Wow. This looks awesome. I replied to one of our reader's comments earlier today, someone who expressed hesitation about Matt Damon potentially being cast in the Coen brothers' planned adaptation of "True Grit," a Western. I responded with the opinion that Damon is a fantastic talent, that he possesses the rare ability to fully inhabit the characters he portrays. I used to be iffy about the "Bourne" movies, but have since come around in a big way. So you can imagine how exciting "Green Zone" is, since it reunites Damon with "Bourne" director Paul Greengrass.

You're on board now, right? Looks like pretty compelling stuff. Action-packed, topical, Damon in action hero mode, Greengrass in blockbuster mode. March 12, 2010 is suddenly a long way away.

Even as I was in the act of writing a recent article about Paul Greengrass’s new film “Green Zone,” I couldn’t help but call bs on myself. After all the quote at the heart of the article was from film co-star Jason Isaacs, who told MTV News that the flick didn’t really use a script, that Greengrass changed his direction every take, that the bulk of the movie was made up of a sort of guerilla style, high-octane game of improv.

That couldn’t possibly be right, could it?

“Yes I would say that Jason nailed it pretty nicely there,” “Green Zone” Greg Kinnear said of Isaac’s observations, which included lines like “[Paul] just throws you into the deep end.” Read more...

Paul Greengrass’s newest film has a script credited to Academy Award-winning writer Brian Helgeland and Greengrass himself. Yeah, big whoop - reading it will give you absolutely no idea about the lines in the final film, Jason Isaacs laughed.

“There’s a script but that’s no more than a start for improvisation. There’s no blocking. There’s no continuity,” he said. “It changes every single time. [Paul] just throws you into the deep end. He creates what feels like chaos but is actually far from it. The whole thing is live organic storytelling. As an actor it pulls the rug out from under you.”

“Green Zone,” formerly “Imperial Life in Emerald City,” is a critical look at the US reconstruction in Iraq, particularly in Bagdad, starring Matt Damon as a CIA officer in search for weapons of mass destruction. Read more...