"How I thought things operated in these giant warring nation states wasn't exactly how it happened. In fact, there are these critical people in between — these information merchants. They could be someone just like Bob, a midlevel guy at the CIA, who's just a nexus point for really good, accurate information for what people are intending. These guys are like lubrication for all these endeavors. They're like a little club. Bob speaks Arabic, Farsi and French and spent 20 years there. He can pick up the phone and call a guy with Rembrandts and Van Goghs on his walls, who says, 'I'm going out with my family on the yacht tomorrow. Come with us.' Twenty-four hours later we'd be sitting on the fantail of a beautiful boat while seven blond Yugoslavians were serving us buffalo mozzarella."
Gaghan soon realized that the meetings were never accidental — that Baer was hunting for information about the whereabouts of Al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, later acknowledged to be the mastermind behind Sept. 11. ("Bob had turned Danny Pearl on to that story, and he felt some guilt about what happened.") Baer also wanted the addresses of the families of the suicide bombers who flew the planes, a few of whom he wound up going to see as the pair drove across the region's Bekaa valley.
Gaghan later continued his research in Europe and Washington, D.C., where he hung out with energy traders and interviewed members of the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank that is considered the neocon incubator of the Iraq War. He chatted with members of the Carlyle Group, the investment bank that boasts such advisors as former President George H.W. Bush and former British Prime Minister John Major; hung out with American oilmen; and interviewed lawyers who perform American legal work for various Gulf nations.
One such law firm, he says, received $36 million for "services rendered. I asked Bob what the check was for. It was to stop an FBI investigation." Everybody talked to him. After all, he was, as he describes himself, nothing more than "a Hollywood screenwriter, a cliché."
"For the grandiose plans and strategy that everybody seemed to be harboring, a screenwriter is a safe audience. You're never going to quote them on the record. With this hubris and arrogance, they're absolutely convinced they're going to win you over to whatever way they're thinking. It's relatively safe, and yet movies are a relatively uncensored art form. They can have a small agitprop effect.
"The more I met these people — whoever it was — I realized how closely the notions of avarice were bubbling up just beneath the surface of whatever geopolitical strategies they were talking about. They're all these cut-rate Talleyrands who are espousing some great vision, and just beneath it is 'Here's how I'm going to get mine.' "
The 40-year-old Gaghan, who grew up affluent in Kentucky before becoming a heroin addict and later going clean, still has a recovering addict's exquisite sense of moral culpability. In person, he's less a raving Oliver Stone than a man condemned to see human failing. He's also an almost compulsive talker and storyteller.
"I have an old car. A '66 GTO with a 6.5-liter engine. It gets five miles to the gallon. I'm driving around in that because there's cheap gas here in America. Our lifestyle is predicated on our ascendancy in the energy business over the 20th century. We're all beneficiaries of that. I'm complicit. You're complicit. We're all complicit. We hide behind the fact that we don't understand. In a movie, which is so visual, you have the ability to cut instantly from something in the Middle East to something in America. As you put these things next to each other, they would start to have thematic resonance. A pattern could become clear. You could feel less confused by the events of the world today."
In "Syriana" — the title refers to the West's ambitions to remake the Middle East — Gaghan presents stories that echo today's headlines: the recent indictment of Texas oilman Oscar S. Wyatt on corruption charges, the suicide bombs that blew up Baghdad's Palestine Hotel, the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
Clooney's character, Barnes — like the real Bob Baer — infiltrated Hezbollah in the 1980s and, in this fictional incarnation, is assigned by the CIA to perform a hit on a Middle Eastern political leader. Matt Damon plays a Geneva-based oil analyst who winds up as the consultant to a reform-minded sheik locked in a succession battle with his younger, pro-American brother. Mazhar Munir, a Pakistani actor from England, is a Pakistani oil worker who is laid off from his job and finds himself seduced by a radical Islamic cleric. Each character — even Baer's — is somewhat naive to the larger global picture, but the audience is not.
"Sometimes movies that are about something can be preachy movies," says Jeff Robinov, president of production of Warner Bros. "The goal [here] is to make you feel for the people in the situation and have you connect to the people. I don't see our mission to change the world. You make movies that you respond to. You can pick up the newspaper and see how oil prices are affecting the country, housing, unemployment. People are living it and feeling it."
Still, given the cost of "Syriana," it's a big bet for the studio. And it could have cost even more, but Soderbergh and Clooney pressured everyone to take reduced fees to make the film, which was shot in Washington, Geneva, Dubai, Oman and Morocco.
The war in Iraq does not appear in the film, but it is clearly the off-camera elephant in the room. "You think the war in Iraq has been good for the oil business. It's been really good for the oil business," says Gaghan, noting that when filming began, it cost him $23 to fill up his tank. It now costs $58.
During his research, the investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh introduced Gaghan to Richard Perle, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who is considered one of the neocon architects of the war in Iraq. It was weeks before the American invasion, and the screenwriter had just returned from Damascus, where he heard prognostications of what a quagmire the war would be.
"I said, 'Really, if we went in, who's going to run the country?' He said, 'It's a shame we haven't done a better job of supporting Ahmad Chalabi. He's a wonderful man.' I said, 'Listen, Chalabi hasn't been in Iraq since 1959. He wears a Hermès tie. He lives in Paris. If he goes back there, they're going to reject him like a bad organ transplant.' "
Gaghan says that suddenly Perle got very serious. "He looked at me like 'Who let you in here?' He stared daggers at me for about a minute." Suddenly the doorbell rang. "He said, 'Excellent. I'll introduce you to Bibi on the way out.' It was Benjamin Netanyahu, dropping by with nine Uzi-wielding Mossad agents." As Perle ushered Gaghan out, Perle's wheaten terrier puppy, Reagan, began jumping around and, as Gaghan describes it, "pawing the crotch of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu just stands there and shakes with rage. So I pulled the dog away from him and said, 'Now, now, Reagan, not on former heads of state,' and they just held the door open and let me out."
ABU-ASSAD'S journey also began with research. He talked to people who knew suicide bombers. He read Israeli police files about suicide bombers. Most importantly, he interviewed a lawyer who represented suicide bombers who had failed on their missions, whose bombs had not gone off as intended, and who thus had wound up in Israeli jails.
"I think the feeling of impotency, literally and figuratively," says Abu-Assad, who speaks Arabic, Hebrew, Dutch and English. "It's human nature. Somebody with his power is humiliating you. It makes you feel worse. It makes you feel like a coward that you can't do anything. You don't have an appetite for food. You don't have sex. The moment I was once humiliated by a soldier, it took me a long time to enjoy sex again."
Abu-Assad's film is much like a Palestinian "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead": It focuses on two people on the periphery of history and watches them breathe. If the culminating event is horrific, the day-to-day buildup is almost surreal in its very mundaneness. When the two heroes make their martyrs' video — in the same spot in Nablus where real suicide bomber farewell videos are shot — the camera fails to work, so they have to redo it. Their guerrilla group handlers watch and noisily eat their lunch — packed by the unsuspecting mother of one of the would-be bombers.
Indeed, the guerrillas appear less ideologues than thugs preying on young men's despair. When one of the friends suggests they'll get to paradise afterward, the other smacks him on the head as if to knock that naiveté right out. One of the protagonists is motivated by family shame — he is the son of an Israeli collaborator killed by Palestinians. Yet their anguish seems palpable — born of some mixture of poverty, hopelessness, fatherlessness and disenfranchisement. Abu-Assad shows their journey from the poor streets of Nablus to the beautiful and prosperous high-rises of Tel Aviv, a shocking journey, no doubt, but for American viewers it is unfortunately no more shocking than a trip from South-Central to Santa Monica.
Abu-Assad is a pacifist who doesn't believe in the values of suicide bombing, but he does place the blame for Palestinian suffering squarely on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and formerly Gaza. Still, he didn't intend to make a polemic. "If this is the case, I could make an article about it. I didn't need to make a film."
He says he struggled to find the balance between "two different worlds and different thoughts, between the world to condemn suicide bombers and the world who finds them a hero…. The tragedy is he wanted to be a hero and protect his society from injustice, but he ended up being a terrorist. It's this balance you have to keep throughout the whole film, and you can easily fall."
Abu-Assad, whose previous film, "Rana's Wedding," was financed by the Palestinian ministry of culture, shot the movie over 40 days in Nablus, Nazareth and Tel Aviv, which he says he wouldn't have done if he'd known how hard it was going to be. "You have to shoot in a real place in real time in a war zone. It's not a safe studio that you can control. The place is in control, not you."
The filmmakers had to contend with the Israeli army and rival Palestinian factions who were all suspicious of their motives. A land mine went off yards from the set. There was an Israeli missile attack, and Palestinian gunmen ordered them to leave (six European crew members did); ultimately one Palestinian faction, afraid that Abu-Assad and his crew were making an anti-suicide bomber film, kidnapped their location manager. Although he'd never met him, Abu-Assad contacted Palestinian Prime Minister Yasser Arafat, and two hours later the crew member was released.
Abu-Assad says that the biggest surprise for him came when he began showing Islamic fundamentalists some respect. "Believe me, I was the first one in Nablus to fight against fundamentalism. Me. At the time, I was 19. We thought they were against civilization and progress. We were accused of being CIA agents or Mossad." A member of his own family became a fundamentalist, and the family thought he'd been brainwashed and ostracized him.
Twenty years later, Abu-Assad contacted his relative and then talked to fundamentalist leaders. "When they discover you respect them, just respect, they become so very, very human and alive, and you don't believe how much they open for you," he says. "If you think you're superior, you create fanatical people on the other side, especially if you're stronger. You don't know how much understanding you create when you are the strong and you do nothing but just listen."
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