Whether shooting ‘The Bourne Supremacy’ or ‘Bloody Sunday’ Greengrass’s work always bears his

Whether shooting ‘The Bourne Supremacy’ or ‘Bloody Sunday’, Greengrass’s work always bears his stamp – a hand-held vision that makes the action viscerally real.It is a v?t?tyle he first pioneered as an amateur auteur in the art room of his secondary school, with an old super 8 camera, a handful of dolls, and a Hammer-Horror storyline.After studying at Cambridge University, Greengrass’s career took off as a director on the ITV current affairs flagship, ‘World in Action’ – a decade that he would later describe as “a festival of puerile self-importance, intense paranoia, fiddled expenses and brilliant creativity.”From early days on WIA, Greengrass went on to court a little infamy, as he co-wrote Peter Wright’s 1985 MI5 tell-all ‘Spycatcher’.Drama followed – directing the SAS story, ‘The One that Got Away’, and a fictional tale of football bungs, ‘The Fix’.'The Murder of Stephen Lawrence’ in 1999, the 2002 docudrama ‘Bloody Sunday’, winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, and ‘Omagh’ in 2004, gained him worldwide respect.His association with the Bourne franchise (he is directing the forthcoming The Bourne Ultimatum) has lent him serious box-office credentials, but his skills have not relinquished the non-fiction genre that made his name. The film is about heroism on a day that was otherwise about only death and hatred. For that reason, the US, a desperately patriotic nation, may embrace this film in huge numbers, even though the watching of it will be ghastly.English director who took America’s nightmareThe streets of Cheam in Surrey are far from mean. “To be honest, I think the chaos was even more than depicted in the film,” noted Jim Bohlaber, an air traffic controller in New York that day who was in the audience on Tuesday.But Greengrass made the fate of United 93 his focus for a good reason. When the passengers mutinyed and tried to retake the controls, it is not for sure that the lives of people on the ground – the film speculates that the plane’s target was the Capitol in Washington DC – were in their minds. Anyone’s first instinct would be to save themself.But his first theme, as De Niro said, is human bravery and courage.

Much of the film recalls the mayhem on the ground, in the air traffic and military command centres. And the impression, more than ever, is left of a national security bureaucracy that responded sclerotically to the crisis that burst forth over a single September morning. “This is about a group of people fighting to save their lives and the save the lives of people on the ground.”Greengrass observes more than just the events on that aircraft. For Candyce Hoagland, the aunt of one passenger, Mark Bingham, it had been “excruciating”. She had stayed near the exits but was proud she had left the theatre only once to compose herself.

“It’s not too soon,” she said with a clear voice.That was also the conclusion of Mark Bingham’s mother, Alice Hoagland. “The story needs to be told, because it is about heroism juxtaposed with evil,” she said, waiting outside for a bus to take her and other family members to a reception and dinner at the nearby Four Seasons restaurant. It helps also that he and Universal, the distributor, have pledged to donate 10 per cent of the opening weekend’s box office to the building of the memorial, when that finally happens.Thus, though their eyes were reddened, most family members at the Ziegfeld admitted to emotions after the screening that were knotted but full of gratitude. Indeed, they were involved closely in helping achieve the greatest veracity possible, although he inevitably had to apply imagination to the details of what transpired on the plane (The credits include a disclaimer to that effect). They filed out sombre faced, as if from a funeral.What is important is that Greengrass won approval for his project from every family bereaved by United 93. But nor are they airbrushed to save anguish.And anguish on Tuesday there was. When the film reached its inevitable, pulverising conclusion, a chorus of moaning filled the rear rows of the Ziegfeld.