PAUL GREENGRASS

The people who went on that airplane were unexceptional.

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.

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

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.

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.

Some filmmakers are more eclectic than others. I'm not one of those! I'm interested in what I'm interested in, which is films about the world, about what's going on. I started in TV documentaries with 'World in Action,' and those interests feed into the films I make now.

I am interested in seeing if you can create on film pieces that feel contemporary and urgent.

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.

I spent my 20s making film after film, often in very adverse conditions. You'd fly back from somewhere - Beirut, the Falklands, South Africa - on Saturday, and you'd have 24 hours to cut your film, and it would go out on Monday night.

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.

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

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.

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.

With the dramatic canvas, I found you could still operate with the documentarist's observational eye.

No one person is the author of a Bourne film. The truth is it's a coalition of people who share the same vision for Bourne and his world, and we... its remarkably collaborative and collective.

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.

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.

Deep down, all directors feel like frauds - because it's built into the nature of the job. You're the jack of all trades and the master of none. The cameraman knows the camera, the sound man knows the sound equipment - and you? You can't do anything: You can't do the acting, you can't dress the set, you don't record the sound or shoot the images.

The one mistake you must never make is to agree to make a film or sign on to film that you don't believe in. Most importantly because it's unfair on that. It's not about you; it's just not fair on that project because you're doing it a profound disservice because you're not serving it - you're uncommitted, ultimately.

I think there's something about a character facing the huge problems and challenges of the contemporary world and meeting them with - head on with courage, allowing for darkness and mistake, but ultimately always moral. That's incredibly, incredibly inspiring, and that's honestly what I think.

Acting is many things. Acting is playing lines, of course, but it's much more profound than that. Acting is truth-telling and trying to find the truth in a human situation, which will be sketched out by a screenwriter with all the skill that a screenwriter can do; but in the end, that's just the map of the journey.

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

When you think of the Cold War, there are various places where you imagine espionage. Espionage crossroads of the Cold War bring you to the backstreets of Berlin, or Vienna.

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

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.