Stephen Gaghan

After achieving what some would consider the pinnacle of his career, scoring an Oscar for penning Traffic in 2000, Stephen Gaghan continued to work on writing projects over the years like the failed and critically panned The Alamo for Disney and most recently, the publicly trashed Havoc.  In the midst of all of this, Gaghan had his Directorial debut in the Katie Holmes flop Abandon.  Now, he returns to his roots with the Traffic-esque political drama Syriana, in which he takes on writing and directing duties.  But, can he ever achieve the success that he saw for  Traffic, his first major project?  The early buzz is saying yes.  We sat down with Gaghan in Atlanta to talk some politics.  As a warning, Stephen tends to love what he is talking about, so grab some popcorn and enjoy.

The target audience for this movie seems to be 30-45, the age generally concerned with heavy politics.  Why should younger people be interested in Syriana?

This movie is almost exclusively for young people.  When I set out to research this movie, I didn’t know anything about it.  I met a CIA officer and he was willing to open some doors for me in the Middle East and the oil business with the arm’s dealers.  I started going around and after a long time, I realized that all these people are so brilliant with their ideological speeches.  They are so convincing, they are so demagogic and charismatic, they totally sway you.  It’s dizzying.  You start thinking “Who is telling the truth here…what does this mean?  How are these convincing opposite opinions relevant to me?”

I’ll tell you.  In Washington this week, Randy Cunningham, a congressman from San Diego, admitted to accepting 2.5 million dollars in bribes from military contractors.  If you are a young person in this country, what is relevant to you is that “Duke,” he goes by “Duke,” is this; you may not have been to Washington or know how it works but you can know this:  Duke lived on a yacht called “The Dukester.”  What kind of car did he drive?  A Rolls-Royce.  On his congressman salary; The Dukester, the yacht, the Rolls.  For years, nobody says a fuckin’ word, nobody.  This guy is a conservative Republican, a Vietnam vet, presumably at one time, a good man.  Nobody calls him on it.  No one says “Hey, how does a guy on a $115,000 a year salary afford a half a million dollar car and a yacht?”  Why?  Because there is a culture of corruption that is so deep and so wide and so prevalent that money has so corroded the American political process that it is right out in the open and everyone else is doing it because people in glass houses don’t thrown stones.  This is relevant to every young person in America because as you go forward and you pay taxes, you have to ask yourself something; “What kind of country do I live in?  What kind of war am I involved in?  What does America Stand for?  Do I love my country?  What is it I love then?  Are we Abu-Ghraib?  Is that how Democracy is being exported in my name?  What do we stand for?

We are in a battle of ideals.  We are in a civilizational conflict right now.  It’s going on all over the globe.  There are a billion Muslims and an increasingly large percentage of them are not happy with America.  What ideas are we going to put up against them?  They’ve got a Totalitarian ideology.  They are telling their young people exactly what to do and what to think.  It’s all written down in the Koran.  Every waking moment is governed by this one book.  What are we going to put up?  What’s left of the “enlightenment” that we can put out against that radical ideology?  And, I’ll tell you something.  When The Dukester is trotting around in his yacht and we are torturing people in Abu-Ghraib, we don’t have a God-Damned leg to stand on.  We are very good at pointing the finger.  Hey, where are your woman’s rights?  Where is your voice for the minority?  Where is your representational government?  And, you know what these guys say back to us?  They say, “You’ve had 250 years of a stable democracy and less than 70 years ago, in Mississippi, you are lynching blacks as a hobby.  You are asking us to modernize in ONE generation when in 250 years, you STILL have such inequality among your minority groups, it’s pathetic.”  I think this movie is ONLY relevant to young people.  Old people? It’s too late.  They’re gone.  The Dukester?  He’s in his sixties, he’s corrupt.  He has crossed the line.  He gave himself a little moral asterisk and he’s going to jail.  They are already corrupt, they just haven’t been caught.

What is it that gives you the conviction to not take the money and run?

I think Hollywood and Washington are quite similar in some ways.  Both of them tend to reflect the culture rather than lead it.  If I were to design a perfect world, they would be more leading of the culture.  If you are the head of a studio, you have to make a $120 million decision every three weeks.  So what do you do?  You poll.  You find out what audiences like and you look at the last thing that worked and you try to copy it.  You stay safe and you don’t make a statement.

From my perspective in Hollywood, I’m able to witness this on a pretty regular basis.  So, can I leap from my little lily pad to another lily pad and look at a similar way of thinking.  Politics has been called the entertainment arm of business.  I think that things happen in the way that Gladwell talks about, with tipping points.  It could be The Dukester or it could be financing a war in Iraq when the reasons shifted four separate times.  To me as a citizen who has children who could get drafted; who pays taxes that finance this war.  I pay so much in taxes, you have no idea.  And, I’m happy to as long as I think that the money is going toward things that add value to my life.  But financing a war in Iraq when the reasons majorly (sic) shifted four times from the connection to Al Qaeda to yellowcake uranium, or weapons of mass destruction that was based on intelligence, if you were hanging out with the CIA guys I was hanging out with, they all knew it was bullshit, to “He was a tyrant and he was bad to his own people, we have to get rid of him.”  That was the third reason?  And that one doesn’t quite work so now we are going to create a democracy in the Middle East.  By the time you get to the middle of the third reason, something doesn’t smell right in Denmark, something is deeply fucked up here.

I feel that it is an obligation to talk about this stuff.  There are a lot of things I can do that would make a lot more money, which would be a lot easier.  I didn’t need to go shoot in 220 locations on 4 continents in 5 languages.  I didn’t need to get blindfolded in Beirut and thrown in the back of a car.  I can stay at home.  I worked at 80% below my market value the entire time I was making this movie.  I’d like a vacation house in the Vineyard.  A lot of people that are well below my level in Hollywood have very nice vacation house.  I don’t even have a house much less a vacation house.

I don’t know why.  I’m an idiot.  I feel like an idiot.  It’s scary for me because Hollywood is changing so rapidly.  No one knows why anyone should go into a movie theatre with 500 strangers and share an emotional journey together.  We haven’t figured it out.  I don’t want to do television, I don’t like television.  I don’t know what to do.  If the movie business disappears and DVDs start getting pirated and that revenue falls off the back end, then I will literally look at my life and go “Wow, there was this window where I could have become a multi-millionaire and I spent all that time working on shit I cared about instead of cashing in.  What a schmuck.”  That thinking is fear-driven thinking and fear-driven thinking causes you to make decisions.  “Please give me Scooby Doo 3.  Please!?  I’m your man!”

But, you did turn down The Da Vinci Code…

That is true and that is a perfect example.  But, in the middle of my second year of researching this and I wasn’t making any money, I was like “What am I doing?”  I’m not any paragon of virtue.  I’m just a schmuck like the next guy.  I don’t really have any answers.  There is no explaining it.  You just get into things and you bump along and the hindsight is 20/20, so you want to apply some rational like “yeah, I had a big plan.  I knew what I was doing.  I was going to change things.”  It’s not that.  I was just scared after 9/11.  I felt something really powerful.  I love my country.  I was scared to go to the mall with my kids.  I was scared to fly on planes.  I love my country.  I hate demagogy.   This guy Bush is saying stuff like “axis of Evil” and “Crusade” and I’m like “W’oh, crusade?”  Man, if I was in the Arab world and I heard that word I would be very nervous.  Then I saw this remote control plane kill these guys in a car in Yemen with a remote control missile.  If I was a guy in the Middle East, I put myself in their shoes.  Imagine what it feels like thinking that there are remote control American aircraft flying around over your head and at any time they can launch a missile and blow you up by remote control I in Langley, Virginia.  How would that make you feel?  I would feel very uneasy.

You filmed part of this movie in Dubai during Ramadan.  Did you have any fear of retaliation against Americans in the Middle East during a holy period?

I think any time you try to take movie stars to the Middle East after 9/11, it’s just scary because they are so high profile, it’s tricky.  But, honestly, I thought that kind of a deal breaker for me to make the movie was to shoot in the Persian Gulf, primarily because of the light.  The sun is very bright but it’s also incredibly humid so there is all this moisture in the air.  It’s not like LA heat, or desert heat.  It’s humid heat.  120 degrees and humid and there is this red dust from the desert from all the construction projects in the air because 9 of the 10 world’s largest construction projects are going on simultaneously so you have this incredible weird thick red air and it does something to the light that you can’t fake.  And, secondly, I had such a good time traveling in the Middle East.  I met so many interesting people and I discovered that I had a lot of stereotypes.  We go over there and we basically take 1/1000th of the experience of being alive in the Middle East and we expand it to 99% of what we show to the American public and I’m that public.  So, all of my expectations were constantly subverted and I thought that on a very basic level it would be important to take a Western film crew and go into the Persian Gulf and shoot and have everyone come out safely.  Have it be a good experience, it’s a cultural exchange.  During Ramadan, no food or drink passes the lips between sunup and sundown.  The whole country observes it.  It’s really really hot so during lunch you are sneaking off to the car to drink some water under the seat and your driver has gone up the hill and has put out a prayer mat and is praying in the sun, devotedly and you are sitting there trying to sneak a bite of your sandwich and drink your water and I’m like “Which culture is stronger?”  If you know that the material gap in your center, if you’ve felt that.  I’ve got a BMW station wagon shaped hole right (in my chest) and if I just fill it with that BMW it’s going to feel great.  And you feel like this is kind of dead-ending and you see these guys praying like this, it’s very powerful.  So, I felt that simply being there, breathing that air in that light and having that cultural exchange would be very powerful for the film.  It would give it a realism too obviously, but would also effect the mindset of everyone working on it.  After 9/11 and everyone is calling it the axis of evil and I’m going, no, that’s not the experience of 90% of that population.  They just want better lives for their children.  They want to live in safety not worrying about robot American assassination planes flying overhead.

Gaghan is already working on his follow-up to Syriana.  Earlier this year he bought the rights to the Malcolm Gladwell book Blink.  Leonardo DiCaprio is attached to star and pre-production is already rumored to have begun…

"I am doing Blink.  I’m doing it with Malcolm.  I had a “Blink” moment.  I read the book and I knew I had to meet this guy.  I don’t know why.  We get together and he is like “why do you want to get together with me?”  He’s totally perplexed.  We hung out and over time we just cooked up this really cool idea out of nowhere.  I actually have the movie.  I know what I’m going to do and Leo(nardo DiCaprio) is going to be in it.  It’s weird."