Paul Greengrass

Born: 1955
Where: UK

The former investigative journalist and documentary-maker first attracted attention for the controversial Bloody Sunday.

The success of the movie, about Irish peace protesters gunned down by British soldiers, led to him directing the big budget Bourne Supremacy.

As a teenager he first grew interested in film-making when he discovered an old Super-8 camera in a school art room.

Using shop dummies and discarded dolls, he made his first film - an animated horror story with a childhood friend.

He then went to work for the documentary strand World In Action for Granada TV and stayed ten years.

His first foray into screen-writing was The Fix, based on the life of bribe-taking sixties footballer Tony Kaye.

However, although the screenplay was rejected playwright Alan Bleasdale invited him to his house to learn the craft of scripting for the screen.

"I spent two days on what turned out to be the best masterclass of my life," Greengrass recalls.

He made his feature debut with Resurrected in 1989, the story of a British soldier (David Thewlis) who is left behind in the Falklands after the war with Argentina.

He followed it with the TV movie Open Fire, a tense police chase drama, and The One That Got Away, about the survivor of an SAS mission to destroy Iraqi scud missiles.

The Fix finally saw the light of day in 1997 with Jason Isaacs as the footballer and Steve Coogan starring as a sleazy reporter.

In 1998, he directed the romantic comedy The Theory of Flight, starring Kenneth Branagh and Helena Bonham Carter.

Next came The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, which painstakingly reconstructed the miscarriage of justice surrounding the murder of the black schoolboy.

In 2002, the controversial Bloody Sunday, starring James Nesbitt, won the Golden Bear Prize at the Berlin Film Festival.

He then helmed his first big-budget Hollywood film, The Bourne Supremacy, starring Matt Damon as a reluctant killer suffering amnesia.