Paul Greengrass made his DP Oliver Wood watch Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers frame-by-frame before shooting began. Not for plot, but for method—how Pontecorvo filmed insurgency as documentary verite, how the camera stays close and panicked, how violence erupts from everyday streets. The interrogation scenes, the hand-to-hand combat in crowded spaces, the sense that we're watching real political chaos unfold—this is Pontecorvo's inheritance. Greengrass documented this in a 2004 DGA Master Class. The Battle of Algiers is on MUBI.
Films That Influenced The Bourne Supremacy
