Greenberg was brought into the film industry by German filmmaker
Werner Herzog, with whom he worked for a number of years. His first book,
Heart of Glass, about the making of
Herzog's film of the same name, was called "The best book on the making of a film ever written" by
Rolling Stone magazine. Greenberg revised the book in 2012 as ''Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of 'Heart of Glass''' and was published by the
Chicago Review Press. It featured Greenberg's previously unpublished photographs, which Herzog called "strange and beautiful." Greenberg also translated several of Herzog's works into English, including
Fitzcarraldo and
Of Walking in Ice. Greenberg made his directorial debut with the documentary
Land of Look Behind, a documentary about Jamaica following the death of
Bob Marley. Greenberg had visited Jamaica from a young age and was a friend of Marley. Following Marley's death, his family asked Greenberg to make a film about him. The film that includes footage of Marley's funeral as well as scenes filmed in Jamaica's remote
Cockpit Country and the capital city of
Kingston. The film ended up being more of a visionary portrait of the Jamaica of that period (focusing on the
Rastafari movement and
reggae culture) than a film primarily about Marley. The film has won considerable critical acclaim, as well as winning the Gold Hugo Award for Best Documentary in the
Chicago International Film Festival. Greenberg also worked as a special unit photographer on films such as
Martin Scorsese's
Cape Fear and
Bernardo Bertolucci's
1900 and wrote several screenplays, most famously
Love in Vain, a poetic account of the mysterious blues genius
Robert Johnson.
Love in Vain was also the first screenplay ever published by a major house (
Doubleday) as literature. Greenberg's last screenplay,
Tutankhamun – Lord of Two Lands, a radically researched vision of
the boy king's murder intertwined with the intrigue surrounding his tomb's discovery in 1922, was to have been produced in 2013. ==Filmography==