topicality the um subtext of all of your works was that was that was that I guess having done this for a while was there confidence that you could kind of abandon some of your bags of tricks some of the things that you kind of relied on I wanted to, definitely. Yeah. In several different ways, actually. I definitely felt after the last film I've made, which was 22 July, you know, I made that film because I was extremely, I felt a great sense of dread about the rise of the violent far right in Europe.

And I think it's a growing problem in Europe, and it's a growing problem in your country too. That was the way that I felt, and Breivik, by the way, the man that the film was in part about, is a patron saint for all those groups. He was much talked of in Charlottesville, genuinely, as he is over here. But I felt that I'm naturally not a pessimistic person, you know. I decided I wanted to make a film that was about where the healing lay.

Definitely that was a conscious thing. This is before News the World going out. I want to make something that is more about where the light is in having made a film about where the darkness is. And then secondly, I felt that I, and this was true, actually a little bit before 22 July. I had wanted to explore a different tempo for films I was making. 22 July was actually quite a lot slower than normal.

And I wanted to do something totally different. At a slower, more classical pace, I wouldn't say, I've said classical, but I definitely would have said, I want to slow right down. And then news of the world came in, Literally, it's just serendipitous, you know, and that's the beauty of filmmaking is you, there are moments when you're alive and you're out there looking for, you know what I mean,

and what is it that really interests me, what is going on in the world? And then they sent the novel, and I read the novel, and I was literally, I mean, I said, oh, I know what this is, I can do this, I know exactly what this is. And this is perfect because it is about a journey towards healing. That is the journey. It is 1870 at a time of bitter division, but it's really today. It's about the struggle for American identity. And by the way, the British one and the Western one.

You know what I mean? It's just America is the anvil, if you like, for Western filmmakers, if I can put it like that. But it's yet, it's a very particular story. It's just about this wandering newsreader, and it's about the tiny gossamer thread that he carries from community to community as he tells his stories from his sack of newspapers

because each story becomes a common experience that pulls a thread to the next community. And it was a Western. And I grew up Westerns as a boy, and I loved Westerns. I never in a million years would I ever have thought I could have got to make one or ever consciously wanted to. But I loved them. I think it was a big part of it looking back was that I'd done that Netflix series,

I think it's called Five Came Back about three. And they had a bunch of directors, I think Spilberg and Coppola and Deltour. And I did one about the five filmmakers who went to the Second World War and were changed. And I did John Ford because I revere, obviously, old filmmakers, I revere John Ford. And of course, because Ford went to war and shot Battle of Midway, which is one of the great pieces of documentary ever made. You know, I knew that. I knew what that sensibility was all about. So I spent a month re-watching all his films, actually. So when News of World came in, which in its essential structure is the searches in reverse. It's not the journey.

to find the girl, it's the journey to bring the girl home. I remember thinking, this is serendipity. It's obviously, this is meant for me. And by the way, it makes for a good double feature. I took the opportunity to watch the searchers right before I watched yours. And, I mean, I understand why any filmmaker embraces this kind of opportunity. The iconography, the way of the Western kind of allows you to kind of lay down the themes you want to get at.

There are a few other genres that allow that. A more classical movie, yeah, for sure. So if you'll indulge me a little bit about the arc of your career a little bit, we talked a little bit about the transition from your earlier life into Bloody Sunday. I had forgotten that it was just right after Bloody Sunday that you moved right into Bourne, which seems like such like a leap in many ways. And I know reading about you, that wasn't something you anticipated working on that kind of a film. And I know everything, you know, I've read a bunch about the Bourne films.

All of them were, you know, they're not easy productions. And certainly you as a first time kind of a filmmaker in that genre, working with Frank Marshall, studio, Matt Damon. Do you remember that as a fraught time? Did you think you were going to make it through that production? It was very odd. I had got to a good place. I'd made a bunch of films before Bloody Sunday,

which were I had a sort of niche in the UK. I could do what I wanted. I tended to make films a bit like that that were exploring my times, my world, the world in action, as I used to call it. And I had tremendous freedom as long as I made them for about $5. But, you know, as long as I made them very, very small, I could make them. And that was wonderful.

And I was very happy. What was strange was that Bloody Sunday, in an odd way, broke out. And then all of a sudden I had the opportunity to make the Bourne movie. I remember they phoned me up and said, would you like to make, you know, what became born supremacy. And I thought, well, yes, because if you don't change, if you don't embrace a new challenge, you never know what you can do. I'd never, ever thought of trying to make a commercial movie in those terms. Never. It wasn't in my, it wasn't part of my ambition, you know. And by the way, nobody would have thought that I'd be a credible candidate for it

in a sort of funny way. And they said, okay, well, look, come out to Los Angeles and come and meet Frank Marshall. So I landed in Los Angeles, which was a place I didn't know hardly at all, and they said, you need to go to Universal Studios at 2 p.m. the next day. So I said, great, okay. And so I booked a taxi, and I got in the taxi. I said, can I go to Universal Studios? And we arrived at like 10 to 2 at Universal Studios theme park. So I get out and I go, where's Universal Studios? The code I was on tier. So I go up to a lot of things and where's Universal Studios on the person on the grill?

I thought I was absolutely different. It took me about 10 minutes to work out that I was at least a half an hour's fast hum from Universal Studio. So you enjoyed the Jaws ride, but you almost lost the job. Oh, my word. I turned into Jason Moore. I ran away there, got there. And I never forget it. I got shown him.

sweating, disheveled. And he said, well, it's great to meet you, but I've got to go in about two minutes. I thought, well, I've definitely lost this job. But anyway, he did, he forgave me. They said, why don't you make it? And do I remember it's fraught? Of course it was fraught.

It was a big commercial movie. I'd never made a movie at that scale. There are particularities to the franchise film-making process, you know, the sense that very often the screenplays are very much not complete, you know, so you're kind of finding the film as you do it. The enormous resources to the good. I was very, very lucky to have Frank because he's a brilliant producer, because he understood me, you know what I mean, in a strange way.

You know, Matt and I left our own devices would be outlandish in some of the things. And he would never say, no, you can't do it. but you'd know that Frank was there to kind of bring it together in some indefinable but clear way, which is what a producer in those movies is there to do, to find the film you want to do, but make sure that you don't drive this incredibly expensive car straight off the road onto the trees. And it was, on the one hand, an insane process,

because franchise film is slightly insane. But I was left with an enduring sense of wonder, if I'm absolutely honest. I'll give you some examples, if you're interesting. I mean, I remember we cut the first version of the film and we tested, and it tested whatever it tested, kind of okay. Not fantastically, but not disaster, but okay. We then did, I think, a bit of reshoot. That's right.

Then we did some reshoots and we did quite a lot more work and then we retested it. and the scores didn't improve. And I remember sitting in this screening with Frank and Dacey Snyder, who was then running Universal. You know, it's high-stake stuff because you're talking about many tens of millions of dollars in those movies.

It's also a franchise movie. It was important for Universal that it worked because, you know, the franchise movies are the machines that allow us all to make all the other films. They, you know, it's important that they were. work for all of us. And I remember feeling the stress in the room. You know, and everybody's left and you're left as a group looking at these scores, you know, where it haven't gone up despite a lot of effort and, you know, seeing them all huddled. Anyway, then we all sat down in the theatre.

And I remember Stacey saying, having talked to Frank, she said, we have not got tonight the credit for the good work we've done, but we're going to keep on. going down this road because I do believe that you will get the credit for this work, but we're not going to change direction. We're doing the right things. We've just not got the credit for it. And I thought, my word, that is courage under fire that. And we changed the end a bit in a good way. Actually, somebody had a very good idea. It was actually George Nolfe. He had a great idea for the end. And that was the end we shot. And we did it like in about two days. We all fluted New York, shut it

the next day it seemed like all happened in like a matter of days. I think it was. And then we retested it and the scores went ping like that. It was a hit movie. And that's you go, that's the romance of movies. Exactly. Nobody says what

a great studio is like. It's too easy to slag them off. You know, oh, they're always trying to stop them. Truth is, these studios have been in business a hundred years. They're not all bad. They're, you know what I mean? Of course, they're money-making machines. They're filmmaking machines.

It's a commercial cinematic universe, but they want great films and great stories. And the Bourne franchise were, they were fun, fine films. You know, I'm not sort of me. I'm just talking about they were collective endeavors by studio and producers and movie stars. And you've got to get together and stick at it and you get a result. And that's taught me lessons. At the end of it, I thought, I like this. It suits me.

Who knew? As any self-respecting film geek, there are a couple of unrealized projects that I will always stick in my craw that I wanted to see from you. One is your interpretation of Watchmen, which I was a graphic novel fan, and I adored that work. Your interpretation, as I understand it, was going to be a bit different. You were going to change the setting. You were not going to stick to the 80s. What was your mission statement on your watchman?

What was, what were you talking about in that film that you wanted to approach? Well, first of all, whatever the vision was, I didn't articulate it clearly about to get moved. That's the lesson there. But in essence, what it was was, and I love the book, or the graphic novel. Look, and I liked Sacks movie, by the way,

which was a very faithful rendition of it. my view was I didn't want to do the faithful adaptation and that may have been by the way a disastrous endeavor and that probably was why I didn't get the movie made I wanted to believe

that these characters lived in the real world and that a lot of what they were thinking and doing was delusions and don't get me wrong when I say oh like the Joker I had the idea first because that's not true at all I thought the Joker was an absolutely brilliant film

But there was something in the Joker that had that quality to it. You know, the Joker was in a real world, and he was filled with delusions. And somewhere the superhero identities were within people's minds and were interior delusions as opposed to actualities. And the idea would have been to find where the join was, if that makes sense. I'm not sure it would have worked and the proof was it didn't because it didn't get made

but I've always thought about that I think that Christopher Nolan did it far, far better than ever I could with Batman because that's what he did with Batman in a funny way. He grounded it, yeah. Perfect place where you could make those characters

live in a world that felt real and yet wasn't real. Well, that's why I was somewhat surprised and maybe you can correct me if this isn't true, but it sounded like a few years back there was a Fox kind of a combo X-Men Fantastic Four project that had been scripted

that supposedly you were attached to. Was that also a grounded kind of superhero take? What was that? They did talk to me about it. I wouldn't say I was attached to. They didn't talk to me about it, and I thought about it. I think in the end,

because I did try with Watchman. I was on that for a good few months, and it felt like, Sometimes when you make a film, it feels like you're in an aeroplane. You get fuelled up and you lumber up the taxiway to the runway. And then you start to put on power and then you're going down the runway to take off. It felt like we started rolling down the runway. I mean, we hadn't got far down the runway.

But it felt like we fueled the plane, lumbered up the taxiway, got to the end, got the go-ahead, and then suddenly it was. So I slightly felt like maybe those moves, maybe somewhere I wasn't. right for those kinds of movies. And this other one, it sounded like you didn't even get the plane fueled up. It sounded like it was just an idea that. I didn't get anything like down the road like I did with Watch. I wouldn't say I would never make one of those movies. I mean, I always think about them, you know.

Well, I do find it curious because I feel like oftentimes the way we think of films nowadays, they're like compartmental eyes where there's like the quote-unquote important films about the subjects that are relevant to us and our humanity. And then there's kind of the empty action blockbuss. And to your credit, you've, again, if there's a theme to this, it's kind of fusing two different worlds and mindsets, you've found a way to kind of fuse those things together when you've operated in that realm. Can you enjoy kind of empty-headed pop entertainment or do you feel like something, even a blockbuster needs something?

I don't call it empty-headed pop entertainment. I mean, I do absolutely, I'm endlessly fascinated by popular culture. I live within popular culture. Anyone who makes commercial movies is inside popular culture because movies are demotic, you know, they're not like novels, they're not like the theatre. I gave a lecture a few years, but the David Lean lecture at BAFTA, and I said, you know, for me, cinema doesn't belong to me, it doesn't belong next to the national theatre as we have in London, you know, or the opera house. It belongs in the gutter alongside, you know, the street hawkers and the rotten fruit from the market and the, you know, and the Essendys newspapers, it belongs.

That's the mulch that keeps it alive and its audience is us, people who go to the movie house because it's the storytelling that speaks to them and it's urgent and contemporary and popular and it doesn't talk down to them. It expresses in themes and in characters, its active style. It articulates popular culture as they understand it, as they experience it. And I think all the films I've made, I hope, although they may stretch the boundaries one way or another, have been within that culture.

You know, it's important to me that my films are seen by people. You know, news of the world is he's a man who knows his audience. audience from the very first frame of that film when he gets up, Good Even, Wichita Falls. You know, it's good to be back here again. I thought about the movies a lot, funnily enough, making news of the world, because in my mind,

kid, although he lives in this pre-newspapers, pre-cinema, pre-radio, you know, pre-everything else, social media, he's a storyteller. And where did the movies begin? The movies began because they transported people away from hard lives. A movie theatres grew up because they were warm places full of bright lights

which transported people from their hard lives. When you go and see a movie, you want to be entertained. Be transported. You want to be shown people who aren't like you at all or people who are very much like you. That's the beauty of it. And somewhere you've got to try now, which is my particular little bit of it all, I try and find ones that, stories I'm

talking about, that reflect how I see the world. You know, in the end, every filmmaker's got, you've got to make the film for yourself, ultimately. Because each film is like an extended conversation. It's like, you know, each film begets, another film begins the next film. And

whether the films are you know, about Bloody Sunday, or Jason Bourne on the run, or Captain Kid, the Newsreader in Texas, I want them to feel like, they're reflecting the world we're living. And a broad audience will see that themselves, you know, think of news of the world as, I mean, what is it? It's actually, I think, a Christmas family movie. That's honestly what I think of it as. It's my version of it. Yeah, I'm never going to be able to,

you wouldn't expect me to do a sort of cutesy sort of Christmas movie, you know what I mean, in that way. But it is a broad Christmas movie. It's filled with heart and soul, I think. It's got a beautiful, one of the exquisite score from James Newton had, and it's got Tom and a little girl and a journey towards redemption. It's got those elements in it set in the grand western tradition and landscape. I think you watch it and you go, this world of bitter division that's about to be transformed by technology, as 1870 was, as he says, the railroads coming, the telegraphs coming. It's about to be swept away all that division by the protein power of technology. And that's, I think, what will happen to our world. It's already happening

with the vaccine, isn't it? The vaccine's going to rescue us, but AI is going to rescue the lack of growth in Western economies. Biotech's going to rescue the lack of growth in Western economies. It's going to start to unpick this division. I believe, that's my belief. I don't but that's my belief. In our waning minutes, I want to pick at one quote that I heard you say in a previous conversation

that I found especially interesting and that you said essentially that a film does not live in the screenplay and that, not to discredit the importance of the writing, but at some point you realized that there's something in between the words,

something that you can only discover on set. Can you elaborate on what your thinking was and when you hit upon that? I'll remember precisely. I made a film called The One That Got Away quite a few years before Bloody Sunday. And it was about a special forces patrol. It was based on a true story, actually, of a special port-for-six-man unit that was dropped into Iraq in the first Gulf War, Gulf One. And their mission was to find where the Scud missiles in this part of Iraq were being fired from.

They knew they had mobile scud missiles, you know. And the six-man patrol was dropped in, and everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. And they were dropped in the wrong place. They didn't have the right equipment, and they got very quickly discovered, and a number of them were killed. They were, you know, a number of them was shot and killed,

and they had to get out. They were all caught except for one guy, who went for the Syrian border, actually. was the one that got away. He was the one who survived this. And his journey, Odyssey, really was to sort of see the truth about what was going on there. Anyway, the screenplay I wrote felt all right to me. I was quite pleased with it. I had written four or five by then. I felt I was sort of I was quite pleased of that and feeling quite confident. And we actually shot it in South Africa and near up on the Namibian border. When I started to make it, it sort of fell apart in my hands.

couldn't understand why what it was and there was a scene at night where the six-man patrol were walking after they'd been dropped and they were lost and there was a sort of scene where they had to decide which way to go you know and I was shooting this thing in the, of course it's the desert at night impossible to light and we broke for lunch at about three in the morning And I was so upset because it just, it didn't feel real to me, didn't feel like I believed it. And I remember, there was a truck down, I remember banging my head on the truck. In frustration, almost in tears, actually, kind of thinking, it was beyond my experience as a filmmaker. I was trying to find something that I didn't have the vocabulary to find or the means to find.

I was trapped inside my own script. I knew it wasn't right and I just couldn't work out what it was, how to do it. A little bit later I made a film called The Murder of Stephen Arts, which was about a terrible race murder in London of a young teenager, not far from where I grew up.

I resolved to do it differently and I realised that I had to stand outside my screenplay. I had to, that films are made afresh It's beyond the screenplay. The screenplay gets you there. It's always with you. It's the guide. It's got lots of things in it.

But you have to dare to go beyond it. And the people who take you beyond it are your actors. They don't want to retract in it either. You have to dare to set the mission to go beyond it. And that's where a movie is fair. That's where you find a film. It's not that you don't shoot the script. not, the script isn't there, it's that you're in a zone beyond it where the truth lies and the

truth can be to allow the actor not to say those words. Right. Or maybe to say different words or to not have any words at all, to explore things in the making of the film that you've never thought of, that only you can only think of as a company of actors. And somewhere you then get, it's like a coat, instead of it feels starched and suddenly it feels lived in. It's suddenly it belongs to you. It's yours. It's what you want to make it. That was the making of me.

And I guess it's called finding your voice, really. Well, you've come a long way since I'm banging your head against a truck in Namibia, clearly. As you can tell, I'm such an admirer of your work. I mean, we didn't even scratch the surface. I mean, United 93 also, for what it's worth, is just one of the most remarkable pieces of filmmaking in the last 20 years. So we'll save that for another conversation, another time.

Congratulations on News of the World, Sir. Thank you so much for being generous with your time. And yeah, a real pleasure, sir, thank you. See you later. And so ends another edition of Happy, Sad, Confused. Remember to review, rate, and subscribe to this show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm a big podcast person.

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