HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Oscar winner Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass re-team for their latest electrifying thriller in Green Zone. In the film, one soldier will go as far as it takes to uncover a conspiracy that extends throughout an unstable country erupting into war.
It is 2003, and U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Damon) and his team of inspectors have been dispatched by their commanders to find weapons believed to be stockpiled in the Iraqi desert. Rocketing from one booby-trapped and treacherous site to the next, the men search for deadly chemical agents but instead stumble upon an elaborate cover-up that subverts the purpose of their mission. Spun by operatives with intersecting agendas, Miller must hunt through covert and faulty intelligence hidden on foreign soil for answers that will either clear a rogue regime or escalate a war in an unstable region. At this blistering time and in this combustible place, he will find the most elusive weapon of all is the truth.
“Thrillers are in a language audiences understand,” Greengrass says. “People come to the cinema to be taken places that only cinema can take them. They can be fantastical places of the imagination, or the compelling real-life environments that we see on television news. Cinema can take you there in a way that the news simply cannot.
“For both Matt and me, our creative mission was ‘Can we create a film that’s every bit as compelling, filled with action, exciting, mysterious, and a privileged inside view to a secret world as the Bourne films, but can we do it in that extreme environment of downtown Baghdad in those desperate weeks immediately after the invasion?’ I’m confident the audiences will say, ‘Yes, they can.’ “
As Roy Miller, Damon portrays a career soldier who served in the 1990 Gulf War and is now doing duty in a very different Iraq. He returns to the region in 2003 to lead a gung ho team of WMD hunters known as MET D (Mobile Exploitation Team Delta). His soldiers have one objective: evacuate a long list of reputed WMD sites.
Much like Jason Bourne, Roy Miller wants only to find out the truth in his precarious situation. Damon elaborates on this character’s motivations: “Miller becomes obsessed with figuring out what’s going on and getting to the bottom of all this. He gets himself reassigned to work for the station chief for the CIA in Baghdad and starts working with him to try and figure out where the weapons are…if they exist at all.”
Watch: Green Zone Trailer
Watch: Green Zone Cast Interviews
Photo credit: Jonathan Olley / Universal Pictures
