Syriana (A Deep Dive Into An Inexplicably Disliked Film)

0:01 Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, Dan Bettimore. I'm a produced writer of film and television and now a podcast producer. And despite having every streaming service, I never know what to watch. So anytime I watch something good, I talk about it on the show. This way, you'll never have the same problem I do. I watched this tonight. There's always something good to watch. Let's get started. Today on the show, we are doing a deep dive into Syriana, an inexplicably disliked film.

0:46 This movie was critically aclaimed. Roger Ebert put it as his number two movie of the year, but it lost money ninety four million dollar gross on a fifty million dollar budget, which, after you take an account marketing and theatrical share, you split with the theaters. This movie lost money in its theatrical release, and I would say more so even Annacdotally just online in real life, anytime of this movie comes up, a lot of people don't like this movie, and I have never understood why. So I wanted to just kind of dive into it as a movie that I think is incredible, and as the years have passed, has only grown in my estimation. I think, if you look at this movie in Mike Clayton, you know you have probably two of the best George Clooney performances of his career. Incredible cast. The ensemble cast includes George Clooney, Christopher Plummer, Jeffrey Wright, Chris Cooper, Matt Damon, Amanda Pete, Tom McCarthy, Max Bengela, Alexander Sadiq, Tim Blake Nelson, William Hurt, and Mark Strong. When asked why he did the film, Matt Damon said, to Dark Horizons, basically, he said it better than I could. About why the movie's great, he said a couple of things. I love the script. I thought it was so smart and so unlike most of the movies coming out of Hollywood, particularly movies that have a real budget. This movie was probably sixty million bucks. And you don't see characters that are this flawed in Gray, in Big Buddy of movies, because in Hollywood, the last thing they want to do is confuse you. They want you to know, we have two hours to tell you a story. Here's the good guy, here's the bad guy, here's the problem. This wasn't reductive like that, so that was really attractive. George had already signed up for it. We were doing Oceans twelve and so I

2:20 talked to him in Soderberg. I didn't know anything about Gagging, but Stephen had obviously worked very closely with him on traffic. I talked to these guys and they said, look, we totally believe in him. You should have a conversation with him. So I called Gagging and after about twenty minutes, I'm like, yeah, I'm in. And had all the things to look for. Really strong script, really smart director, and a good role. So I love the script too, Matt Damon. And just to give you the flavor of it before I get into the production history, whether you've seen the movie before, you've never seen the movie before, I just want to give you some quotes in the movie because I think it really the dialogue, it's so good. And that's where I keeps making me think about Michael Clayton, because I'm willing to bet that Tony Gilroy really loves this movie. This is a line that George Clooney says in this movie. He says, if anything happens to me and my family, an accident, an accusation, anything, then first your son will disappear. His body will never be found.

3:07 Then your wife her body will never be found either. This is guaranteed. Then whatever is the most dangerous thing you do in your life, it might be flying in a small plane, it maybe walking into the bank, you will be killed. Do you just see what I'm saying. I want you to acknowledge that you do understand, so that we're clear and there won't be any mistakes. This is the line that Matt Damon says to Prince Nassir. What are they thinking? What are they thinking? They're thinking that it's running out, It's running out, and ninety percent of what's left is in the Middle East. Look at the progression Versailles Suez nineteen seventy three. Go four one, go four two. This is a fight to the death. So what are they thinking. Great, they're thinking, keep playing, keep buying yourself new toys, keep spending fifty thousand dollars a night in your hotel room.

3:51 But don't invest in your infrastructure. Build a real economy so that when you finally wake up, they will have sucked you dry and you will have squandered the greatest natural source in history. And here's something that prisoners here says when a country has five percent of the world's population, but spends fifty percent of the world's military spending. That country's persuasive power is in decline. The things that I love about this movie is that it feels so real, it feels so lived in right. And there's a reason for that, because Stephen Hagan did maybe the most expensive research procedure of all time to be a guide to just write the movie script. According to Wikipedia, while working on traffic, Stephen Gagan began to see parallels between drug addiction and America's dependency on fore An oil. Another source of inspiration came from nine to eleven and Gagan's lack of knowledge about the Middle East. A few weeks after nine eleven, Steven Soderberg send gag in a copy of XCIA officer Robert Bower's memoir See No Evil.

4:46 Gagan met Bauer for lunch and then for six weeks in twenty and two, they went to Washington, Geneva, the French Riviera, Lebanon, Syria, Dubai. They met with lobbyists, arms dealers, oil trade, Arab officials, the spiritual leader of Zebellah. Gagan said about Bauer that he had gone out there and done and seen things that he was not allowed to talk about and wouldn't but he was angry about and also trying to make amends for. Before any filming took place, Gagan convinced Warner Brothers to give him an unlimited research budget and no deadline. And I think I read in the research that they spent seventy thousand dollars. That was the research budget. He did his own leg work, meeting with oil traders in London and lawyers in washingtond c. And then he was kidnapped. At one point, moments after arriving in Bayrout in two thousand and two, Gagan was taken from the airport in a blindfold in hood where he met with Sheik Mohammed Hussain fudd Lala, who was interested in films. This is according to an article in Time magazine, quote very few screenwriters get kidnapped in Hollywood, or most of them live in work. They're considered low value targets. But moments after arriving in Baby he tells it too. Stephen Gagan, oscar winning right of traffic, found himself in what seemed to be a hostage situation. His cell phone rang and the voice on the other end said I've got something really special you can do, but you have to do it right now, and I can't tell you what it is. Gagan walked down to the airport and got into a car with a stranger. As they drove, he was stripped of his backpack, pens, and belt and was blindfolded, hooded, and thrown into the back of

6:18 another car. Gagan gave this quote. He said, there was a bad ten minutes there where I'm thinking, you are really an idiot. You're like mister Magoo. You just wander over to the Middle East and literally within the first twenty minutes get kidnapped and beheaded. World record. The abduction turned out to be standard procedure for anyone visiting Shake Muhammad Hussein Fadlala, spiritual leader of the Lebanese Shiate militia Hezbillah, who unbeknownst to Gagan, had an interest in movies and had decided he just wanted to meet him. He's like, Hey, what's up. I just wanted to talk to you. He will later also dying with men suspected of killing former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafikiri and meet with former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Pearl. Harrison Ford turned down the role of Bob Barnes, the role played by George Clooney. He regretted it later he said, I didn't feel strongly enough about the truth of the material, and I think I made a mistake. He also turned down the role that was played by Michael Douglas in Traffic. So Stephen Gagan must hate Harrison Ford.

7:17 He must think that Harrison Ford as it out for it or something. Can you imagine Harrison Ford and the George Clooney part in this movie that would have been so interesting In general, movie just had a ton of great parts for actors. Alexander Sediq plays a humanized Arab kind of oil prince, which we have not seen really before or since. As far as I'm scerned, I can't remember a movie where we've seen that or a TV series. In an interview with chud dot Com, Sadiq said that the character he played was quote, the personification of the great missed opportunity. Here's the chance that America had to turn things around, if only they hadn't been so angry they had given the contract to someone else. Clooney also gave some great quotes about this film.

7:58 You know, Clooney plays this world weary role, and he clearly was weary in real life making the film. Quoting the Slash film on the weight gain of thirty pounds, Cluney said, the truth is it's not nearly as fun as it sounds. The idea of putting on that kind of weight at the end of the day. In general, that's what we do for a living. So my job was just to eat as fast as I could, as much as I could, but mostly you just ate until you wanted to throw up and made sure you didn't throw up. So that was my job for a month, was eating. George Cluney was extremely seriously injured making this film. He said, quote it was my own dumb fault. I was taped to a chair and a guy was pretending to hit me. It's all fake, you're not really getting punched, and I flipped myself over on the chair and I cracked my head and tore what's called my dura, which is the wrapping around your spine, and ended up with what they call c s F leak, which is a cranial spinal fluid leak. Good fun. I highly recommend it for everybody out there, Cluney said, quote, I thought I had an aneurysm. It was long drawn out. There was a couple of days of sitting in a room taped to a chair and getting buckets of water, which isn't in the film anymore. There's a lot more torture to it that you don't see. As far as the politics of the film, Cluney said, I think it's sort of important, although I've certainly been outspoken in times politically. I thought it was important between good Night and Good Luck in Syriana, both films, that the idea was not to be political necessarily.

9:15 Obviously it's a political film, but we show this to a lot of neocons who liked it and agreed with it. Our argument, of course, is to raise the debate, not to tell people what the answers are, because clearly we don't have any answers for this, the issues or the problems which I agree with. By the way, I think that if I think I could totally watch this with somebody who's conservative and we could both get something out of it, and I don't think it's like lecturing or anything like that. I think it is sort of politically neutral. Clunya was so clutey considers suicide at one point because of this movie. Quote You're Rolling Stone quote. I was at a point where I thought I can't exist like this, I can't actually live. I was lying in a hospital bed with an IVY in my arm, unable to move, having these headaches where it feels like you're having a stroke, and for a short three week period, I started to think I may have to something drastic about this. You start to think in terms of you don't want to leave a mess, So go in the garage, going the car, start the engine. It seems like the nicest way to do it. But I never thought i'd get there. See, I was in a place where I was trying to figure out how to survive.

10:13 According to Rolling Stone, again, Clooney turned to alcohol to help alleviate the pain and has since had surgery which has helped. He still suffers from occasional headaches related to the accident. You know, it's interesting and or obviously has been a huge success. People really loved it, and I think that if you look at the plot in this movie, which is about the migrant workers who are radicalized into becoming terrorists, that is basically what happens in Andor likes. That's the story of Andor is people who are normal people who don't want to have to deal with this stuff and then are because of the circumstances of their lives, are eventually radicalized into taking extreme actions. So I just thought it would you know, if you really kind of unpacked that for a second and think about how radical that is, both for Andor and for this movie.

11:00 You know, I just really like, I think that's real, right, So the humanization of the guys who eventually you know, one of them, does they do like a suicide attack. You get where they're coming from because they're humanized. Now, one reason people might not like this movie is because I'd say it's too confusing or too dense. And this was something that MPR actually talked to Gagan about in an interview with MPR, the interviewers said, it's a very dense plot. Many people have already said they find it confusing, and you've said that you wanted it to be intentionally confusing. Why is that? Did you think that that wouldn't that it's more realistic that way, And Gagan said, well, I wanted the first hour, you know, particularly to give you this feeling of full immersion, like you dropped into a real world that has its own rules and it operates in a way that feels to you the way the world feels now to be alive today. And then he goes on to say, in the second half of the film, I wanted you to feel these common themes start to emerge, you know, like sort of ideas of very simple shared humanity. That the world is very small, that a man who's in a cave in Afghanistan can bring down the world trade centers. But the versus true. The positive actions here, when the globe is woven so tightly, when the fabric of the globe is so tight, the tiny positive pull on thread here reverberates all over the world.

12:11 The interviewer said, still, the movie is pretty bleak. You've a pretty jaundest view of American interests as governed primarily by greed and corruption. And I'm wondering did you wrestle with that idea of portraying America and the Americans as the villains in this And Gagan said, I don't think I do portray them as villains. I didn't do what America tends to do, which is generated the answer and then go look for the reasons. A guy from Kentucky lives in la and writes movies. I don't have any agenda, I have young children, the stakes feel elevated. I'm concerned. I love my country. You know. All this stuff is really basic and it's emotional. It matters to me. So if I'd gone out and found a bunch of selfless people working for the common wheel, caring about the weakest link of society, believing in representational government, believing that the smallest voice is valuable as the loudest voice, I would have portrayed that. I would have dramatized that exactly as I saw it. Unfortunately, that's not what I saw. So the gag obviously kind of a tough career in terms of produce credits posts Sirianna. For reasons unknown, they hired him to do the Doctor Doolittle movie with Robert Downey Jr.

13:09 And if you read the reporting on that, a lot of the reporting is like they realized maybe he wasn't the right person for that, which any Joe Shmo on the street with common sense could have told you, this guy, you're gonna have to do Doctor Doo a little make no sense. He's actually quite young still. I looked this up. He was born in nineteen sixty five, which means he was around forty when he made Sirianna, which can you imagine I'm getting close to forty. I cannot would be what an incredible accomplishment at that age. And he's only in his late fifties now, so there's totally still time for him to either make another film like this, or probably more likely a great HBO prestige series like you know, the two movies that he did Traffic in Sirianna. Today, those would be like eight part HBO shows and it'd be awesome. So I really hope that Gagan gets the chance to do that because this movie is so rare and it's I think as time has passed, it's become even more impressive to me, and I sort of value it even more so. If you haven't seen Syriana, I don't think anything I've said here has really spoiled anything about it. I really encourage you to watch it, and if you have seen it, I would love to know what you think. If you're somebody who didn't like it, I'd love to know why too. You know, I really don't understand why people didn't like this, but you know, obviously not ever taste. So that is that is my little jump into Syriana. There. That is the show for today. As always, thank you so much for listening. I have confirmed a cool upcoming guest, so I can tease it. The director of the Skyline Films. So Skyline is there's three movies and they're going to do

14:43 a fourth movie, and particularly the second and third movies are the ones that really are awesome, and we're going to talk about a lot. So that's an episode that's gonna be coming up. I've got some other cool stuff coming down the pipe as well, so yeah, a lot of good stuff kind of on the burner here. As always, if you enjoy the show, please leave me a five star review on Apple Podcasts. That's the best way to support the podcast, and you can always reach out to me at benmore Dan on Twitter, watch This Tonight on Instagram, or watch This Tonight podcast on TikTok or join our Facebook group. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, Bye,