Green Zone

Green Zone is a 2010 action thriller film directed by Paul Greengrass. The storyline was conceived from a screenplay written by Brian Helgeland, based on a 2006 non-fiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City by journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran. The book documented life within the Green Zone in Baghdad during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The key players in the film are General Mohammed Al-Rawi (Yigal Naor), who is hiding in Baghdad during the invasion of Iraq, and US Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon), a Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) leader who is searching for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Miller finds that the majority of the intel given to him is inaccurate. His efforts to find the true story about the weapons are blocked by US Department of Defense official Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear). The cast also features Brendan Gleeson, Amy Ryan, Khalid Abdalla and Jason Isaacs. The film was produced by Working Title Films, with financial backing from Universal Pictures, StudioCanal, Relativity Media, Antena 3 Films and Dentsu. Principal photography for the film project began during January 2008 in Spain, later moving to Morocco and the United Kingdom. Green Zone premiered at the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival in Japan on February 26, 2010, and was released in Australia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia and Singapore on March 11, 2010, followed by a further 10 countries the next day, among them the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. The film generally received mixed critical reviews and was a box office flop, as it cost $100 million to produce plus $40 million in marketing, while the global theatrical runs produced only $94,882,549 in gross revenue.