Documenting a world on fire with director Paul Greengrass | Canada Voices

It is a little odd to see Paul Greengrass comfortably plunked down in a chair – this is a filmmaker, after all, whose work refuses to sit still. Bloody Sunday, United 93, Captain Phillips, and three Bourne movies all confirm Greengrass as a relentlessly jumpy, jittery, go-go-go director whose energy is high and inexhaustible as his stories are visceral and nerve-wracking. Yet here is Greengrass, calm and patient, walking a day’s worth of interviewers through his latest white-knuckle thriller, The Lost Bus, the morning before its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival the other week.

Adapted from Lizzie Johnson’s non-fiction book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, Greengrass’s film stars Matthew McConaughey as a real-life school bus driver named Kevin McKay who, in the midst of the deadliest wildfire in California history in 2018, was entrusted with ferrying 22 children through a raging inferno.

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Ahead of the film’s limited theatrical release Sept. 19 and streaming debut on Apple TV+ starting Oct. 3, the director sat (yes, the entire time) with The Globe and Mail in Toronto to talk balancing fear and hope.

This is as intense a film as you’ve ever made, but there’s a very interesting point toward the end, featuring Yul Vazquez as a California fire chief, that addresses the elephant in the room that other recent natural-disaster films like Twisters have not, which is the effect of climate change. How important was it for you to have that?

I can’t speak to other movies, but I remember when [producers] Jamie Lee Curtis and Jason Blum phoned me up to say they had this book about the fire in California, automatically I was interested because there’s an ability to link a very simple human drama with the burning world now. Of course, our story is that particular fire and that particular community, but implicit in it is the broader picture of the burning world. I wanted it to be unspoken and implicit all the way through, because I don’t like lectures. But I did feel it needed one tiny moment in the film where we could say the obvious truth, which is that every year there are more of these fires and they’re getting worse. I think most people feel that way. Since the film has come out, look at Europe this summer. France, Greece, Italy. You’ve had bad ones in Canada, too.

There have been some days in the summer where the air quality is the worst in the world thanks to forest fires, yes.

Exactly. Yul and I talked a lot about it. Is that line too much or too little? You try to find the one moment to say something that is both appropriate to the story told – the character would need to feel it in the moment – but that it speaks to what a person watching this film inside would think, too. It’s not about wanting to make a film that is a lecture. You want a film to be an intense experience and a rewarding experience. All the things that make a movie worth watching. But if you can try to capture that thing that is just on the edge of people’s consciousness, then it gives your film a sense of relevance.

Because this was such a horrible, chaotic situation, just as intense as your other work, and you’re dealing with a story about kids in peril, how do you as a filmmaker ensure that the audience is locked in to the story but not overwhelmed with terror and despair?

I think the answer honestly is, it’s who you are. The weird thing about making films, and you realize it as you make more of them, is it’s incredibly self-revealing, even when you don’t intend it to be so. Weirdly, whatever you make, is revealing of your inner instincts and feelings. I’ve made films about intense experiences, but I don’t think I’ve ever made bleak or depressing films. Often, the subjects that I’ve looked at, I’m always interested to find something about people who go through those experiences and come out the other side.

Is that what you’re like as a person?

I am, and it’s what cinema needs to be. Today’s cinema, there are always the dangers, the rocks, in any journey. Sentimentality is one rock. And it’s easy to fall into that. You have to make sure you don’t, by not avoiding the truth. Not lapsing into trite solutions or simple tropes.

Conversely, bleakness, nihilism, despair, it’s all a nightmare, we’re surrounded by naïfs and fools – that’s also part of the world today. In a way, though, if you surrender to that, it’s almost like for me, there are rocks on either side of you and if you veer one way or the other, you’re not being truthful. What’s the point of telling a story into despair? In this story, you put your kids on the school bus, you bring them up, because you want them to find their way through the world that we’ve made for them. I’m being a bit high-falutin’ here, but the answer to your question is that you make films, and if you make them with a true heart, your character comes through.

Even a film like United 93, which tackled 9/11 …

Even that film, yes, which had a desperate end, of course it did. And the film doesn’t duck that ending in any way, shape or form. But I remember people saying that it didn’t feel bleak, because it honoured, cinematically, how those people responded in that extreme moment and the courage and heroism. Without being sentimental about it or nihilistic about it. That, if there’s a golden thread in narrative cinema, commercial cinema as we understand it in the West, when you capture that, you can go, “That felt great.” You can find stories in extreme places that do tell the difficulties of the world and give you the experience of hope, without it being sentimental.

This interview has been edited and condensed.