- Hanna. Directed by Joe Wright. Starring Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett and Eric Bana. Screenplay by Seth Lochhead and David Farr from a story by Seth Lochhead.

Hanna, the new film best described as a coming-of-age thriller with a smattering of sci-fi, will inevitably be compared to the Bourne films, the 21st-century gold standard of suspense.

Like Jason Bourne, our 16-year-old heroine seems preternaturally prepared for the violent trials that await her; there are remote locales, lots and lots of running, and a techno score by The Chemical Brothers that aids and abets the tension.

But stylistic similarities aren't the only reason you might soon hear Matt Damon's name mentioned in the same sentence as North Vancouver's Seth Lochhead's. It's not his height: Lochhead has a good four inches on Damon. It's because Lochhead, like Damon and pal Ben Affleck, scored big with a first-time screenplay. Damon and Affleck won Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay for Good Will Hunting.

You have to go way back to decipher where the idea for Hanna started percolating, though not quite as far back as Lochhead's first effort, a re-write of The Three Little Pigs featuring cats. The childhood collaboration with his mom was "pretty dark and messed up," he admits. Certain that he wanted to do something creative, Lochhead continued writing short stories at Argyle secondary, but "never really shared" his creative bent with the guys on his Kitsilano football team, for obvious reasons.

He went to university, planning to study law or criminology, with an aim to write on the side, when "halfway through I said 'what the hell am I doing? I want to write.' " He fled overseas, criss-crossing through Turkey, Eastern Europe and the Nordic countries. "That trip was the backbone for what Hanna would originally become," Lochhead says.

Lochhead wrote the screenplay for Hanna just before finishing up at Vancouver Film School, then spent the next year sending out some 300 emails to agents, two of whom replied with non form-letter responses, before someone bit. From there, "it caught fire," says Lochhead.

The screenplay was picked up. Focus Features came on board, and Joe Wright (Atonement) was called in to direct. Saoirse Ronan, in diapers when the idea for Hanna was born, was cast in the lead role of a teen who's lived her entire life in a Spartan cabin near the Arctic Circle. Her dad Erik (Eric Bana) has taught Hanna several languages, martial arts, hunting and survival skills, all in preparation for . . . For what? The mystery unspools deliciously, beginning with the flick of a switch on a long-buried tracking device.

Hanna's target is Marissa Viegler (Cate Blanchett), a CIA agent who oozes menace, from her zealously groomed gumline to her perfect, unscuffed Pradas. Marissa is on the hunt for Erik, a CIA agent who has gone off grid -- "he knows things you don't want to know," she tells comrades -- but she seems particularly interested in Hanna. "It was this strange kismet thing," Lochhead says of getting his first choice to play the role. "Cate was the best female actress at that point and still is. She's raw and talented and she takes risks, and it's a somewhat risky role."

Hanna is a stranger in an alien land; she travels solo from Morocco to Spain to rendezvous with Erik in Berlin. Along the way she meets up with a hippie-ish British family and gets her first taste of maternal concern (from Olivia Williams), not to mention her first friend and a rapid-fire crash course in pop culture from Sophie (Jessica Barden). She experiences a lot -- from warm weather and electricity to her first kiss -- all the while fending off attacks from bad guys. Ronan earned an Oscar nomination in 2007 for Atonement; here she is a wonder, brimming with stifled, powerful emotion.

Lochhead acknowledges some inspiration from his parents -- his self-proclaimed feminist mom and his dad's fishing and carpentry skills -- in forming Hanna's self-sufficient character, and his own. "I don't think they've trained me to kill, though," he laughs. He does own that he's not unlike Hanna: "I'm always learning. Sometimes I feel like I don't have the social tools to connect with some people. That's how Hanna felt: she really wanted to connect with people but she didn't have the tools, and the ones she did have conflicted with the rest of the world."

Lochhead was on the set of Hanna every day, and frequently collaborated after-hours at Wright's home. It was a "freeing and creative time," he says. "We'd put the weirdness in, but make sure it was comfortable enough for the 'squares'." Lochhead attributes that friendly atmosphere on set, a rarity, to Wright, and it may have shaped the writer's future plans: "I loved being on set and working with these people.

"I aspire to control my fate, and hopefully to re-create that experience," says Lochhead, with an eye to direct. "Maybe I'll be the one who invites and includes people. That's my five-year goal."