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Interview | Stephen Gaghan

Last week the Daily spoke with writer/director Stephen Gaghan concerning his newest film, "Syriana," whose subject matter spans from suicide terrorism to white collar crime. As in 2000's "Traffic," for which he wrote the screenplay, "Syriana" traces multiple captivating story lines intertwined to form a moving critique of the United States' current political situation. This time the movie is concerning oil-related endeavors in the Middle East. Gaghan explained the pressures associated with creating and directing a politically-charged film in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 as well as the cultural and political realizations he experienced while traveling the world and gathering information to comprise his latest political commentary.

Question: Making this movie post-Sept. 11, 2001, do you feel that you had to censor yourself or that you were censored by others?

S. Gaghan: It was actually the total opposite. I felt like in the wake in 9/11 it was really important to feel like you were uncensored. The most insidious type of censorship I find that happens to people, particularly in Hollywood, is that you're sort of a victim of received wisdom, which is how you can never do that. They'll never make a movie like that. Drug movies don't work. You can't make a movie about drugs. You can't make a movie that puts the system on trial. You have to have a hero and a villain. It has to be a victory for the hero. If you don't have that it will never work.

If you listen to these internal voices, you'd never start to do anything. If you sit there and you're afraid ... if I try to write something and it feels true to me, and yet some censoring bodies - say the studio or the government is going to come after me - I think that's exactly the time you would have to proceed. You'd have to just sort of go all right, if I'm really afraid of that, which I wasn't, but if I was I would just respond with full-speed ahead.

Q: In a movie like this, how much sacrifice between making a great movie and making an accurate movie is there? What's your top priority?

SG: That's really interesting. I think you set out - I don't know. I can only speak for myself. I just try to do the best work I can, and that has a whole bunch of different facets to it. What I discovered is that since I do a lot of research and I meet a lot of people, what I've found is quite often what I actually saw and what people actually said just won't work. No one will believe it. It's too broad. It's like too amazing.

I witnessed things and heard conversations that if I - they were great scenes, but if I stuck them down in the movie people would have said, "I don't believe it. That's bullshit. There is no way," or people would have said, "Oh, you just have an agenda," or they would have said, "This is Dr. Strangelove," and I knew I didn't want to make a satire.

I don't think there's any contradiction between truthfulness and quality or between accuracy and quality, but you always have to be a kind of arbiter for what you think, what the big picture is. I could tell you five anecdotes. You'd be howling with laughter. They're amazing. Unfortunately they don't fit into "Syriana." They would fit into some other movie.

I haven't ever encountered that. I haven't found that going for accuracy would get in the way of quality, I guess. Is that a good way to put it? Yes.

Q: In articles about writing "Traffic," you've said you drew on real-life personal experiences. Do you have any ties that go that deep for you with this film?

SG: Here's what happened to me in the wake of 9/11. I had to travel a lot in early October '01. I'd been thinking a lot about the oil business since "Traffic." I saw this sort of dealer/user paradigm in "Traffic;" I knew from being a user. I knew sometimes you maybe hang out with a dealer, and this guy's got what you want, but he's got kids and the kids are watching violent television, eating sugar-coated breakfast cereal. They're malnourished and there's a handgun on the table, and you're like, "This isn't so great." But you're not going to toss this guy a parenting manual, "Here's a book by Mary Hartzell: a few great tips," because you don't want to jostle the status quo.

It felt like there was a real similarity in our oil-producing nation: a dynamic. So I was thinking about it. Now 9/11 happens, and after 9/11 I felt scared. I was violated. I had two small children. I was worried for them. I was worried when I'd go to the mall. I had to fly in October of '01 a lot. It was just a completely different experience. I felt it very deeply.

Now what happens, America's response to that act, it felt like this car America was accelerating, like someone hit the gas, shifted to a lower gear, maybe the highlights are off, but we're careening down some hill in the dark, and I'm holding on in the backseat going, "Where are we going?" We're like declaring an axis of evil. We're talking about evildoers. We're talking about crusades. We're going into Afghanistan. We're going into Iraq. We're rattling swords at Iran, Syria. This is precipitous and it really affects us. It affects me.

Q: There are a lot of big name actors in this film. With your past success, did you find that they were coming to you to ask for work on this film?

SG: Two things happened. One, without George Clooney jumping in really strong and saying he would cut his fee... listen, it's a quality problem when you can leave $20 million on the table, but George could have ... $20 million and he worked for scale. So that sent a really strong message to everybody, the studio and the world.

But even before that, the script had been leaked out, out of my agency. It has just gotten out somehow, and it got photocopied and sent all over everywhere, and people really responded well to the material. It was hugely flattering. Great actors were coming forward to be a part of it. The combo of those two things really helped get the movie going, a challenging movie. So yes, I was amazed.

Q: Would you describe this movie as pessimistic?

SG: I would describe myself as pessimistic. I think I'd stand fairly closely aligned with Brent Scowcroft. He says, "I'm a realist. I believe in the fallibility of human nature. If humans can mess something up they will." And yet, I'm also an American and I'm also an optimist, and I'm ever-hopeful that we can go out in the world and make a difference, that maybe this democracy exportation project will work, not in the short-run, but maybe in the long-run, that we can help make the world a better place, that we can stop the famine in Mogadishu, that we can get fascism off the continent of Europe and World War II.