Paul Greengrass

Speaking personally as a filmmaker, I think encoded in Bond are a series of values about Britain, about the world, about masculinity, about power, about the empire that I don't share. Quite the reverse. Whereas in Bourne, I think encoded is much more scepticism. There's an us and a them, and Bourne is an us, whereas Bond is working for them.

Tom Hanks has built his career playing ordinary men.

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

I'd always suspected my face wouldn't fit in drama departments. And it never did!

Studio people are bright. Empowering. They don't want to have to interfere creatively. That's their horror story, too.

My films express me, my sense of rhythm, my sense of impact, my sense of kinetic energy. I like films to move, but I like also clear storytelling and characters, and most of all, I like authentic emotion.

Directing is all tied up with childhood loneliness. It's such an odd thing to end up doing.

Action is only really compelling when it reveals character - character revealed through action, and not action for its own sake.

The people who went on that airplane were unexceptional.

I just don't get on with institutions. I need simple relationships with people who believe in me.

Acting is many things, and one is an exercise of will. In any given scene, you're trying to find where the drama and conflict is and then deploy the actors to play at that point of conflict with precision, control, and complete will.

It's no good in a scene to have one actor lie down because the scene says it's the other actor's moment. Each actor has to believe that with extra will, the outcome of a scene can be different. An actor can win the scene if he exerts the most powerful will in that moment.

I always tell young film-makers, 'Find the song that only you can sing.' It doesn't just come to you. It's trial and error and disappointment before you find, slowly but surely, the confidence to express your film-making identity.

The most important thing as a filmmaker, the hardest journey you'll have, is to find your point of view.

Making movies is both entirely ludicrous and incredibly hard. It's a preposterous way to spend your time. You give up a lot for the privilege of doing it, and one of the things you get are relationships of immense trust that you see forged in situations of immense stress.

With a franchise movie, it's got to turn the wheels of the industry, and the studio has to have them. So you start with a release date. They say we're going to make a new 'Bourne' film, and it comes out summer of X. Then they start on a script, and invariably, the script is not ready in time.

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.

Making a film, every film, is a big gamble, large or small. The more that you do it, the more you're aware of that.

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.

It's a circus life, the movies. It's a lot of travelling, a lot of antisocial hours; there's a lot of it that's about escaping from life.

To make a film is eighteen months of your life. It's seven days a week. It's twenty hours a day.

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.

What attracts me to Bourne's world is that is a real world, and I think I'm most comfortable there. But I come to a Bourne movie to have fun as a filmmaker, to strut my stuff, and that's part of the fun of franchise filmmaking.

In my little imperfect way, what I'm trying to do is understand the world. As a filmmaker, you realize as you get older that each film is part of a dialogue you're having with yourself. That started when I was working in documentaries. And in a way, I've never deviated from it.

I don't want to feel what I'm creating on film has an outcome that is preordained. I don't think of the world as a place with a divinity that shapes our end. What you try to do with film is create, as far as you possibly can, an unfolding present - a theatre in which an outcome happens and is tested.

Very few people do bad things because they're bad. They generally do bad things because they think they're the right thing to do, but they're misplaced.