Stephen Gaghan won an Oscar for his screenplay for Traffic. After crafting the screenplay for that dense multiple storyline filled story implicating everyone even the US government in the worlds hard drug trade Gaghan decided to do the same for Big Oil with Syriana.
Syriana follows George Clooney as a career CIA operative as he begins to uncover the disturbing truth about the work he has devoted his life to, an up-and-coming oil broker. [Matt Damon] faces an unimaginable family tragedy and finds redemption in his partnership with an idealistic Gulf prince [Alexander Siddig]. A corporate lawyer [Jeffrey Wright] faces a moral dilemma as he finesses the questionable merger of two powerful U.S. oil companies.
Check out the official site for Syriana
Daniel Robert Epstein: What made you want to create Syriana?
Stephen Gaghan: From a genre perspective I was definitely fascinated by movies like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. I watched those movies again while I was researching this film and I thought, "Wow. You get to the end and some guy pops up and goes, It's big oil! And you go, Ooh, big oil. That explains everything." Then fade out. I thought in the intervening 30-years what's happened is this idea that's Big Oil has become of a super-structure that we all kind of live in. That is like the pop-up answer to a conspiracy that didn't work anymore. So from a genre perspective, that was a great way to think about the paranoid thriller.
DRE: How difficult was it to structure this?
SG: It almost killed me; it was nearly nervous breakdown time. I'll tell you a story, this one time, I had spent so much time crawling around my hands and knees on the shag carpet in my office that I had permanent indentations in my hands and knees from the shag carpet in my office. I woke up and thought I had leprosy because the indentations from the carpet hadn't come out overnight.
DRE: Such a complicated film might polarize the audience, what made you want to do that?
SG: Everyone in Hollywood knows that clarity is everything, that emotions are everything. You have to have a protagonist who's a hero and he gets a victory. You have a villain who's a bad guy and he gets defeated. That's clarity, so why deviate from that? Well, here's the problem. I went out with this Ex-CIA officer, Robert Baer, who's a world expert and was Iraqi Bureau Chief in the mid-90s. Do you think this guy has relevant experience on whether we go into Iraq and if we go into Iraq what might happen? You think he might have a point of view on that? He only spent 25 years thinking about it. He infiltrated Hezbollah in the 80s. He has this rolodex filled with middlemen who are billionaire oilmen and arms dealers. If he calls them on their private cell phone, they pick up the phone and they invite him over. He has something they want. When I went around with him I found that it is not nearly as simple as I thought it was. There's not a simple good guy or bad guy. It really is a system with a set number of players who all know each other. It's endemic and has been going on for a long time and I wanted to examine that. What I discovered here at home seems to be this willful exploitation of ambiguity that seems to be going on at the highest levels of our culture. There is a willful choice by somebody to sow confusion about whether or not the globe is heating up in a way that could be dangerous for all of us. I think that is wrong so I want to show in a narrative how these people operate.
DRE: There are a lot of liberals who are terrified right now to say anything about anybody. But with making this you are pointing fingers at the government and Big Oil and the US government. Does it make you any more paranoid?
SG: I hope that what people see when they watch Syriana is that I'm pointing the finger at myself. I'm not pointing the finger at anyone that I feel is separate from me. I feel like the world is this tiny, little place. I feel that my incredible standards of living are predicated by our success in the oil business. I have a '66 GTO convertible with a 387 6.5 liter engine; a convertible muscle car. I've been Hybrid shopping but a guy like me who comes from Kentucky and drinks bourbon and drives a muscle car doesn't easily segway into a Prius. My experience isn't dissimilar from the rest of this country. What I want people to come away with is a heightened awareness of how the system works, so they can decide if they're getting a government that is representing what they really believe it; if they really are part of something that's feels right and comfortable. If not, then you change it.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Syriana follows George Clooney as a career CIA operative as he begins to uncover the disturbing truth about the work he has devoted his life to, an up-and-coming oil broker. [Matt Damon] faces an unimaginable family tragedy and finds redemption in his partnership with an idealistic Gulf prince [Alexander Siddig]. A corporate lawyer [Jeffrey Wright] faces a moral dilemma as he finesses the questionable merger of two powerful U.S. oil companies.
Check out the official site for Syriana
Daniel Robert Epstein: What made you want to create Syriana?
Stephen Gaghan: From a genre perspective I was definitely fascinated by movies like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. I watched those movies again while I was researching this film and I thought, "Wow. You get to the end and some guy pops up and goes, It's big oil! And you go, Ooh, big oil. That explains everything." Then fade out. I thought in the intervening 30-years what's happened is this idea that's Big Oil has become of a super-structure that we all kind of live in. That is like the pop-up answer to a conspiracy that didn't work anymore. So from a genre perspective, that was a great way to think about the paranoid thriller.
DRE: How difficult was it to structure this?
SG: It almost killed me; it was nearly nervous breakdown time. I'll tell you a story, this one time, I had spent so much time crawling around my hands and knees on the shag carpet in my office that I had permanent indentations in my hands and knees from the shag carpet in my office. I woke up and thought I had leprosy because the indentations from the carpet hadn't come out overnight.
DRE: Such a complicated film might polarize the audience, what made you want to do that?
SG: Everyone in Hollywood knows that clarity is everything, that emotions are everything. You have to have a protagonist who's a hero and he gets a victory. You have a villain who's a bad guy and he gets defeated. That's clarity, so why deviate from that? Well, here's the problem. I went out with this Ex-CIA officer, Robert Baer, who's a world expert and was Iraqi Bureau Chief in the mid-90s. Do you think this guy has relevant experience on whether we go into Iraq and if we go into Iraq what might happen? You think he might have a point of view on that? He only spent 25 years thinking about it. He infiltrated Hezbollah in the 80s. He has this rolodex filled with middlemen who are billionaire oilmen and arms dealers. If he calls them on their private cell phone, they pick up the phone and they invite him over. He has something they want. When I went around with him I found that it is not nearly as simple as I thought it was. There's not a simple good guy or bad guy. It really is a system with a set number of players who all know each other. It's endemic and has been going on for a long time and I wanted to examine that. What I discovered here at home seems to be this willful exploitation of ambiguity that seems to be going on at the highest levels of our culture. There is a willful choice by somebody to sow confusion about whether or not the globe is heating up in a way that could be dangerous for all of us. I think that is wrong so I want to show in a narrative how these people operate.
DRE: There are a lot of liberals who are terrified right now to say anything about anybody. But with making this you are pointing fingers at the government and Big Oil and the US government. Does it make you any more paranoid?
SG: I hope that what people see when they watch Syriana is that I'm pointing the finger at myself. I'm not pointing the finger at anyone that I feel is separate from me. I feel like the world is this tiny, little place. I feel that my incredible standards of living are predicated by our success in the oil business. I have a '66 GTO convertible with a 387 6.5 liter engine; a convertible muscle car. I've been Hybrid shopping but a guy like me who comes from Kentucky and drinks bourbon and drives a muscle car doesn't easily segway into a Prius. My experience isn't dissimilar from the rest of this country. What I want people to come away with is a heightened awareness of how the system works, so they can decide if they're getting a government that is representing what they really believe it; if they really are part of something that's feels right and comfortable. If not, then you change it.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
Thanks for this interview, folks.
Gaghan has created an epic .. and the complete message and the the full potential of Syriana is just about to be realized...