Hour Syriana is a tough film, and it's being released at the height of Christmas shopping season. But I'm glad to see it's doing really well.
Stephen Gaghan I think the context of the world is giving us a leg up... I was hanging out all this time with people I knew in Iraq, and from the CIA, and so what's happening to us right now - the war in Iraq, gas prices skyrocketing - they were things we had talked about, I had a pretty good idea we would end up in a situation like this. So it's no accident that the film is finished now and now's when we're releasing it [laughs, a bit maniacally].
Hour Yeah, you researched this thing as hard and long as if it was going to be a book, or one of those big magazine features in the New Yorker... how did that go? Did you get treated like a "real" journalist, going to White House debriefings and all that?
Gaghan Unfortunately. I even went to the White House Correspondents' dinner.
Hour Winston Churchill said that, didn't he?
Gaghan Winston Churchill!!! He also overthrew a really great man, [Iran's nationalist prime minister] Mohammed Mossadegh, who was saying that his people were getting raped on what belonged to them, and Churchill came to us and said, 'This man is gonna nationalize British oil,' and oooooh, 'Mossadegh is a communist.' So we overthrew a man who had just won the country's first democratic election, and restored their Shah, who was a weak-chinned little playboy. We interrupted his extended skiing holiday and flew him back, and installed him as a puppet dictator. The building where they are holding hostages this week? It's the exact same building where Eisenhower overthrew Iran's democratic election. Accidental symbolism? I think not.
Hour So before you started writing, you did four years of really detailed research, talking to just about everyone you could find who had a point of view on this thing -but your script doesn't really give anyone a chance to rant. That must take some serious restraint.
Gaghan I have hung out with all these people, and I have seen and heard things that would make your toes curl and your hair fall out. We talk the talk, but don't walk the walk: freedom, openness, transparency? Our torture operations in Abu Ghraib out-Mengele Josef Mengele, and here we come pointing the finger, and we can't even get it right at home. 'You've had a democracy for 200 years, and yet you were still lynching blacks in the South 70 years ago like it was a hobby. And you expect us to modernize a 2,500-year-old culture in one generation? Fuck off.' I've had it said to me 100 times, in Iran, Saudi Arabia... and they're right.
Hour Ever run into something so out there, you felt you couldn't put it in the movie?
Gaghan Fifty per cent of the stuff I see and learn I can't put in, because it would play too much like Dr. Strangelove, too much like satire. I have to cut back the story arc to make it believable. If I put in half the stuff I've seen, people would say, 'You're partisan, you're taking pot shots, it never happens like this.' Part of the companion book is going to be how to tell the truth - how much skipping around I can get away with, how to fragment a narrative - and most importantly, how to craft a narrative so it appeals to the population, how to make stories by which people can absorb the truth.
Syriana
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