Paul Greengrass Quotations

Acting is many things. Acting is playing lines, of course, but it's much more profound than that. Acting is truth-telling, and trying to find the truth in a human situation, which will be sketched out by a screenwriter with all the skill that a screenwriter can do; but in the end, that's just the map of the journey. The actor's job is to divine and embody the truth, and find it.

That's one of the central challenges we face - how to stay true to events and compress the fundamentals.

The actor's job is to divine and embody the truth, and find it.

All directors make films in individual ways. But the classical kind of view of filmmaking is that you have a script and it's very linear.

There's a script, then you're going to shoot the script and then you cut that and then that's the end of the film. And that's never really been how I've seen it.

Most of the films that I've written, made in my life, I've written. Not all, but most I would say.

You're trying to create a screenplay and your screenplay is there to give you a structure, rigidity, situational awareness, who the characters are, what do they want, what's the shape of the thing.

I think when you think of my films, I think hopefully you think of an extreme sort of real unfolding, real-time, performed, feeling semi-improvised, you know what I mean, all that.

I always try and bring screenplay, shooting and editing into a sort of symbiotic - as close into alignment as you possibly can get them, consistent, obviously, with the resources that you've got and the time you've got available.

You sort of can't talk about the post production unless you talk about what comes first.