How do you create screen violence that isn’t entertaining? That was the challenge the English writer-director Paul Greengrass faced with his latest film, 22 July. As the director of The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum and Jason Bourne, Greengrass, 63, has crafted some of the most exciting action scenes out there – a spectacular fight in Supremacy comes to mind, where Matt Damon chokes a rival assassin with a rolled-up magazine.
But 22 July required a much more sombre handling. It’s based on the true events of July 22, 2011, when a Norwegian far-right terrorist named Anders Behring Breivik exploded a bomb in Oslo, killing eight, and then posed as a policeman to gain access to a youth camp run by the Labour Party on the island of Utoya, where he slaughtered 69 teenagers and staff members before being arrested. (The film opens simultaneously in theatres and on Netflix on Wednesday.)
22 July began as a study of the worldwide migration crisis.Erik Aavatsmark
Greengrass wanted to show the scope of the horror – children running, shots popping, bodies falling. But what did he do to prevent it from looking like a real-life Hunger Games?
“You have to use extreme restraint,” he said in a hotel room during September’s Toronto International Film Festival. He was wearing a green T-shirt and jeans, and his long, swept-back white hair and round wire-rimmed glasses called Ben Franklin to mind. Greengrass is a thorough speaker, prone to multipart answers (first, a, b, c; second, a, b, c, etc.), but he knows where he’s going with them; he never loses his way.
The first step he took was to ask the survivors if he had their permission to make the film. (If they’d said no, he’d have moved on.) He met with them several times and discussed in detail how he would handle the images. Although they used words such as “dignity” and “sensitivity,” they also said they would not be happy if he sanitized the events. “As a group, they are unanimously of the view that people have to wake up to the world-wide far-right threat, because they lived through it,” Greengrass says.
Secondly, he goes on, except for one close-range shooting, there is little graphic violence. What we get are fleeting glimpses, shot docudrama-style. Breivik (Anders Danielsen Lie) approaches; Greengrass cuts away. We hear more than we see. He photographs the victims so that no real people can be identified. There’s no driving score (in fact, there’s very little music); there are no comic-book whips or cracks or impacts in the sound design. “That was in my mind all the way through – restraint,” he repeats. “Not to distress the survivors more than they’d been. And to convey the violence not for its own sake, only insofar as it supports the purpose of the film.”
The first step Greengrass took was to ask the survivors if he had their permission to make the film.Erik Aavatsmark
Most importantly, Greengrass restricts the violence to the first 30 minutes of 22 July’s 21/2-hour running time. “It’s a tough watch, that half-hour, but this is not a film about the attacks,” he says. “It’s about what happened after.” And what happened after – the arrest, the interrogation and the trial – offer a counter to violence that, for Greengrass, the world urgently needs.
“Democracy has to fight for itself,” he says. “Particularly among young people. They face this threat – neo-Nazis in Sweden, the [Alternative for Germany party] in Germany, [U.S. President Donald] Trump and Charlottesville, Brexit. They’re going to have to figure it out.” (He partnered with Netflix, he says, expressly so more young people could access the film.)
The BAFTA-winning Greengrass has made several movies based on real events: Bloody Sunday, Omagh, United 93, Captain Phillips. “I think if you choose the right moment, and you don’t load the pieces toward an agenda,” he says, “if you just try and look at it in its granular detail, and listen to what the moment says to you, that you can see much deeper truths inside it.”
“Democracy has to fight for itself,” Greengrass says. “Particularly among young people."Erik Aavatsmark
22 July began as a study of the worldwide migration crisis. But the more research Greengrass did, the more he wanted to explore how that crisis was prompting “an unprecedented shift to the right” in Western politics. “When I read Breivik’s testimony – which we use in the film – I was amazed how his rhetoric, his opinions, his world view, which in 2011 was considered outré, was now entirely mainstream,” Greengrass says. “There is no populist politician on the right now that would have difficulty advancing those arguments.” (If you think he’s exaggerating, listen on any random day to Fox commentators Laura Ingraham or Jeanine Pirro.)
So the film is a true account of events, he continues, “but it’s also a metaphor for how we deal with this shift to the right. How we fight that rhetoric. I realized, all the arguments, and the solution – Norway had already had them.”
The solution? Democracy and the rule of law. So Greengrass counterbalances the violence of the film’s first half hour with the extreme civility of Breivik’s trial in its last. Along the way, there’s a quietly stunning scene – which really happened – where Breivik asks for, and receives, a bandage, because he’d cut his finger on a shard of shattered skull.
“Even in the year since we shot the film, the far right has become bigger by the day, and we’re nowhere near the end,” Greengrass says. “It’s really important that we open our eyes to what’s happening, and open our cinema to it. Cinema’s central mission is to entertain. And it’s an art form. But it also holds a mirror up to what’s going on. It’s important that it has that connection to the real world and, from time to time, dares to look – unflinchingly -- at what’s happening.”
Johanna Schneller