'Kidnapping' helped film's research

Although set in the Middle East, neither Iraq nor Israel is mentioned in the film.
By RENE RODRIGUEZ
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
NEW YORK -- Being kidnapped was not supposed to be part of filmmaker Stephen Gaghan's research for "Syriana," a panoramic drama about big oil, global politics and terrorism.
But that's exactly what happened when Gaghan, while standing in line at customs at the Beirut airport in 2003, received an anonymous call on his cellphone, offering him the opportunity to do something "really special."
Following the caller's instructions, Gaghan got into a waiting car and was taken to a remote village where armed men politely blindfolded him, took all his possessions -- pens, backpack, camera, even his belt -- and drove him to a secret location to meet Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, one of the spiritual leaders of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
"If you're writing a thriller that's set in the Middle East and you don't leave New York or L.A., you're just going to regurgitate images you've seen in other movies," Gaghan, 40, says. "These are the interesting things that happen when you actually go out into the world. It was so strange and human. They knew I was trying to write a movie and they wanted to say their point of view."
The meeting
The ensuing conversation, conducted via a translator, was friendly and wide-ranging. But it was Fadlallah's closing comments that really stuck with Gaghan.
"He said, 'Up to now, it's been easy to distinguish between the American people and the American government. American people are good people; they have hosted 10 million Muslims in the United States. But if you go into Iraq under these pretenses, it will no longer be possible to make a distinction between the will of the American people and the will of the American government anywhere in the world.' "
Gaghan's faux-kidnapping found its way into the plot of "Syriana," which opens Friday. But Iraq is never so much as mentioned in the film. Neither, for that matter, is Israel -- a curious decision for a contemporary thriller set largely in the Middle East.
"When I started writing this thing, everyone was saying, 'You can't do this movie and not write about Israel,' " Gaghan says. "Then all of a sudden we're going into Iraq, and everybody was, 'You have to make this about Iraq. Why aren't you talking about Iraq in here?' "
But Gaghan was gunning for even bigger game. "I'm trying to take the big picture of the forces I see in play. Whether it's the Roman empire marching off to Asia Minor to take care of King Mithrades, or our invading Iraq 2,000 years later, it's the same thing that's always going on -- this evergreen belief that you can remake somewhere to suit your very narrow needs, and there are no consequences. But you know what? There are consequences. There are always consequences."
Similar structure
Using a similar structure to 2000's "Traffic" (which won Gaghan a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar), "Syriana" unfolds through the eyes of four characters: a veteran CIA agent (George Clooney); an energy analyst (Matt Damon) who becomes an advisor to the prince of an oil-rich country in the Persian Gulf; a Washington, D.C. attorney (Jeffrey Wright); and an unemployed Pakistani laborer (Mazhar Munir).