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HEARD IT IN THE PIPELINE Matt Damon (left) is oil executive Bryan Woodman, and George Clooney (centre) CIA agent Robert Barnes. syriana
In 2000, screenwriter Stephen Gaghan’s Traffic, a brutally realistic, multi-faceted portrait of the drugs trade in (and into) the US, won him an Oscar - and proved the year’s surprise box-office hit into the bargain. Further statuettes for the film went to director Steven Soderbergh, to Benicio Del Toro for Best Supporting Actor and to Stephen Mirrione for Best Editing. The film itself was also nominated for Best Picture, but lost out to Gladiator. Now, five years later, Gaghan both writes and directs Syriana, another fact-based drama, this time about the international oil business. Soderbergh is still on board, but as producer, along with his partner in production outfit Section Eight, George Clooney, who also plays the lead role of Robert Barnes, a long-time CIA agent who uncovers a disturbing truth. Syriana, like Traffic, has several other interlocking stories, including those of ambitious young oil broker Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon); a Pakistani teenager (Mazhar Munir) whose frustrations find a focus in the teachings of a fundamentalist cleric; and Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright), a corporate lawyer finessing a merger deal he suspects is highly dubious. The film, in addition to reteaming Clooney and Soderbergh with Warner Bros. (where they made Traffic), also involves the multi-millionaire founder of e-Bay, Jeff Skoll, who last year set up Participant Productions to make films with a social agenda. He will also spearhead an educational and awareness-raising campaign called ‘Oil Change’ - designed to break what it calls America’s “addiction” to oil - to go with the release of Syriana. Just as, in Traffic, drugs provided an invisible web that tied together a large number of individual and corporate destinies so, in Syriana, oil is the link between the western world’s escalating energy crisis; the rise in fundamentalism as much in the West as in the Middle and Far East; and the increasing desperation of the oil business to gain control of the earth’s remaining stocks, 90% of which remains in the Middle East. Doing business there, according to one scenario, means accepting the way things are - and the way things are leaves little room for morality. As one character in the film says, “Corruption is our protection. Corruption is what keeps us warm…” So this is the price we pay for being comfortable.
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