Paul Greengrass has a penchant for putting his lead actor Tom Hanks in harm’s way. In their 2013 collaboration Captain Phillips, the British director made his two-time Oscar and Golden Globe winning actor face off against Somali pirates. Seven years later, Greengrass now puts Hanks in the middle of the 19th century American West in News of the World, this time trying to hold back hostile land barons and petty thieves. For some creative reason, these adverse scenarios seem to bring out the best in both men. It has been a long way since the filmmaker started his career in secondary school, where he discovered a super 8 camera in his art room. The Surrey native began creating short animation horror films utilizing old dolls, artist dummies and general clutter. Those short films gave way to documentaries for the first ten years of his professional career, eventually leading to his first feature in 1989: Resurrected.  That documentary-on-the-go background would prove useful when Greengrass helmed the career making The Bourne Supremacy with Matt Damon, a gritty, pulse-pounding action thriller where the camera never stopped moving. Two more Bourne films would follow as well as the critically lauded United 93, Green Zone and 22 July. Now the 65-year-old presents his latest, News of the World.

What was your jumping off point from the Paulette Jiles novel?

Well I think really first off for me, I’m a parent and I’ve got kids.  The world is worryingly divided, is it not, over in Europe, all across the U.K. the sense of bitterness and division and uncertainty I think is very troubling.  And I don’t think that is a political point (…) no matter what their politics are, I think the world feels very, very divided.  And being a filmmaker you sort of think about that and how can you address it?  Then along came the novel and I read the novel. As I read the story of this lonely newsreader with his satchel of newspapers, who wanders from small community to small community in Texas in 1870 in the South of the Civil War, reading in old barns and dusty town squares, he’s engaged in the healing powers of storytelling basically.  He is a tiny thread that binds a divided community in the shared experience of stories.  And that felt to me like a story.

Did you always see how the film would resonate, even though it is set right after the Civil War?

Although it’s 150 years ago and though it’s set in the South of the Civil War, it felt eerily contemporary, strongly contemporary.  It also gave me an opportunity to make a film about the road towards hope, the road towards optimism. What is the road out of bitterness and division and how can we find a place where we are comfortable again in the shadow of what is going on in our world?  And so, this story of Captain Kidd and young girl, seemed to me to enable us to explore that.

And you got to make a western.

For sure, and that was a big part of the appeal, because I had never made a Western before and neither had Tom. I grew up with those films as a boy.  Later when I was a student, I studied John Ford and all the rest of them.  But I never thought I would ever get to make one.  It’s an unmissable opportunity, it was wonderful to make a Western, it was wonderful to make a movie with Tom and wonderful to explore the road to healing, which is something that I felt that I wanted to do.  I wanted to do a film in these dark days that shows us the road to a better place.  I mean that road is not without danger of course, it’s going to be a dangerous road, but a road full of adventure.  He’s going to have to confront his past and so is she and the dangers of the world that they are moving through.  But ultimately, they are headed towards redemption.

When we think of our protagonists in most westerns, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Gary Cooper, they were all the strong, silent type. They have bravado but they maintained a stillness. Was that your direction to Tom?

Definitely, yeah.  I mean he sits in that landscape perfectly doesn’t he?  You feel that he carries the weight of the past, the pain of the past somewhere there unresolved.  You feel his loneliness, you feel his decency and his courage and his fortitude and his sense of responsibility.  It’s not like he meets this girl and it’s like he’s going to take her home, he has to come to the realization that he’s the only one who can. I think that Tom is a remarkable actor and a remarkable movie star.  I think he is one of the greatest in the history of Hollywood in my view, he stands up there with Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper, those kinds of guys, because he explores the best of us, doesn’t he?  And he does it with unbelievable humanity.  I think in a way, I don’t know if you agree with this, but I think it’s easy to take Tom Hanks for granted, because he’s always so good in his films, his standards are so high.  And I think he has been from time to time taken for granted.  I felt that in Captain Phillips to be absolutely honest, where I also thought he was absolutely extraordinary.

As certain as you were that Tom could fit comfortably into the role, you placed a lot of faith in a very young German actress, Helena Zengel. Not only do you ask her to be believable speaking English, but to learn the Kiowa language as well.

The biggest challenge that we were going to face on this film was finding an eleven-year-old girl capable of playing this huge part, toe to toe with Tom Hanks, with all the difficulties of mastering language and also the huge acting challenge of the piece, she is often on screen on her own doing big things.  You can’t cut away from her, she has to be able to perform at a very high level.  I thought that was going to be the biggest challenge we faced, I thought it was going to take months and months and I thought we would be looking at hundreds of young German girls, cause the character is German. One of our producers contacted me and said you have to see the film System Crasher. She sent it to me and I literally spent the night convinced it had to be here. How many other eleven-year-old girls in Germany are there? She did a test for me and was brilliant and I offered her the part. She was the easiest decision I made on the whole film.