United 93 director 'to film Iraq'

Paul Greengrass is currently working on The Bourne Ultimatum

British director Paul Greengrass is to follow up his 9/11 film United 93 with a docu-drama about Iraq after the US-led invasion, according to reports.

He will film an adaptation of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, according to trade paper Variety.

Chandrasekaran was Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post from 2003-04.

Greengrass has been praised for the way United 93 dramatised the crashing of a plane in Pennsylvania on 11 September.

Award nominations

Radio transmissions and mobile phone calls made on 9/11 were used in the film to reconstruct what happened on the flight, which apparently crashed after passengers fought back against the hijackers.

The film recently received six nominations for the Bafta Awards, including best British film and best director.

Greengrass will start work on the Iraq project after finishing making the Bourne Ultimatum, Variety said.

Chandrasekaran used hundreds of interviews and documents to write his account of life inside the heavily fortified Green Zone, which houses government buildings and foreign embassies.

The book describes it as: "A bubble, cut off from wartime realities, where the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competed with the distractions of a Little America - a half-dozen bars stocked with cold beer [and] a disco where women showed up in hot pants."