IF YOU were to switch television channels and happen upon a Paul Greengrass film, you could tell within a few seconds that it was directed by him. Mr Greengrass, 60, made the hugely acclaimed “Captain Phillips”, “United 93” and “Green Zone”, but he is better known for “The Bourne Supremacy” (2004) and “The Bourne Ultimatum” (2007), a pair of spy thrillers, starring Matt Damon, which reinvented the Hollywood action sequence. A typical Greengrass chase scene or fight scene—and there isn’t much else in the Bourne films—is a hurly-burly of bone-jarring impacts, dynamic hand-held camerawork and stroboscopically fast editing. They create the breathtaking illusion that they were shot on-the-hoof in real locations, and that the camera operators were only just keeping up with the chaos exploding around them.
