Greengrass Quotes

#1. I'm not really a director for hire. You read these scripts and go, 'This is a really great script, but Paul Greengrass would make this so much better than me.' I usually say, 'I know who would be good for this. It's not me.'

Stephen Daldry

#2. There's good art and there's bad art. A lot of action films are bad art, but Paul Greengrass showed us with the Bourne films that it's possible to make an action film with a political, social conscience.

Joe Wright

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

Paul Greengrass

#4. Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors, and their toes are going to curl up.

Jim Crace

#5. 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.

Paul Greengrass

#6. In the end, it's acting, it's not real. But every director will tell you that you have to create conditions that create tension, because tension is what makes drama feel real.

Paul Greengrass

#7. He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent.

Orson Scott Card

#8. The people who went on that airplane were unexceptional.

Paul Greengrass

#9. Why are people saying it's too soon? Like the people on that flight, we need to agree about what to do about terrorism. And I think we need to have that conversation now.

Paul Greengrass

#10. 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.

Paul Greengrass

#11. You face challenges and you have to make choices. You're weighing the necessary responsibility toward reality and authenticity and of course the need to create a compressed drama over two hours.

Paul Greengrass

#12. Remembering is painful, it's difficult, but it can be inspiring and it can give wisdom.

Paul Greengrass

#13. 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.

Paul Greengrass

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

Paul Greengrass

#15. Programmed by quanta, physics gave rise first to chemistry and then to life; programmed by mutations and recombination, life gave rise to Shakespeare; programmed by experience and imagination, Shakespeare gave rise to Hamlet.

Seth Lloyd

#16. It would be wryly interesting if in human history the cultivation of marijuana led generally to the invention of agriculture, and thereby to civilization.

Carl Sagan

#17. Dance is movement, and movement is life.

Ludmilla Chiriaeff

#18. I can write all the way through the morning, when my mind is clear, and there are no distractions.

Karen Thompson Walker

#19. Andromeda. It means beautiful.

Priscilla Glenn

#20. I always wanted to be a 'Blue Peter' presenter when I grew up!

Sophie Aldred

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

Paul Greengrass

#22. Well, you mind your manners and don't raise your voice. You know what your mamma used to say. Any book is a Good Book, and wherever they keep the Good Book safe is also the House a the Lord. Like I said, my mom would have never made it in the DAR.

Kami Garcia

#23. There will be days that you don't want to dress up and if you have some decent looking athletic wear, you can give the illusion that you've just been working out, as opposed to giving up on life.

Big Mama

#24. Europe's enduring localism, which had been the weak link in Christendom, became in turn the Achilles heel of the dynastic state.

Mark Greengrass

#25. 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.

Paul Greengrass

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

Paul Greengrass

#27. There's a film you write, there's a film you shoot, and there's a film that you cut - and they're all different.

Paul Greengrass

#28. 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.

Paul Greengrass

#29. It seems so much easier in these days to live morally than to live beautifully. Lots of us manage to exist for years without ever sinning against society, but we sin against loveliness every hour of the day.

Evelyn Underhill