1.

Movie Review

'Syriana'

CLOONEY AND A MAZE OF COLLUSION
By A.O. Scott

New York Times
November 23, 2005
Page B1

http://movies2.nytimes.com/2005/11/23/movies/23syri.html

Swaddled in 30 extra pounds and a thick gray beard, George Clooney moves through his portion of "Syriana" with furrowed brow and a slow, careful gait. His character, Bob Barnes, is a not-unfamiliar type in the world of movie espionage: the weary, cynical C.I.A. operative on the brink of an attack of conscience. Bob, who has spent his career in cheerful spots like Beirut and Tehran, is the kind of guy who knows a lot more than he says, and who speaks in a low monotone, evading more questions than he answers. When pressed for information - by an aggressive government bureaucrat or by his impatient teenage son (Max Minghella) - his default response seems to be, "It's complicated."

Quite so. "Syriana," written and directed by Stephen Gaghan (who also wrote "Traffic," its obvious precursor), is a movie that demands and rewards close attention. Loosely based on the memoirs of a C.I.A. veteran, Robert Baer, on whom Mr. Clooney's character is modeled, it aims to be a great deal more than a standard geopolitical thriller and thereby succeeds in being one of the best geopolitical thrillers in a very long time. Along with Mr. Baer's book "See No Evil," it assimilates a whole shelf of post-9/11 nonfiction and journalism, spinning a complex, intriguing narrative about oil, terrorism, money, and power. Parsing its details requires a good deal of concentration: important information is conveyed through whispered conversations and sidelong glances, and you may sometimes wish for a chart diagraming all the patterns of influence, connection and coincidence. But the mental labor of figuring out just what is going on is part of what makes the film such a rich and entertaining experience.

And its sheer entertainment value - the way that Mr. Gaghan, with remarkable conviction and confidence, both honors and scrambles the conventions of the genre - is worth emphasizing. Since it deals with some contentious contemporary realities, it is likely to be greeted with a fair amount of chin-rubbing commentary. Though "Syriana" is expressly a work of fiction, it will no doubt be subjected to a round of pseudo-fact-checking, and its dark, conspiratorial view of the present and recent past is likely to be challenged, either because it is too complicated or not complicated enough.

Someone is sure to complain that the world doesn't really work the way it does in "Syriana": that oil companies, law firms and Middle Eastern regimes are not really engaged in semiclandestine collusion, to control the global oil supply and thus influence the destinies of millions of people. O.K., maybe. Call me naïve - or paranoid, or liberal, or whatever the favored epithet is this week - but I'm inclined to give Mr. Gaghan the benefit of the doubt. And even if the picture's rendering of current events turns out to be entirely off base, the energy, care and intelligence with which it makes its points are hard to dismiss.

There are four main storylines, linked by the anxious, irregular heartbeat of Alexandre Desplat's score - each one subject to enough twists and reversals to make plot summary a treacherous exercise. While Bob is sorting out his midcareer issues - his bosses, concerned about his maverick tendencies, appear to want either to confine him to a desk job or send him off to be killed somewhere - some members of the younger generation are finding troubles and opportunities of their own. Bennet Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) is a rising lawyer at a Washington firm who is called upon to run due diligence in advance of a merger between two energy companies. Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon), a financial analyst living with his family in expatriate luxury in Geneva, becomes the financial adviser to Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig), who is eager to succeed his father as ruler of an oil-rich emirate and inaugurate a program of political and economic modernization. In Prince Nasir's country, meanwhile, a young Pakistani laborer named Wasim (Mazhar Munir) succumbs to the lure of radical Islam, seeking refuge from the dusty oil fields and crowded hostels in the tranquillity of a madrasa.

These five characters -- Bob, Wasim, Prince Nasir, Bennett and Bryan -- add up to a sort of composite hero, though their heroism, collective and individual, is highly ambiguous. Not one of them is in possession of a clear conscience or a singular motive, and not one of them fully claims the audience's sympathy. Greed and ambition sometimes coincide with idealism, and self-interest shades into scruple. Each of the five is afflicted by family problems - the mutual disappointments of fathers and sons is the film's principal psychological motif - and throws himself into the world of money, politics and power as a way to escape or salve his private unhappiness.

Viewed in hindsight, and as a whole, "Syriana" can seem a bit chilly and schematic. Mr. Gaghan handles the main characters with analytical detachment, leaving it to the actors to supply each of them with a full measure of individuality. They prove more than equal to the task, and it is hard to single any one of them out. At different points in the film - and with the repeated viewings it amply repays - you notice Mr. Munir's delicate, watchful sensitivity; Mr. Damon's angry, boyish bravado; Mr. Siddig's icy mastery; or Mr. Wright's stealthy ferocity. Mr. Clooney, an executive producer as well as one of the stars, pushes understatement almost to the point of inscrutability. Is that guilt we see in Bob's eyes, or fatigue? Skepticism or fear?

There are too many fine supporting performances to list, though Christopher Plummer, Chris Cooper, Amanda Peet, William C. Mitchell and Shahid Ahmed all deserve mention. A movie this crowded and wide-ranging - the number of speaking parts seems to be exceeded only by the variety of locations - inevitably resorts to various kinds of shorthand. The secondary characters tend to be stock figures. When a character is shown working in his garden and then, later, swirling brandy in a snifter, you know he is a bad guy. A man who shoots billiards in the middle of the day can be counted on to be feckless and self-indulgent, and anyone who makes a high-minded speech on the virtues of free-market capitalism might as well have "fall guy" tattooed on his forehead.

All of which is to say that "Syriana" is, in the end, a movie. Rather than dispense with the familiar signposts of Hollywood storytelling, it brings them to a state of heightened attention and pushes beyond the clichés of heroism and suspense toward something a good deal more unsettling. Something you might even call realism.

"Syriana" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has some graphically violent scenes and occasional obscenity.

Directed by Stephen Gaghan; written by Mr. Gaghan, suggested by the book See No Evil by Robert Baer; director of photography, Robert Elswit; edited by Tim Squyres; music by Alexandre Desplat; production designer, Dan Weil; produced by Jennifer Fox, Michael Nozik and Georgia Kacandes; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 122 minutes.

WITH: George Clooney (Bob Barnes), Matt Damon (Bryan Woodman), Jeffrey Wright (Bennett Holiday), Chris Cooper (Jimmy Pope), William Hurt (Stan Goff), Mazhar Munir (Wasim Ahmed Khan), Tim Blake Nelson (Danny Dalton), Amanda Peet (Julie Woodman), Christopher Plummer (Dean Whiting), William C. Mitchell (Bennett Holiday Sr.), Shahid Ahmed (Saleem Ahmed Khan) and Alexander Siddig (Prince Nasir Al-Subaai).

2.

Entertainment

Movies

ROAD TRIP WITH EX-SPY INSPIRES 'SYRIANA'
By Christy Lemire

** Complex film examines crossroads of oil, business, and government **

Associated Press
November 24, 2005

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051124/ENTERTAINMENT03/511240310/1007/LIVING

NEW YORK -- "Syriana," a dense and complicated film about the global oil industry, began with something as simple and familiar as a road trip.

During two months of traveling through the Middle East, an unlikely camaraderie developed between boyish, Oscar-winning screenwriter Stephen Gaghan and low-key former CIA officer Robert Baer.

Gaghan, 40, calls their journey "the greatest field trip I ever got to go on."

"I mean, how do you explain it?" he told the Associated Press. "You're, like, a guy from Kentucky who lives in L.A. and suddenly you're sitting with friends talking about their favorite surface-to-air missiles."

The writer and director, who won the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay in 2001 for "Traffic," tells another multilayered story with "Syriana," which opens nationwide Dec. 9.

His inspiration is See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, Baer's memoir of about 21 years of gathering intelligence in the Middle East.

George Clooney plays a fictionalized version of the 53-year-old Baer: Longtime CIA agent Bob Barnes, on the verge of retirement, is assigned to assassinate a prince who's heir to the throne in an oil-rich Persian Gulf country.

Intersecting plot lines feature Matt Damon as an idealistic energy analyst, Jeffrey Wright as an ambitious lawyer investigating a giant oil company merger, and Mazhar Munir as a poor oil field worker.

Gaghan read See No Evil after he finished the drug-war drama "Traffic," and was curious about how an eclectic array of international power brokers and hangers-on from oil, business, and government ended up crossing paths in a CIA veteran's book.

"I just wanted to get together with him. I wanted to see, what is a Bob Baer?" Gaghan told the AP. "I'd never met a CIA officer. I'd only seen them in movies."

"We had lunch," said Baer, sitting alongside him. "And it always pays to show somebody, so I said, 'Come to Europe. Let's go to the Middle East and I'll show you what I'm talking about. You listen to it and figure it out -- what are all these intersections and why, what does it all mean?' "

Baer approached his time with Gaghan as if it were "a college road trip -- driving down to Washington or up to New York or something. We had rented a Renault; we had no idea where we were going."

Clooney seemed an unlikely choice to play a character who survives by being inconspicuous.

With a movie star, "they don't blend in -- that's the point. That's why they get $20 million and 20 percent of gross, it's so they don't blend in," Gaghan said. "So when George said he wanted to play the role, that was my first question -- how are we going to do this?"

Clooney gained 30 pounds in 30 days, grew a beard, shaved his hairline -- and injured his back severely while shooting a torture scene.

Watching the finished product, Baer said he didn't make the connection between his own life and what was on the screen.

"I was just absorbed by the narrative," he said. But he believes Clooney accurately captured his sense of feeling defeated after serving his country for more than two decades.

"What I really got from Bob was this unbelievable sadness," Gaghan said. "He really did know how the world worked, and he really did seem like a wandering guy without a country, like an exile. And it was sad."

While no specific moment from Baer's book appears in "Syriana," Gaghan included his own experience from a trip he took alone to Beirut in 2002.

He had just arrived and was going through customs when he got a call on his cell phone from "an acquaintance of an acquaintance of Bob's" -- even though Baer had warned him not to trust anyone in Beirut.

The caller said he'd send a driver, but couldn't tell him where he'd be going or what he'd be doing. Gaghan walked outside, got into the back seat of the car, and was blindfolded and driven out to the suburbs.

Little did he know he was on his way to meet Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon's most senior Shiite Muslim cleric.

Baer said that's standard procedure for meeting a Hezbollah sheik, which Fadlallah was then. Gaghan used it in the film for a scene in which Clooney's character has a similar meeting.

"They took my phones, my belt, my backpack, my pens, notepads, everything. Blindfolded me, drove me," he said. "And then you notice everyone has a gun, like, stuck in their waistband. The gate comes down, the driver doesn't speak English, nobody speaks English -- everyone's speaking Arabic."

Gaghan believes any number of episodes in Baer's book would have made compelling films of their own -- from his time in Beirut in the mid-1980s to being in northern Iraq in the mid-1990s.

"But I felt like -- and I think Bob probably would agree -- that at the end of the day, all the groundwork was laid during those times for the sort of crisis period we're in now," Gaghan said.

The best way to tell such a complicated story was through various threads, because "his life crosses all these worlds," Gaghan says.

"But never really part of it," Baer adds.

"Yeah, but we're looking at a big system. That was my experience, coming out of 'Traffic,' is that when you try to talk about a system -- like if the system is the bad guy -- the whole movie is all gray area; there are no good guys or bad guys. The system itself is what you're indicting."

3.

Arts & Entertainment

Movies

A BIG OIL SPILL IN 'SYRIANA'
By Peter Rainer

Christian Science Monitor
November 25, 2005

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1125/p11s01-almo.html

Fiercely partisan political thrillers have generally been the province of great incendiary European directors like Costa-Gavras ("Z") and Gillo Pontecorvo ("Battle of Algiers"). In America, more often than not we get the fever dreams of Oliver Stone.

Usually, however, the field lies fallow. During Vietnam and for an unconscionably long time afterward, Hollywood did nothing to confront explicitly the agonizing issues of that war. The current situation in Iraq and the Middle East has so far been dealt with mostly in the bullheaded Michael Moore manner. Hollywood has yet to dive into the turmoil and surface with something that survives as more than just agitprop politicking.

A lot of people have held out high hopes for "Syriana," a vast mosaic of a movie about Big Oil written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, Oscar-winning screenwriter of "Traffic." Its star and coexecutive producer, George Clooney, has been tantalizingly forthright: "'Syriana' . . . opens discussions about corruption, about the effectiveness of the CIA, about any number of things," he said in studio press notes. "You want people to be standing around the water cooler the next day talking about it saying, 'Here's what I agree with' or 'Here's where they're wrong.'"

But the discussion most people will likely be having is more along the lines of: "Could you figure out what was going on?" With its multiple crisscrossing plots, "Syriana" falls down at the most basic storytelling level, and this incoherence damages even the good parts. I'm not saying that Gaghan should have tied everything up into a neat little bundle -- that would be ludicrous when dramatizing a situation as volatile as the current one in the Middle East.

But the confusions in this movie should not be mistaken for the passionate chaos of creativity. Bad exposition is more like it.

Even when it's clear what is going on, "Syriana" doesn't exactly rip the lid off high-level criminality in our time. Gaghan has his Oliver Stone side: His clarion call is issued with a bullhorn. Is it really breaking news that corporations -- of whatever stripe -- are fiercely, even lethally, competitive? There is even the obligatory greed-is-good speech, delivered here as a litany by a Texas oilman (Tim Blake Nelson) facing prosecution: "Corruption is our protection. . . . Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why we win."

Gaghan comes on like a heavyweight, but he's wearing kid gloves. In this movie, where so much is at stake in the Middle East, Israel goes virtually unmentioned. Gaghan doesn't go after any real-life Washington muckety-mucks; his condemnations are comfortably generic.

The central story line in "Syriana" involves the prospective merger of two American oil companies against the backdrop of a reformist Persian Gulf prince (the hyper-elegant Alexander Siddig) who has sold drilling rights to the Chinese. Clooney's Bob Barnes is the veteran CIA operative who, in his final undercover mission, is sent to assassinate him. Matt Damon is the Geneva-based energy analyst who cozies up to the prince. Jeffrey Wright plays an attorney finessing the oil company merger for a big-ticket Washington law firm with deep ties to Big Oil. (The firm is headed by Christopher Plummer at his most imperially smarmy.) As a sideshow, a Pakistani father (Shahid Ahmed) and son (Mazhar Munir) working the prince's oil fields are laid off because of the China deal, pushing the son into terrorism.

Any of these story lines could have been expanded into a single worthy movie. (And judging from the disjointedness of the narrative, probably a lot of filmed material was left out). But what we are left with are, at best, tantalizing shards.

The most glittering of these shards is the Bob Barnes subplot. The spy who is left out in the cold is by now a stock figure, but Clooney invests him with a rugged poignancy. Barnes is a late-blooming do-gooder in a bad world, and he pays the price for it. When he is cut off, so is the movie. Grade: B-

--Rated R for violence and language.

4.

Entertainment Weekly

'SYRIANA' LACKS HUMANITY
By Lisa Schwarzbaum

CNN
November 23, 2005

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Movies/11/23/ew.mov.syriana/

"Syriana" has a lot of big, important things to say about big, important things, and it says them with a sense of urgency.

This dense, talky, proudly complicated adult drama of geopolitical intrigue weighs in on the amoral realities of covert CIA operations, Middle Eastern politics, global oil business and U.S. government antitrust investigations -- the whole military-industrial ball of wax. Indeed, the point of "Syriana" appears to be that the whole lousy, corrupt, oil-producing and -consuming world is a ball of wax, ready to melt.

The movie tells interrelated stories in knotted loops of simultaneity and jagged shards of documentary-style realism, with conspiracy on its mind and the piecemeal structure of "Traffic" as its screenwriting template, in good part because Stephen Gaghan, who wrote the Oscar-winning "Traffic" script for Steven Soderbergh, here writes and directs, too.

It's as earnestly, politically left-leaning as "Jarhead" is coyly apolitical; it's also the kind of movie that requires a viewer to work actively for comprehension, and to chalk up any lack of same to his or her own deficiency in the face of something so evidently smart.

But while I'm all for political dramas that take stands rather than feign neutrality, what "Syriana" forgets to provide is the one thing that makes any movie, however difficult, easy to love: emotional empathy. Like the title itself -- think-tank talk for a hypothetical reshaping of the Middle East -- this is a working paper of ideas driven by hypothesis, rather than a compelling drama driven by compassion.

And while those with an eye for vast left-wing conspiracies are welcome to believe that Gaghan planned all along to make a movie shaped like a big-picture that fails to take into account small-picture human needs, I am not one of those conspiracy junkies; I think the absence of soul is just the filmmaker's big gaffe.

Consider George Clooney as Bob Barnes, a veteran CIA man who serves as one of the character tentpoles of Gaghan's construction.

Bob's got the thickened gut of a middle-aged company spook slowed down by years of routine (even if the routine involves assassination), and Clooney, who grew his own morose gut and beard for the part, is nothing if not generous in his habitation of such a shady yet loyal, freewheeling yet lonely man. (The actor's commitment to politically engaged movies, in this as well as "Good Night, and Good Luck," is one of the most effective uses of his well-earned stardom.)

But for all we see of Bob, we know nothing at all about the guy, except that having been arbitrarily double-crossed by a field contact during the course of a mission, he now finds himself just as arbitrarily made a scapegoat by his own CIA handlers, who want to distance themselves from such a liability.

We watch Matt Damon, as an open-faced go-getter of an energy analyst, negotiate business with a Middle Eastern prince (Alexander Siddig), and Jeffrey Wright, as a Washington attorney, work on a merger between two American oil companies, and there's no reason given for the double-dealing, power plays, and American capitalist thuggery that shape the landscape.

What little humanity this trio of clueless, overmatched American men retains is conferred by fleeting interaction with kin; in the case of Wright's ambitious lawyer, his private burden is an embarrassing drinking bum of a father. And he handles the old man with much the same distraction shown by Michael Douglas as a drug czar with an addicted daughter in "Traffic."

The same schematic shorthand goes, by the way, for the Middle Easterners involved, who are less fallible men tripped up by the modern (and specifically American) world than walking position statements: corrupt Gulf-country prince backed by American oilmen versus his reform-minded brother, or long-suffering migrant Pakistani oil worker versus his angry son recruited by nuclear-weapon-toting extremists.

"Syriana" makes a point of circling the globe, with scenes shot in Geneva, Dubai, London, etc. -- it's a picture that displays datelines as a show of geopolitical bustle. And the speeches of even the most passing players are honed to draw blood -- Chris Cooper as a scheming oilman, Christopher Plummer as the head of a powerful law firm, Amanda Peet in a slicing performance as Damon's distressed wife.

But what do those speeches say? They say, "We're talking about big, important things, so pay attention" -- and then make it a challenge to do so.

EW Grade: B-

5.

Film

SPY GAME
By J. Hoberman

** "Traffic" writer's slick oil thriller oozes with intrigue but crams too much into its drum **

Village Voice
November 22, 2005

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0547,hoberman,70223,20.html

"Syriana," written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, is by far the Bushiest of Bush II thrillers. Set in the really big time, it's a complicated tale of investigation and intrigue involving Texas oilmen and Gulf emirs, Islamic terrorists and slick lawyers, the CIA and the Committee for the Liberation of Iran, fear of China and hatred of regulation, dubious business deals and missing missiles -- just about everything except the big enchilada, Eye-Rack.

Gaghan wrote the screenplay for Steven Soderbergh's highly regarded 2000 dope opera "Traffic," and "Syriana" (which was inspired by Robert Baer's CIA memoir and takes its title from a think-tank term for a reconfigured Middle East) is a comparable game of 3-D Monopoly. Indeed, Gaghan has been widely quoted comparing oil to crack. Given the large cast, the international hopscotch, and the tantalizing illusion of depth, the movie's tone is Frontline meets John le Carré. Compared to the complacence of something like "The Interpreter," it's a regular brain tickler. Gaghan's opus runs just over two hours and, complicated as it is in its evocation of new world disorder, could easily have been half an hour longer.

The ensemble is stellar. Bearded and paunchy, George Clooney plays against his looks as a bearish CIA operative who is at once the spook that sits by the door and the spy left out in the cold; Matt Damon is an enthusiastic young energy trader who angrily cashes in on a family tragedy to hook up with a reform-minded Persian Gulf prince (Alexander Siddig); Jeffrey Wright's very buttoned-down D.C. lawyer dutifully greases the wheels for a merger involving a giant oil company, just shut out of the Gulf, and the smaller outfit run by Chris Cooper's wildcat Texan, which has locked up the drilling rights to Kazakhstan.

No single scene typifies the movie's geopolitical whirligig, and yet nearly every one of them is predicated on a subtle reversal of expectations. While, from a liberal perspective, Siddig's character is a designated good guy and Wright's boss (Christopher Plummer) is an unambiguous slimeball, no one else's morality is so clear-cut. What's particularly novel about Syriana's scenario is its reticence in identifying the honest intentions of its three stars. In a sense, this virtue is also the movie's flaw: There are too many points of view and there is too little time to fully develop the key characterizations.

Or, perhaps the actors have been under-directed. Is Clooney playing a fall guy or a rogue operative or both? At what point does disillusionment set in? (Clooney's torture scene evidently caused a serious back injury.) Is Damon's character an avid opportunist or an incipient idealist? Does Wright's have his own agenda? Is he a monster of passive-aggression or is he simply a tailored suit? Even if character is defined by action, as is customary in the thriller world, there is a sense of abruptly telescoped activity. Clooney's agent, in particular, has a puzzling genius for hitting the narrative's dramatic marks all over the world.

"Syriana" is both topical and anachronistic. It harks back to lefty thrillers of the Watergate era like "The Parallax View" and "Three Days of the Condor," but Gaghan is less fixated on superstar heroism and more interested in representing a system -- if, indeed, that system can be represented. His method is actually more Socratic than his worldview is paranoid. There is the feeling that any location might yield a terrorist bomb and that the big story is (intentionally?) submerged beneath a welter of small plots. Still, the question is always, can we really do this -- and does it matter?

Gaghan's oblique framing, dense editing, and hectic Steadicam make his movie's tangled narrative skein even harder to unravel. The look recalls Soderbergh -- and while Syriana is certainly more fluid than if it had been directed by Michael Mann, it doesn't dumb itself down. Gaghan assumes that you'll get the historical reference when someone casually drops the name "Mossadegh," or recognize the more egregiously self-serving koans certain characters are apt to spout. ("In this town you're innocent until you're investigated," Plummer tells Wright.)

Even at its most didactic, "Syriana" (like "Traffic") is not unduly moralizing. The movie may be too knowing for its own good, but it's not glib and it never goes cheesy.

6.

Entertainment

A WORLD ADDICTED TO THE DRUG CALLED OIL
By Jennie Punter

** "Syriana"'s screenwriter found the geo-political relationships of the oil biz not so different from the narcotics trade **

Globe and Mail (Canada)
November 22, 2005
Page R3

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051122/GAGHAN22/TPEntertainment/Film

"Syriana," a new political thriller from writer-director Stephen Gaghan, takes its title from a term used by certain Washington think-tanks to describe a hypothetical Middle East reshaped by their ideas of democracy. But the Syriana created by Gaghan, Oscar-winner for his screenplay for "Traffic" (2000), is a far more abstract notion, a place where the conflicting ambitions, ideals, and family (especially father-son) dynamics of its inhabitants reflect the complexities of the post-9/11 world.

Gaghan began contemplating the milieu of Syriana -- the global oil industry -- while researching "Traffic," which uses multiple storylines to explore the human cost of the U.S. anti-drug wars. Syriana unfolds in similar fashion, and while getting across borders is the least of its characters' worries, addiction most certainly propels much of the action.

"When I was in Washington in 1998, I noticed that the Pentagon's bureaus of counternarcotics and counterterrorism were operating out of the same office," Gaghan recalls during a phone conversation this weekend. Gaghan saw that the user-dealer paradigm of "Traffic" could also be applied to the context of the oil business, a long-standing interest of his.

"If you're a user standing in the kitchen of a drug dealer, you might see handguns lying on the coffee table and his kids sitting close by watching TV and think to yourself, 'This is not good parenting.' But as a user, you're not about to comment on this," he explains. "Similarly, for many years the dynamic between oil-producing and oil-consuming nations essentially involved a tacit support of the status quo in the Middle East.

"Now, of course, America is involved in a massive democracy deportation exercise."

In the wake of 9/11, Gaghan, who was flying around the world promoting "Traffic," was given a copy of former CIA agent Robert Baer's memoir See No Evil by Steven Soderbergh (one of this film's executive producers). The book became the jumping-off point for "Syriana," its author acting not only a guide for Gaghan during a year-long, international research trip but also the basis for the character of Bob Barnes, a CIA vet played by George Clooney (who disappears into the role behind a thick beard and 30 additional pounds).

Baer, a case officer for the CIA Directorate of Operations from 1976-97, had a Rolodex filled with names of people in the oil business, royal families, arms dealers, and intelligence officers, and proved to be "an amazing guy, far better and more interesting in person than he was in the book," says Gaghan.

"While I was travelling around, I was taking in lots of points of view, reading books like Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem, but I wasn't writing any scenes. I felt I needed to take absolutely everything in," recalls Gaghan, whose research took him to Britain, Switzerland, Lebanon, Syria, Dubai, and North Africa, meeting people from all levels of the oil business. "I just put this flag in the sand. All I knew is that I was going to write some kind of thriller. The whole exercise felt precipitous.

"I'm in the back seat of this car called America and I don't know where the hell we're going -- which is a great place to write from."

Inspired by what he refers to as "the agony of self-loathing of not writing," Gaghan eventually found himself on his hands and knees, crawling around the shag carpet with hundreds of coloured note cards trying to keep his storylines organized. "Since I was doing multiple narratives, things would take off and I wouldn't know where they were going. It led to incredible difficulties in the second act, where you have beginnings that have consequences and you have to find a way to untangle them."

Many of the countries Gaghan visited during his research eventually became settings -- even Canada makes a "cameo" appearance. At one point, the CIA vet played by Clooney identifies himself as a Canuck and later, during the climax of the film, another character recognizes him as "the Canadian." For Gaghan, who spent a lot of time in Canada and has a great affection for this country, the decision to make Clooney's character ID of choice Canadian represents something he calls "agnosticism.

"Although I am very critical of my own government, when I was doing a lot of backpacking it used to really bother me when I saw all these people with maple leaves sewn on their jackets or backpacks," he says. "America may have fought a lot of battles that didn't need to be fought, but we've also stood up a lot of times when no one else did, which is something too easily forgotten by other countries. So I was trying to make a very slight commentary on that agnosticism."