Paul 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. 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

#5. 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

#6. I'm friends with Carla Olsen and she's doing a lot of producing these days. She's getting quite a little collection of records that she's produced. She's real busy.

Kathy Valentine

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

Paul Greengrass

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

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

Paul Greengrass

#12. 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

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

Paul Greengrass

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

Paul Greengrass

#15. Sirs, if you are listening and are not acting, it is like a man who is always tilling but never sowing. It is better not to listen to a truth than to listen without acting, for then it becomes a poison.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#16. 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

#17. Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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

Paul Greengrass

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. Those who are ready to sacrifice freedom for security ultimately will lose both.

Abraham Lincoln

#22. Scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of age, when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets, according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself.

Benjamin Franklin