Paul Greengrass quotes:

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.

The people who went on that airplane were unexceptional.

The actor's job is to divine and embody the truth, and find it.

You're trying to create a screenplay and your screenplay is there to give you a structure, rigidity, situational awareness, who the characters are, what do they want, what's the shape of the thing.

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

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. The actor's job is to divine and embody the truth, and find it.

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.

I always try and bring screenplay, shooting and editing into a sort of symbiotic - as close into alignment as you possibly can get them, consistent, obviously, with the resources that you've got and the time you've got available.

I think when you think of my films, I think hopefully you think of an extreme sort of real unfolding, real-time, performed, feeling semi-improvised, you know what I mean, all that.

Most of the films that I've written, made in my life, I've written. Not all, but most I would say.

That's one of the central challenges we face - how to stay true to events and compress the fundamentals.

There's a film you write, there's a film you shoot, and there's a film that you cut - and they're all different.

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.

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.

You face challenges and you have to make choices. You're weighing the necessary responsibility toward reality and authenticity and of course the need to create a compressed drama over two hours.

You sort of can't talk about the post production unless you talk about what comes first.