Levin sums up their motivation: "Paul and Brian wanted to incorporate the world of the Green Zone and the hunt for weapons of mass destruction into a thriller. We knew this source material was just what we needed."
As the project developed, Greengrass understood it would be the perfect blend for his and his often-star’s sensibilities. He offers: "When Matt and I finished The Bourne Ultimatum, we sat down to discuss our next project.
"It was obvious that the most dangerous place in the whole of the world at that point was Baghdad. And it was just as obvious to us that the challenge was whether we could make an authentic and believable thriller there.
"Thrillers are in a language audiences understand," Greengrass says. "People come to the cinema to be taken places that only cinema can take them. They can be fantastical places of the imagination, or the compelling real-life environments that we see on television news. Cinema can take you there in a way that the news simply cannot.
"For both Matt and me, our creative mission was ‘Can we create a film that’s every bit as compelling, filled with action, exciting, mysterious, and a privileged inside view to a secret world as the Bourne films, but can we do it in that extreme environment of downtown Baghdad in those desperate weeks immediately after the invasion?’ I’m confident the audiences will say, ‘Yes, they can.’"
With Green Zone, Greengrass worked with Helgeland to weave a dramatic story set against a time period of historical events. Their mission: Bring audiences across the exotic deserts of Iraq, with a view from the front seat of Roy Miller’s Humvee.
That landscape also includes sequestered chambers of the Republican Palace, where the U.S.-led provisional government aimed to put the country back together again, as well as the shadowy streets where operatives hunted down the men deemed Iraq’s 'Most Wanted.'
Helgeland imagined a screenplay in which a WMD hunter comes to Iraq with one objective: to find weapons and save lives. Loyal to his mission and team, Miller sets out to find those responsible for those creating and potentially detonating WMDs. His end game?
To bring them in and guarantee that justice is served. Miller is told that a source with the code name of Magellan met with U.S. officials prior to the war and guaranteed that weapons actually exist, and Hussein was ready to deploy them on his own people and any usurpers. What Miller is finding, however, does not add up.
The screenwriter developed a story in which his protagonist begins to question the intel behind this list of potential weapons locations: the warrant officer finds that site after site yields nothing.
Miller receives no answers through official channels, but off-the-record encounters with a veteran CIA operative, an Iraqi civilian and a journalist point him toward the elusive source Magellan and lead him into conflict with a civilian Defense Department intelligence head, as well as a Special Forces officer and a shadowy group of formerly influential Iraqis with conflicting agendas.
Green Zone is out now.
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