Cinematical

Writer-director Stephen Gaghan’s new film, Syriana, is a look at the politics of oil – and much more. In a interview in San Francisco, Gaghan spoke about politics, art, the dealer-user paradigm for drugs and petroleum, and how if he’d written a movie about his experiences researching Syriana, he would have wound up with something that looked and felt like Dr. Strangelove. Gaghan was more than willing to digress – about if ‘running the gantlet’ or ‘running the gauntlet’ is correct, Congressmen who live on boats paid for by defense contractors and how Turkish coffee can ruin your film crew and perhaps how he shouldn't have had that last Caramel Macchiato  – and his thoughts on oil and chaos, politics and art were bursting out of him at a fever pitch, as crude and refined and combustible as the resource that fuels his film. This is the first part of a two-part interview; if you're sensitive about profanity, you may not want to click further.

(Gaghan is asked about a remark he's made about the genesis of the film -- specifically, Executive Producer Steven Soderbergh's quote in the Syriana press notes that "Steve Gaghan once said to me that he thought oil was the world's crack addiction, and I knew he would find a novel way of exploring that idea. ")

‘Oil is crack?’ Who said that? Oh. I was mis-quoted. Well, what I was talking about really was the dealer-user paradigm; and what I mean by that is not some fancy phrase, because I’d had experience around drug dealers during my voluminous 19-year research for Traffic...

... and I’d noticed some times when you could be in somebody’s house, and it could be a totally genteel type of drug dealer, or it could be a more gangster-y drug dealer, but whatever – there was often something similar about them, which is they have children, and the children are staring at violent television, cartoons or some shit, and they’re eating sugar-coated breakfast cereal and they look malnourished, there’s a handgun on the table – there’s always a handgun on the table, like on a coffee table or a table, and it’s so unsettling, and the TV’s going and you’re looking at the handgun and the children are over there and you want to say, 'I’ve got this great parenting book by Mary Hartsell and I just want to give it to you, because I think you could use some advice on parenting. …' But you don’t say that – because that would be breaking an unwritten code. And the unwritten code is the guy has something you need, and you really need it, and you’re not going to fucking bum him out.

In America, in the West, we have this producer-consumer nation paradigm, and it works like this: 50 years of sort of a bi-lateral, multi-lateral maintenance of the status quo in the Middle East, which involved turning a bad eye to some really bad parenting. Whether it was a repressive regime, extermination of the Kurds, Saudi Arabia with women shrouded, walking 10 feet behind the men, etcetera, etcetera. But we weren’t going to say anything. Why? Because the producer nation, the dealer, has the shit we need – they got the good shit, and we don’t want to knock over the apple cart. To mix the metaphor. So that’s what I was thinking about, and I think it’s really apt. ...

And I think it’s truly interesting, as I went around to research the film, the most startling thing early on – and my access point was through a CIA officer (See No Evil author Robert Baer) who had been our Iraqi bureau chief early on in the mid-‘90s – speaks Arabic, speaks Farsi, speaks Russian, speaks French, 21 years in the Middle East – he’s a world expert on Iraq, and the people he was introducing me to, all around, a total rogue’s gallery – from government intelligence to middlemen in the oil business to arms dealers, terrorists, billionaires, members of royal families from the oil-producing nations.

… I met so many people who were just certain, they were certain; They had this great speech; they would tell you how the world works, and it was so convincing. So convincing. And then an hour later, you’d meet somebody else and he would tell you how the world works, and they were so convincing, too.  And the problem was that their worldviews were a hundred and eighty degrees from each other, and this is really unsettling. And it happened again and again and again, and I thought “Holy shit – could it be that nobody is seeing the whole picture? Could it be that all these people who have this fucking talk – this often ideological talk – are masking some self-interest? That all these people who are posturing like Talleyrand -- they don’t have the whole picture? The Talleyrands are rare; a Talleyrand comes along once in a hundred years, and we’re in a Talleyrand free-zone, with a bunch of discount Talleyrands that are truly just looking to feather their own nest, and they’re gonna put in their time riding the ideological gravy train for just the minimum amount of time necessary before they can jump out and really score big. And they tell themselves, when they are making these morally compromised decisions, that it’s really about their family, that they have a wife and kids to support. It’s not just them: ‘God, if it was just me, I could buck the system, I could do what feel right in my gut, but I havemy family to think about.'

I’ll give you an example: (George H.W. Bush's National Security Advisor) Brent Scowcroft. His last point (in a recent New Yorker profile): 'I believe in the fallibility of human nature; I’m a realist. If human beings can mess up something, they will. You can hope for the best, but you gotta expect the worst.' I find that quite compelling. (World Bank President and ex-Deputy Secretary of Defnese under Donald Rumsfeld) Paul Wolfowitz; I met Paul Wolfowitz at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, which is pigs feeding at the trough like you have never seen; if you’ve never been to that event it is literally pigs feeding pigs … pigs at the trough? They don’t even need the trough; they’re dropping canapés into the piggy mouths; there’s piggy dancing. It’s disgusting ... anyway. Wolfowitz’s point – which they touch on in the New Yorker article, it’s the most cursory examination of what the Neo-Con philosophy was, but anyway – Wolfowitz’s point is: 'No, we’re in a civilizational conflict; America’s only as good as the ideas we’re exporting. What are we exporting? What do we stand for in the country? Are we the children of the enlightenment and John Stuart Mill? Do we believe in representational government, do we believe in women’s rights, do we believe in minority representation in government? If we do, then we can’t stay in business with these people; we can’t keep turning a blind eye to these repressive regimes, to people gassing their own citizens. We have to take a stand; we have to stand for something; otherwise, this other force that we’re up against is just going to swallow us whole while we’re sleeping.' That’s a compelling argument; they’re a hundred and eighty degrees apart from each other. And what’s interesting is that both of these men have had a really high hand in running the United States government in the last 15 years.

I find that it’s really interesting and exciting; I think it’s such a great entrance point for thinking about narrative in a modern film, a truly modern film that truly tries to reflect the world to us as it feels right now to us, not as the world feels to us it feels to us as if it has to be a movie. Because if it has to be a movie, it can’t be x, y and z. But if it has to feel like the world feels like now, what is the narrative form that’s gonna take? How do you dramatize hundreds of people all of whom seem certain … and none of whom see the whole picture? Those are the questions I was asking myself.  

(I explain to Gaghan a glib exchange with a friend I had with a bit of truth to it: "I was talking to someone and they said “I don’t know if I want to see it, because it looks like a sequel to Traffic,” and I said --  glibly, but also seriously, “Don’t think of it as a sequel to Traffic; think of it as a prequel to Mad Max.” ... And the question is, at a certain point, the music’s going to stop, and everyone’s going to look around and say ‘Uhhhhh, where’s my chair?” I mean, you’ve done a certain amount of research; if there’s a civilian authority on these matters, it’s you. So, how long is the music going to keep going for oil?")

Well, they think we’re at peak production this year and next year, something like that, for global energy production, the most that we can ever can really get out; that we’ve hit the crest and oddly, I think everybody had this feeling – although not a one-to-one relationship –  I think that what we were seeing, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it felt like the trailer of coming attractions, it felt like a preview. Like, holy cow – we are looking into Mad Max. Like, God, that is what it’s going to look like. It’s going to be racial; 'Us fat White people, we got all the shit we need; fuck you, poor people who happen to be Black or Mexican'; it really felt like you were looking at this Hobbsean future; it was just like he laid out. I don’t know; people have been making predictions; oddly, everybody I talked to in 2001, 2002, would have said for sure that Saudi Arabia was going to topple by now, that it was going to go down in flames to the Wahhabists. And weirdly, us going into Iraq, energy prices tripled; it tripled the price of a barrel of crude, which has poured so much money into the coffers of these regimes that they’ve been able to sustain themselves a little bit longer. They were going down; they were running out of money. And now, they’re like so loaded. Imagine if you could triple your Gross National Product overnight. They’re like ‘Go Bush! Go baby! Go Iraq, go Syria, go Iran! Keep it rollin! Let’s see if we can quintuple it, sextuple it!’

It’s astonishing how good war is for oil companies and oil traders. Anyone in the energy business (will tell you): Chaos is good for the energy business. And that’s the first thing they’ll tell you. They don’t feel good about it; but it’s true. I think we will hit a tipping point ... but I also think we’re so industrious, so creative … that there really will be a Manhattan Project-style ... I mean, we’re very close to having the writing on the wall for global warming, I believe; we’ve passed a tipping point and shit is going to start going haywire, and I think we’ll start talking in terms of carbon wedges and changing our lifestyles is going to happen very quickly. I don’t know if it’s going to be five years, 10 years 15 years … It’s definitely in our lifetime; our children are going to have very different lives. The carbon economy is going to shift; I don’t know if it’s a hydrogen economy, a sunlight economy; you’re not going to be flying around on jet planes the way you are now, probably; there are going to be changes. ... I don’t know; I’m not a futurist. But I did enough research into human nature, figuring out this one, that I’m absolutely certain that until it’s really dire, nothing’s going to change.

(The energy crisis of the '70s comes up; specifically, how we didn't seem to learn anything from that.)

It’s the same fuckers, man! It’s all the same Nixon guys; they got tossed out of office for a while with Carter. They came back with Reagan; they had a bad couple years under Poppy (George H. W. Bush), who wasn’t really hip to these guys, and then Clinton … and they’re all back! Just look at them! They’re all like a hundred and ten years old, they cut their teeth under the first Nixon administration ... they hang upside down like vampire bats when they’re out of power and they wait around. It’s the same guys: ‘Hey, don’t conserve energy! There’s no problem! Party on!’

(Part Two of this interview include Gaghan's thoughts on if defending Syrania will be harder than making it, comedy as tragedy, and more.)