Many directors have attempted to represent the invasion of Iraq on film. But Paul Greengrass's Green Zone is something special, Khalid Abdalla, who stars in the film, tells David Tresilian In the seven years since the US-led invasion of Iraq, many US and international directors have tried to capture the invasion and subsequent occupation of the country on film, some of them producing work of real distinction. Independent films, such as the 2007 British film Battle of Haditha and Brian de Palma's Redacted, also released in 2007, have done much to bring the reality of the conflict to international audiences. Arab and Egyptian films, such as Mohamed Amin's Laylet suqout Baghdad (The Night Baghdad Fell), released in 2005, Khaled Youssef's Heen Maysara (2007) and Adel Adib's Baby Doll Night (2008), have also examined events in Iraq, though these have been denied significant distribution outside the Arab world. This year has seen a renewed focus on the war in Iraq, this time by Hollywood directors making big-budget films. Kathryn's Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, the story of a group of US army explosives experts working in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, won six awards at the 2010 Academy Awards in Los Angeles, including Best Picture and Best Director. British director Paul Greengrass, perhaps best known for the action films The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), has recently released Green Zone, a film set during the immediate aftermath of the 2003 US-led invasion. While Bigelow's name may be unfamiliar to international audiences, though as a former wife of blockbuster director James Cameron she surely counts as Hollywood royalty, Greengrass is well known for a string of independent and politically engaged films, including The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, a 1999 made-for-television film about a racist murder in London, and Bloody Sunday (2002), a dramatization of events in Northern Ireland in January 1972 when British troops fired on unarmed protestors, killing 13. In 2006, Greengrass released United 93, his second film for Universal Pictures and the first of his political films to be given wide international distribution. This film is a real-time account of events on United Flight 93, one of the aircraft hijacked on 11 September 2001 and the only one that did not reach its destination, the plane crashing into a field in Pennsylvania apparently as a result of the hijackers being overpowered by its passengers and crew. At the same time, Greengrass was making the Bourne films, both of them starring Hollywood actor Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, an ex-CIA operative suffering from a crisis of identity and loosely based on a character in thrillers by the American author Robert Ludlum. As well as raising issues about the representation of the Iraq war in mainstream American film, his new film Green Zone brings long-standing issues about the shape of Greengrass's own directorial career into focus, particularly the relationship between the politically engaged independent films and his work on the action-thriller Bourne franchise, aspects of the latter spilling over into his latest film. Set in the period immediately following the 2003 US-led invasion when American forces were establishing themselves in Baghdad and leading the hunt for the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that had served as the justification for the war, Green Zone stars Damon in the role of Warrant Officer Roy Miller who is charged with investigating locations around Iraq in the search for WMDs. Miller does not find any, and following an encounter with an Iraqi interpreter, nicknamed "Freddy" in the film and played by Anglo-Egyptian actor Khalid Abdalla, his suspicions are aroused. Could it be that the whole WMDs story was cooked up in order to justify an illegal American invasion? In press interviews given since the film's US and UK release in March, Greengrass has said that Miller's slow realisation that he has been had -- that there are no WMDs and the authorities in Washington knew it all along -- is designed to echo what may be the parallel suspicions of the film's audiences, as well as to pick up on Damon's previous performances as Jason Bourne, another individual who suspects that he is being manipulated by forces beyond his control. "Many people, broadly speaking, believed what they were told [about the dangers of WMDs in Iraq], so the Matt Damon character is us," Greengrass told the British magazine Time Out. "We can have the Chilcot Enquiry [a UK enquiry into the 2003 Iraq war] and this, that and the other, but in the end we know you got us into this thing and it wasn't wise and you trimmed and rigged and did whatever you did." "It's easy to say that all big films in Hollywood are shit," Greengrass told the interviewer, "but there are certain things you can do in that beating furnace of popular culture," including "distil[ing] what's going on and represent[ing] it in ways that speak to a broad audience." The importance of Green Zone, he suggested, was that it was an attempt to use the conventions of mainstream action film, honed to perfection in the popular Bourne films, "a preposterous story about an amnesiac assassin," to distill the "fear and paranoia and mistrust out there, particularly among young people." "In 2004, it was obvious that two events were driving our world: 9/11 and the war in Iraq... I wanted to engage with that directly. I thought it would be one film, but it turned out to be two: United 93 and Green Zone. As United 93 was the way to get to the heart of 9/11, the hunt for WMDs felt like the way to get to the heart of what was happening in Iraq. How did they get it so wrong?" Both United 93 and Green Zone feature Khalid Abdalla in Arab roles, Ziad Jarrah, one of the hijackers, in United 93, and Miller's Iraqi interpreter Freddy in Green Zone. Abdalla, born in Britain in 1980 of Egyptian parents, is probably best known for his performance as Amir, the lead character in The Kite Runner, Marc Foster's 2008 adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel about Afghanistan under the Taliban. In conversation with the Weekly, Abdalla expressed his admiration for Greengrass's work and his pleasure at working with Matt Damon on Green Zone. The film is loosely based on Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a 2006 book by US journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran that describes the surreal state of affairs reigning in the US compound in Baghdad, the so-called Green Zone, following the 2003 invasion. As the rest of the country descended into chaos, Coalition Provisional Authority officials holed up in this "Versailles on the Tigris," as Chandrasekaran puts it, enjoyed all the comforts of home: "Fritos, Cheetos, Dr Pepper, protein powder, Operation Iraqi Freedom T-shirts, and pop-music." The real Baghdad -- "the checkpoints, the bombed-out buildings, the paralyzing traffic jams -- could have been a world away," Chandrasekaran writes, remembering a period when he was based in Baghdad as a reporter for the Washington Post. "The fear on the faces of American troops was rarely seen by the denizens of the palace. The acrid smoke of a detonated car bomb didn't fill the air. The sub-Saharan privation and Wild West lawlessness that gripped one of the world's most ancient cities swirled around the walls, but on the inside the calm sterility of an American subdivision prevailed." In the film, Abdalla's character works with the US forces as an interpreter, and, like many Arab actors called upon to play Arab characters in western films where the danger of stereotyping is always present, Abdalla says that he felt a special responsibility in accepting the role, though one that was eased by working with Greengrass for the second time and for the first time with scriptwriter Brian Helgeland. "Paul's work is incredibly unorthodox by Hollywood standards, and he's allowed to work in ways that few directors in his position are," Abdalla said, particularly in the way he uses improvisation. "Whatever he does, he's always politically attuned and morally searching, and whenever I work with Paul, for the second time in Green Zone after working with him earlier on United 93, there is always this huge sense of responsibility, given the political importance of the material, and the sense that this is not going to be easy, that in working with him I am going to be taken to the very edges of my comfort zone." "Brian Helgeland had created a wonderful and lovable character who, it was clear, was going to be a great challenge and joy to play -- the limp, the big heart, the loud voice, the sense of humour. But more than that, with Paul I knew that I was going to be part of a committed and sensitive attempt to engage with a political event of huge significance, and to be part of a film that might even have current implications: we started making the film under the Bush administration, and completed shooting as Obama was coming to power. You don't get much better than that as an actor." One of the features of Greengrass's way of working, Abdalla explains, is that he is always interested in gathering others' input, making filmmaking into a collaborative process in which "the moral consequences of what you're doing, the moral consequences of the work and the moral consequences of decisions we would make about the characters in the film, and what happened to them, are very much with you all the time." For Abdalla, one of the main differences between working on United 93 and on Green Zone was that "in the later film we had a script." In United 93, "we started out without a script," he says, "but the film was very finely researched and the event was our script. We had a clear human drama to explore -- we were exploring the architecture of the event and the human drama that existed within it -- which we did in sometimes very demanding ways. Takes averaged some 25 minutes long where ordinarily a take will rarely be more than three to five minutes, and one take was an hour and 15 minutes." All this meant that there was never any sense of routine, of learning lines and then delivering them to camera. On the contrary, the idea was always to "explore the meaning of the material, making the experience a matter of raw nerves but also a tremendously enriching one in which you really have to think about the significance of what you're doing." In Green Zone there was a script, focusing on the Bourne-like character Roy Miller played by Damon. It is an "action parable," says Abdalla, quoting a friend. "When you're making a film of this size, a mainstream thriller, it becomes a very different kind of beast from a low-budget film. There is a hugely important balancing act between the entertainment values of the film and the narrative of one man's journey that runs through the film and the larger moral and political questions about war and invasion." "Paul is immensely interested in the world and in the politics of mainstream opinion, and where better to talk to the mainstream than through cinema?" Of his own character in the film, Abdalla comments that Freddy represents "ordinary people, the people who really suffer, the people who are caught up in events outside their control. This was part of my responsibility in the film -- to try to represent events from the perspective of the suffering of ordinary Iraqis, showing that in other circumstances, in the absence of war and invasion, Freddy and Miller could have been friends." What attracted Abdalla to the role was precisely the possibility he saw in it for moral exploration. Freddy could easily have come off as "a shrill, adversarial character, but what we were looking for were other possibilities, other relationships, and this is how we discussed it on set. People like Freddy are the people whose voices and opinions are rarely heard. But Freddy isn't quite an everyman. He's a patriot with a big heart who is right off the street, but his particular journey forces him into the world of actions and decisions of serious consequences, which eventually he can't continue with and refuses. Through it all, though, his heart stays firmly where it was." Despite pressures to accept roles that present the Arab world in a stereotyped way, Abdalla says that "I will not play a stereotype or accept a role in a film that seems to me to be going in the direction of presenting the Arab world in a stereotypical way. I am very interested in parts and films that try to make people look at things differently. Freddy could have been made into a 'funny local guy' who is laughed at but not listened to. Instead, he is one of the moral hooks of the film, so much so that the hero of the film changes his views because of him." "All this was very important to me. Of course, had Green Zone been an Iraqi film then probably it would have taken an Iraqi as the hero. But Green Zone, as a mainstream international picture, has the kind of reach that an Iraqi film at the moment probably would not have, and that is a reach that one can work with to help change people's ways of seeing." "I remember that when I went to audition for the part of the Arab hijacker in United 93 Paul said to me, 'do you think it's possible to do this film correctly?' If you're an Arab actor working in the western industry, you're going to feel a responsibility not to reinforce stereotypes. You're going to be offered roles or sent scripts that you find offensive. You have to make choices. Hollywood has come some way in moving beyond the cliches in recent years, but there is still a long way to go." At present based in Cairo, where he is making an Arabic-language film, In the Last Days of the City, set in Cairo, Baghdad and Beirut, Abdalla says that he is "carrying over and putting into effect a lot of what I have learnt from working with Paul. Working with Paul has also given me strength of mind and spirit to understand the advantages and opportunities that exist in difficult and adverse circumstances when you're making a film. That's a very important lesson." Co- produced by Abdalla with the film's director Tamer El-Said, the film is shot largely in the city streets and breathes a very real setting. "Of course, for In the Last Days of the City we don't have the budget of something like Green Zone -- we're shooting the film in the city streets, but unlike in Green Zone, where we took over whole sections of Rabat in Morocco and created events to suit the plot of the film, for an independent film we have to work more with what the city gives us." In the Last Days of the City will have Arab and it is hoped international distribution, Abdalla says, though he is aware that as an Arabic-language film it will probably not reach mainstream international audiences. However, that, he says, is not really the film's challenge. Instead, Abdalla picks up on Greengrass's view that "there are certain things you can do in the beating furnace of popular culture." Just as importantly, he says, "there are certain things you have to do outside that beating furnace to stoke the fire and keep it hot. The parameters of public debate and experience have to be as wide as possible. The voice of the street in the Arab world is barely heard at all in international cinema, and with In the Last Days of the City we're trying to do our bit in rectifying that as well as we can. Perhaps Green Zone and the other films I've done will help our reach. Perhaps Green Zone and others like it will have piqued the interest of an audience that it's now time for films in the Middle East to capitalise on. We just have to make a very good film, which is what we're trying to do with everything we've got." Of working on Green Zone Abdalla particularly remembers the noise of the weaponry used to simulate fighing in the film, the battle scenes, and the cooperative atmosphere on set. Many Iraqis were involved in making the film, as well as soldiers who had fought in Iraq. What was it like to act with Damon? "He's an incredibly generous person. He's also very well read, well informed and intelligent. He's very hard working and takes a genuine interest in the meaning of what he's doing and is very smart with it. Working with him, it's very clear why he won an Oscar for scriptwriting. He's also funny, charismatic, full of stories and immensely supportive to people around him and those acting with him." "There's nothing star-like and unapproachable about him -- though he is a real star and has that aura to him. He's just, quite simply, a very good, warm, down-to-earth guy who happens to be one of the most important actors of his generation. It's very impressive, and he's going to start directing soon. It's going to be exciting. Clint Eastwood Mark 2."
