Director Paul Greengrass will bring a version of George Orwell’s 1984 to the big screen, reports The Hollywood Reporter. Orwell’s dystopian world of state control, Big Brother, thought police, and censorship should suit the director well. Greengrass, who directed two of the Bourne movies and is currently planning another installment with Matt Damon, is known for his politically-charged dramas: among his credits are the Northern Ireland Troubles-set Bloody Sunday and the Somali pirate tale Captain Phillips. Or, as Uproxx puts it: “Greengrass is probably best known for the Bourne franchise, but he follows a fairly specific pattern: He makes a Bourne movie, and then uses that cred to make a deeply personal political film in his pseudo-documentary style.”
Before he became a filmmaker, Greengrass worked as a journalist and researcher on the British investigative current affairs program World in Action, a show with huge influence in the 1980s: it played a major part in the overturn of the convictions of the Birmingham Six. Margaret Thatcher thought the show was staffed by “just a lot of Trotskyists.” Greengrass is also the co-author of MI5 agent Peter Wright’s memoir Spycatcher, a book that the British Government immediately attempted to ban. No actors have been cast in 1984 yet; could Matt Damon play the novel’s hero Winston Smith?
