Deconstructing Chaos: Locations and Design
Paul Greengrass and production designer Dominic Watkins' team created the look and feel of Baghdad, 2003--both inside and outside the bubble--on location in Spain, Morocco and England. 
Filming began January 10, 2008, at Los Alcázares Military Air Base, situated on the Mediterranean Sea in southeastern Spain's Murcia province.  It was a relatively easygoing start of production, with well-secured locations and a winter climate much like Southern California's. 
The ramshackle Los Alcázares training facility, operated by the Spanish air force, provided locations for Hussein's pillaged Mukhabarat intelligence headquarters, as well as exterior scenes at the Republican Palace and a smaller Green Zone palace.  Also in Spain, the unit filmed the MET D convoy rolling under a highway overpass and getting stuck in a traffic jam on a four-lane highway as panicking throngs fled Baghdad.  The traffic shots were staged on the brand-new Murcia motorway, which had not yet been opened to the public.
Most of Green Zone's exteriors, however, were filmed on streets in and around Rabat, Morocco, where the company encamped for seven weeks.  A coastal city on the Atlantic Ocean, Rabat has served as Morocco's capital since 1956.
The Bou Regreg river empties into the Atlantic alongside Rabat.  Across this estuary, Rabat's "twin" city, Salé, hosted many days and nights of filming for the production. 
The Moroccan portion of the shoot began February 2 in Kenitra, a city 25 miles north of Rabat.  Kenitra provided the location for the Diwaniya WMD site.  Instead of discovering weapons of mass destruction here, Miller's MET D convoy arrives to find Diwaniya overrun by hundreds of looters. 
The looting sequence was controlled pandemonium, performed with joyful abandon by the Moroccan extras hired to portray the plunderers.  Costume designer Sammy Sheldon and her team outfitted approximately 200 male extras for this rubble-strewn shot.  "The overview of the movie is that it needs to be grounded in reality for every character involved, whether Iraqi or American," says Sheldon.  "Paul likes grimy, sweaty realism.  The looters were a mix of young and old guys, very dirty and quite wrapped up so that you wouldn't recognize them if they were seen on the telly.  We went for the older sportswear look mixed with traditional dishdasha [male robes] and head scarves to hide their faces."
Sheldon, the costumers and the webbing team were as grateful as the cast to have former members of the military on the production.  "I've done other movies of this nature where most of the main team were actors," Sheldon offers.  "You put all this kit on them, and when they take a break, they put something down and forget about it.  The MET D boys never lost anything, and they helped us a lot with how it's worn."
The MET D convoy's push through a Baghdad traffic jam was filmed over a two-day period in Kenitra.  CBS News had aired footage of a similar Baghdad incident in 2003, shot for the network by British cameraman Nick Turner and then-CBS News producer Bronner.  Greengrass and his team used the network's 2003 material for reference in planning the film's traffic sequence.  Completely by chance, cameraman Turner was part of the CBS News crew that visited the Green Zone set when the traffic jam was filmed.
This sequence, referred to as "bump street" on set, was a big undertaking for action vehicles coordinator ALEX KING and first assistant director CHRIS CARRERAS.  Their teams sourced approximately 150 vehicles, which had to be dressed, then dirtied down and made to look as if they belonged in Baghdad.  They also had to prepare the cars to be hit by a four-and-a-half-ton Humvee. 
Kenitra Military Air Base, a former U.S. Naval Air Station, provided the exterior location for scenes set at Saddam International Airport.  The visual effects team completed the transformation of Moroccan locations into Iraqi landmarks, including the airport, Republican Palace and Assassins' Gate.
  With fewer iconic locations, Rabat was appropriately atmospheric.  "Rabat was chosen because it best resembled parts of Baghdad," says VFX supervisor Peter Chiang.  "The architecture and flat roofs provided a good foundation for our needs."
Night shooting in Salé provoked further déjà vu for Chandrasekaran.  Says the journalist: "It looked and felt like a hard-scrabble part of Adhamiya, a Sunni-dominated neighborhood on the eastern side of the Tigris River." 
Salé also accommodated the dust and din of three Special Forces helicopters swooping in and out of a woebegone football pitch (soccer field).  The helicopter of choice for Briggs and his men would be the Black Hawk, but ongoing military needs made Black Hawks unavailable.  The Huey, a staple of the Vietnam War, most closely resembles the Black Hawk's shape.  Therefore, three Hueys were filmed and transformed into Black Hawks during postproduction.
Not every day in Morocco was so gritty.  For several days and nights, an upscale area of Salé depicted Baghdad's Mansour district, also known as "the Beverly Hills of Baghdad."
Production moved to its London base in mid-March and availed itself of a wide variety of locations.  Most of the film's interiors were shot in the London area and in the neighboring county of Surrey.  Scenes set in the grand rooms of the Republican Palace were filmed at Freemasons' Hall, an imposing Art Deco landmark on Great Queen Street in London's Covent Garden.  The indoor betting parlor at Sandown Park Racecourse in Surrey underwent a metamorphosis to portray the interior of Saddam International Airport, which was transformed when Coalition Forces set up camp there in 2003. 
Updown Court, a never-occupied luxury manor house in Surrey, stood in for a ravaged Green Zone palace, where Miller and the MET D briefly lodged.  Green Zone filmed at the Renaissance Hotel, steps away from Heathrow International Airport's infamous Terminal 5, on the very day that the new terminal so disastrously opened.   
Huge construction sheds at QinetiQ, a former tank factory in Surrey, housed another would-be WMD site and a Camp Cropper prison.  The interior of General Al-Rawi's house, mounted on a ton of pneumatically inflated bellows by the special effects team, was also built at QinetiQ.  The bellows' heaving gave the set a violent shake, simulating the effect of bombs falling in the near distance.
Saddam's long-rumored maze of underground tunnels and bunkers, also alleged to be rife with hidden weapons, inspired the setting for a climactic firefight in Green Zone.  The desolate Millennium Mills site in East London's Docklands was chosen for the sequence.  "We researched the tactics Iraqi soldiers would be geared up for, if attacked somewhere like a safe house," offers stunt coordinator MARKOS ROUNTHWAITE.  "They would know the place like the backs of their hands, and U.S. troops wouldn't know where to start chasing them."

Humvees to Helicopters: Weapons and Stunts
Before filming began, SIMON ATHERON and his team of armorers invited the MET D cast into the weapons truck.  They chose what they had used in Iraq, and customized their weaponry with sights, strapping and lights.
The weapon of choice for Miller and the MET D team was the M4 carbine.  Only Keating, played by army reservist Brian Siefkes, broke from the pack with an M16 203 grenade launcher, which had been his weapon in Iraq.  The armorers had practicals, i.e., real guns, for each MET D character, as well as nonpractical Airsoft versions.  If they weren't firing that day, the armorers didn't give them practicals because the Airsoft worked so well.  Naturally, practicals were only given to people trained to use them.
  The MET D convoy mirrored what Gonzales and his unit had used in Iraq.  "The vehicle configuration, the way the people are grouped, the equipment, the organization--everything is almost exactly as it was when we were there in 2003," says Gonzales. 
The "hero convoy" included Miller's lead Humvee, followed by a second Humvee, a large M35 truck, and a rear Humvee. "These were underdog vehicles," notes action vehicles coordinator King.  "The production designer, Dominic Watkins, wanted them to look less desirable and underequipped."
Just as they would have on duty, the MET D boys personalized the interiors with photographs.  They gave King practical tips to make the action even more realistic.  "They suggested taking all the doors off," he says.  "These aren't armored Humvees, so the moment you have any contact, the doors do nothing but stop you from getting out fast."
King knew the Humvees' limits and that they'd be challenged.  "We always had to consider the scene where they cross into oncoming traffic and bump vehicles out of the way," he explains.  "The Humvee is robust, but its parts will disintegrate if you smash into the back of another vehicle.  We saw in the reference images that they usually clamped something on the front as an improvised ramming bar."
Stunt work came naturally to many of the vets.  "A couple of the guys have a tremendous amount of experience," offers Gonzales.  "When asked to tackle an adversary, take him to the ground, search him, flex cuff him, and do whatever you do with a prisoner, no rehearsal was needed.  These guys have done that 100 times.  They just do it."
Jason Isaacs had to keep pace with these men.  "I've been hanging out of very old helicopters by what seemed to me a piece of dental floss," he jokes.  "Unlike most movies, it would be embarrassing to suggest that somebody else do the stunts, since I'm surrounded by some of the most fearless men I've ever met.  It turns out they were terrified too, but they figured I must know something they didn't."

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS

Green Zone is director PAUL GREENGRASS' (Directed by/Produced by) seventh feature film.  He has also had a long and distinguished career in British television. 
His most recent feature, The Bourne Ultimatum, received three Academy Awards^® and two BAFTAs (Orange British Academy Film Awards) in 2008.  The Bourne Ultimatum also won the Empire Award for Best Film and brought Greengrass Best Director honors at the London Film Critics' Circle Awards.  Greengrass received Best Director nominations for The Bourne Ultimatum from the BAFTAs and Empire Awards, among others.
Greengrass previously directed The Bourne Supremacy, his first collaboration with actor Matt Damon.  The 2004 action-thriller grossed more than $50 million during its domestic opening weekend and went on to earn more than $175 million at the U.S. box office and more than $287 million worldwide.   It also confirmed the public's appetite for the Jason Bourne saga based on Robert Ludlum's best-selling suspense novels.
In between Bourne blockbusters, Greengrass stunned audiences with the powerful dramatic feature United 93, the story--told in real time--of passengers and crew rallying against hijackers on September 11, 2001.  Greengrass wrote and directed United 93 and was one of its producers.  He earned an Academy Award^® nomination for Best Director in 2007 and a Best Original Screenplay nomination from the Writers Guild of America.  He won BAFTA's David Lean Award for Direction and Best Director awards from the London Film Critics' Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics, among others.
   In 2002, Greengrass illuminated a dark day in Irish history with another haunting drama, Bloody Sunday.  Greengrass wrote and directed the documentary-style feature film depicting the 1972 civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland, in which 13 unarmed civilians were shot dead by British soldiers.  Bloody Sunday won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and the World Cinema Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival.  Greengrass was named Best Director at the British Independent Film Awards.
Greengrass has written and directed television films concerned with social and political issues, including The Murder of Stephen Lawrence (winner of BAFTA's Best Single Drama Award in 2000 and the Special Jury Prize at the BANFF World Television Festival), as well as The Fix, The One That Got Away and Open Fire.
He produced and co-wrote the 2004 television film Omagh, set in the aftermath of the notorious Real IRA car-bombing that killed 29 people in Omagh, Northern Ireland.  Omagh won BAFTA's Best Single Drama Award in 2005 and was named Best Irish Film at the Irish Film and Television Awards (IFTA) in 2004.  Omagh was also nominated for the IFTA's Best Script award.   
Greengrass spent the first decade of his career covering global conflict for the ITV current affairs program, World in Action.  He has written and directed many documentaries, including the Live Aid documentary Food, Trucks and Rock and Roll.   He is also an author and co-wrote the controversial bestseller "Spycatcher," with Peter Wright, former assistant director of Britain's MI5.
Greengrass was born in Cheam, Surrey, England, and studied at Queen's College, Cambridge University. 

BRIAN HELGELAND (Written by) has written and adapted many features throughout his career as a screenwriter, including the Academy Award^®-winning film L.A. Confidential, for which he received an Oscar^®.  Among his credits are his original screenplays for Conspiracy Theory and A Knight's Tale, along with his adaptations of Payback, Man on Fire and Mystic River, for which he received an Academy Award^® nomination.  Helgeland also wrote the upcoming Robin Hood, which is directed by Ridley Scott and stars Russell Crowe. 
In addition to his work as a screenwriter, Helgeland has directed three feature films and is soon to direct his original screenplay Sidney Grimes for Sony Pictures. 

RAJIV CHANDRASEKARAN (Inspired by the Book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" by) is a senior correspondent and associate editor at The Washington Post.
He has served as the Post's national editor and as an assistant managing editor. From April 2003 to October 2004, he was the Post's bureau chief in Baghdad, where he was responsible for covering the reconstruction of Iraq and supervising a team of Post correspondents.  He lived in Baghdad for much of the six months before the war, reporting on the United Nations weapons-inspections process and the buildup to the conflict.  Before the U.S.-led war in Iraq, he was the Post's bureau chief in Cairo.  Prior to that assignment, he was the Post's Southeast Asia correspondent, based in Jakarta, Indonesia.  In the months following September 11, 2001, he was part of a team of Post reporters who covered the war in Afghanistan and events in Pakistan.
He is the author of "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," a best-selling account of the troubled American effort to reconstruct Iraq.  The book, which provides a firsthand view of life inside Baghdad's Green Zone, won the Overseas Press Club award, the Ron Ridenhour Prize and Britain's Samuel Johnson Prize.  The New York