Cincinnati World Cinema: SYRIANA Page 2

SYRIANA PRODUCTION NOTES

"We are living in complex, difficult times and I wanted Syriana to reflect this complexity in a visceral way, to embrace it narratively. There are no good guys and no bad guys and there are no easy answers. The characters do not have traditional character arcs; the stories don't wrap up in neat little life lessons, the questions remain open. The hope was that by not wrapping everything up, the film will get under your skin in a different way and stay with you longer. This seemed like the most honest reflection of this post 9-11 world we all find ourselves in."

~ Stephen Gaghan

Syriana was written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, winner of the Academy Award for Best Screenplay for Traffic. Gaghan started thinking about the machinations of the global oil industry while doing research for that earlier film. He had met a host of powerful people in Washington, including those at the Pentagon who enforce America's anti-narcotics policies. It was then that he began noticing some interesting parallels between the trafficking of drugs and the power plays of the oil industry.

"At that time," says Gaghan, "the Pentagon's anti-terrorism and anti-narcotics branches were the same branch. And I started thinking that maybe the biggest addiction in our country is how we're hooked on cheap foreign oil. And that our easy access to oil is what gives us a good deal of our edge."

When Traffic director Steven Soderbergh, actor/producer George Clooney and their production company, Section Eight, introduced Gaghan to See No Evil, a memoir written by former CIA agent Robert Baer, it was a perfect way for Gaghan to develop this interest. The book chronicles Baer's experiences working out of the Middle East as a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Operations from 1976 to 1997. "Steve Gaghan once said to me that he thought oil was the world's crack addiction," says Soderbergh, "and I knew he would find a novel way of exploring that idea."

While the book provided the initial impetus for Syriana, Baer's experiences as a CIA field officer are what really served as a jumping-off point for the broader story that the filmmakers wanted to tell. "The book itself was fascinating," says Clooney, "and the more time we spent with it, the more we discovered there was actually another story to be told beyond the one in the book. We saw the potential for Syriana to be made in the fashion of the films of the mid-60s and early 70s that were willing to discuss the failures of government as if they were failures of all of us, not just a particular party or group."

"I think what we've done is preserve the essence of Bob, even though his storyline is fictional," Gaghan says. "He also helped me understand the web of players in the Middle East and in the oil business that ultimately led to the choice to tell this story through multiple narratives."

Gaghan researched the film for a year before beginning work on the screenplay, investigating the inner workings of the industry in the United States, as well as journeying to the UK, France, Italy, Switzerland, Lebanon, Syria, Dubai, and North Africa to speak with people at every level of the power chain that makes up the petroleum industry.

Bob Baer himself took Gaghan to explore the regions of the Middle East where he worked gathering intelligence for 21 years, introducing the director to a multitude of figures that exist on all sides of the industry, including oil traders, CIA operatives, arms dealers, and the leader of the Islamic movement Hezbollah. "I discovered really hospitable people with very articulate points of view," says Gaghan of his travels. "I found that if you ask the same question to five different people, you get five different stories - and it's still not the whole story. Starting from there, I tried to focus in on how this whole world of clandestine information worked."

After his intensive travel and study, Gaghan began work on the screenplay, in which he would weave together multiple independent storylines that illuminate the inner workings of the industry and the figures who keep it running, whether through the wielding of their considerable influence, the force of their will or the exploitation of their labor.

The filmmakers' chief intent was to tell a compelling story that also reflected the complexity and ambiguity of our current situation - one that that explores diverse points of view, while not championing any one perspective as the truth. "We're not trying to preach to anyone with this film," says Clooney. "Movies, at their best, can initiate discussions - obviously, in this case, discussions about world dependency on oil, but Syriana also opens discussions about corruption, about the effectiveness of the CIA, about any number of things. You want people to be standing around the water cooler the next day talking about it, saying here's what I agree with or here's where they're wrong. We need that discussion."

Gaghan also hopes Syriana will make issues and characters that seem alien and distant to American audiences much more accessible. "Any time the lens by which you're viewing the whole can also be the lens by which you view the specific, you're in better shape," says Gaghan. "We're able to go from Wasim, working with his father in the Persian Gulf, where he says, someday we'll get a real house and get your mother here, to Robby Barnes visiting a college campus with his dad, Bob. The power of those specific images next to each other is that you hopefully start to feel connections that show you the whole: how we all inhabit the same world, and we all just want better lives for our children.

"This movie uses ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances to explore the idea that personal responsibility does matter, that our daily choices contributes to where we are on a global level," continues Gaghan. "Bob Barnes is ultimately a company man who's trying to do his job well and put his son through college. Bryan Woodman's got a wife and two children, and then he faces the worst thing a father can go through when he loses his son. Bennett Holiday has a very difficult relationship with his father, so he's trying to deal with these complicated issues in his work while also holding it together at home - which is a situation we all find ourselves in. So it's through these characters' everyday lives that we're able to enter into a world that at first blush seems abstract to most people, but is incredibly relevant because this nexus of oil interests, terrorism, and the possibility of democracy in the Middle East powerfully affects our economy as well as our psyche and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

"While 'Syriana' is a very real term used by Washington think-tanks to describe a hypothetical reshaping of the Middle East, as our title it is used more abstractly. 'Syriana,' the concept - the fallacious dream that you can successfully remake nation-states in your own image - is a mirage. Syriana is a fitting title for a film that could exist at any time and be about any set of circumstances that deal with man's unchecked ambition, hubris, and the fantasy of empire."

GLOBAL CASTING

With over 70 speaking parts in Syriana, the filmmakers cast roles with talented actors culled from over a dozen locations around the globe, including Los Angeles, New York, London, Cairo, Bahrain, Dubai, Kuwait and Damascus. Gaghan's absorbing script enticed a host of exceptional performers to come together as part of a large ensemble - esteemed actors such as Oscar-winners Chris Cooper and William Hurt were eager to join the cast. "Gaghan's such an excellent writer that when we sent the script out, the first thing that happened was everyone we sent it to wanted in," says Clooney. "And that doesn't happen very often. We were saying to actors who were used to carrying movies, Listen, it's not a large part, and they'd come back saying, I don't care. I just want to be in this. It's truly an ensemble piece. The star of this film is the screenplay that Gaghan wrote."

For his part, Gaghan feels that the actors' performances were instrumental in taking his script to the screen in such a stellar fashion. "You get actors of this caliber and they just bring so much to the script with their performances," he says. "It happened with the whole cast throughout shooting."

Clooney plays veteran CIA operative Bob Barnes, who made his career working deep within the Middle East in the 1980s. As a member of a rapidly dwindling number of operatives in the Middle East, Bob is one of only a handful of agents capable of infiltrating on that level.

"One of the aspects of Bob's storyline is the systematic deconstruction of the CIA and what the effects of that are," says Clooney. "It results in there not being many Arab-speaking operatives left in the Middle East, which is a danger. The idea is that we are finished with the Cold War and that we don't need surveillance anymore, we don't need boots on the ground, i.e., CIA operatives. And so Bob gets caught in what is basically a downsizing."

Bob has always put his career first, even before his family, not only out of dedication and a belief in the value of what he is doing, but also out of necessity. "CIA officers lie to everybody, for their entire careers," Gaghan points out. "They lie to their families, they lie to their children, they lie to their wives, they lie to their friends. They lie everywhere they go." As a result, Bob is estranged from his wife and has a difficult relationship with his son Robby, who resents the life he's been made to lead, constantly moving and having to start a new life everywhere his father travels. As Robby prepares to go to college, Bob fears he may finally be losing his son forever.

However, no matter how much he's sacrificed along the way, Bob's dedication to his work and his intricate understanding of the region mean nothing if he is not willing to play the game in Washington - i.e., telling powerful people what they want to hear, even if it's not the truth he's witnessed in the field. And when his honesty becomes a liability, his government has no problem cutting him loose.

"Bob is a fascinating character because he's a true believer," says Clooney. "He's not a cynic - he believes that his work is the right thing to do, that it helps his country. But he becomes disillusioned because, basically, the company he's devoted his life to lets him down."

While Robert Baer served as the departure point for the character of Bob Barnes, Clooney did not base his characterization on Baer. Rather, he took the essence of the CIA foot soldier and interpreted it into an unique character that isn't strictly beholden to any real-life model.

"We wanted to let the character serve the story rather than the other way around," says the actor. "That freed me up quite a bit because I was no longer playing a living person; instead, I was dealing directly with the issues that the movie brought up. I didn't have to be concerned with an accurate depiction of a particular person, so I could concentrate more on reacting honestly to the broader questions that we're raising."

Clooney's appearance also served to define his character, as the actor put on 30 pounds in 30 days and grew a thick beard for his role as the middle-aged agent nearing the end of his career in the field. "The thing about CIA officers is that they blend in everywhere," explains Gaghan. "They disappear inside a role, just like an actor. A CIA officer is a guy who can walk into a bar in Macao, or a mosque in Riyadh, and you're not going to recognize him because he blends in. This is the exact opposite of what movie stars do - people are drawn to movie stars precisely because they don't blend in. George is a great actor, but he's also a very glamorous guy. But once he gained that weight and grew the beard and shaved his hairline back, he just disappeared inside of the character. He was completely believable as this very unglamorous man."

"It was interesting being completely anonymous," says Clooney. "I've tried other disguises before and they haven't worked. But put on 30 pounds and grow a beard and you can walk into any restaurant in town and not get a table."

While Barnes is trying in vain to tell the players in Washington truths that they don't want to hear, corporate lawyer Bennett Holiday is furthering his career by taking on a prestigious assignment investigating a business transaction that could prove extremely lucrative for a great many people in power. Bennett, played by Golden-Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor Jeffrey Wright, is an up-and-coming attorney in the prestigious Washington law firm of influential D.C. power player Dean Whiting, played by venerated actor Christopher Plummer. Bennett has been assigned to investigate the merger of oil giants Connex and Killen - with the tacit understanding that he will do everything in his power to ensure that the deal goes through.

"Bennett has the conscience of the moment to some extent," says Wright, who first came to audience's attention with his riveting performance in Basquiat. "He's not unlike a lot of folks who try to fit themselves into a certain profession or institution to become part of the military-industrial machinery. He's ambitious and this assignment marks a very critical point for him in his career - he's a lawyer who's supposedly investigating the merger of two oil companies, but who has actually been hired by the companies to protect them."

It's when Bennett comes across some incriminating information that threatens to jeopardize the merger that he genuinely begins to understand how the industry functions, and what his role in the hierarchy truly is. "What happens to Bennett," Wright explains, "is that he finds himself in a dangerous situation in which the pressures that were originally exerted on the companies are potentially exerted on him, and he has to extricate himself from that. So his job becomes as much about protecting himself as protecting the company."

Wright sees parallels between Clooney's character and his own. "Bennett and Bob both realize at some point in the film that there's a machine at work that doesn't necessarily have their best interests at heart, when in fact they had thought they were a very respected and much needed cog within that machine. I think that's the nature of the world in which the film takes place - it's a murky, powerful world, and it's much larger than the individuals who are a part of it."

Bennett's upward mobility is complicated by his difficult relationship with his father, an alcoholic who faults his son for working for the establishment. While he has always denounced his father as a failure, as Bennett is drawn deeper into the morally ambiguous world of the industry, he starts to doubt his right to judge his father's character.

"I think their relationship is a wonderful reminder of the larger cultural struggle that Bennett is a part of," says Wright. "As a lawyer, Bennett has to probe, to look into dark places, and as someone who is trying to become a part of the private sector of the oil industry, he's going to discover parts of himself and parts of the world that he might not necessarily have wanted to discover. He goes through this journey to uncover the truth about this merger, and simultaneously goes on a journey in becoming a player in that network of power."

George Clooney's Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Twelve co-star Matt Damon plays Bryan Woodman, a rising oil industry analyst who has been steadily climbing within his firm, living in Geneva with his wife Julie and their two young sons. It's a great honor when he is asked to represent the company at a gala event at the estate of the powerful Emir of an oil-rich Gulf Coast country. Bryan hopes to share some of his ideas with the Emir, but when he arrives, rather than getting an audience with the Emir, he is instead asked to briefly sum up his remarks to two of his representatives.

"At the Emir's event, Bryan basically pitches him the same ideas that the guy gets pitched by eight other companies every day," says Damon. "Bryan does have these other ideas that are a little more radical that he might put forward if he had the courage or the will, but he's afraid of getting thrown out of the guy's estate, so he doesn't."

But during the party, Bryan's young son is killed in a tragic accident, spinning him and his wife into turmoil and setting Bryan's life on an unexpected new path. In the wake of his devastating loss, Bryan throws himself into his work and becomes increasingly alienated from Julie, played by Amanda Peet. "At the beginning of the story, Julie and Bryan are very much in love and have a beautiful little family," says the actress. "Then, our son's death makes Bryan want to run away and fix things from the outside. He gets preoccupied with his career and it starts to consume him. I think a lot of marriages don't survive the death of a child and I think it's probably because one person wants to run away, and even being in the same room as their spouse brings out the remembrance of the loss."

Trying to consume himself with his work, Bryan remains lost in his grief until he is invited to come speak with the Emir's son, Prince Nasir, who in an attempt to apologize for his family's role in Bryan's loss, makes a lucrative offer to work with Bryan's company. Stung by the implications of the deal, Bryan confronts the Prince, chastising him for the ways in which his royal family has been squandering their incredible resources.

"There's a kind of reckless nihilism to him once he loses his son," says Damon. "At that point he's willing to basically just say the hell with it, and tells him what he really thinks."

What Bryan scathingly points out to Nasir is that by selling their oil cheaply to powers like the United States, Russia and China, who in turn sell it to other nations, they are allowing these foreign nations to reap the benefits of a natural resource that rightfully belongs to the Arabs. This setup benefits the royal family, which is made wealthy by their dealings with foreign powers, but robs Nasir's people of wealth that could vastly improve the quality of their lives. Bryan suggests that if Nasir's country instead refines and transports the oil themselves, they could set their own price, taking the power away from other nations and rebuilding their country into the superpower it once was. However, Bryan doubts that Nasir has any interest in helping his people when he himself benefits from the current scenario, which favors the wealthy elite.

But the Emir's son turns out to be quite different than the decadent royal Bryan took him to be. Intrigued by Bryan's ideas, Nasir begins to share with him his own hopes for his people. "Bryan's very judgmental of Nasir at first," says Damon, "thinking he's just another one of these royals who are squandering their country's resources and spending the money they're making in dealing with foreign countries to pay for their opulent lifestyles. But he comes to understand that he's much, much more and Bryan actually ends up becoming really inspired by him."

The visionary Prince Nasir is played by actor Alexander Siddig. "Nasir has so many new ideas he would like to implement," says the actor, "such as freedoms for women, freedom of the press, all of these very progressive ideas that this new plan could make a reality. These two characters find each other at this one moment in their lives where they really catalyze each other."

Nasir's ambitions are complicated by outside pressure from the foreign corporations whose massive profits depend on business as usual. The Emir is getting on in age, and soon will have to name his successor. Nasir has worked at his father's side for years, building hopes for a stronger country and better lives for his people when he ascends to the throne. But the Emir has been made vulnerable by strife within the royal family, and when Nasir becomes more vocal about the empowering future he sees for his people, American interests are quick to step in and put pressure on his father to name Nasir's more materialistic, compliant younger brother Meshal as his successor.

"Meshal is willing to be more of a puppet," says Akbar Kurtha, who plays the younger prince. "He's quite happy to play that game. He and Nasir don't have a very comfortable relationship. While Nasir is pro-reform, Meshal would probably prefer to have an even more flamboyant lifestyle than he already has. And there's a resentment there, because while Nasir has been groomed all his life to be king, Meshal has pretty much been left by the wayside."

As soon as he read the script, Alexander Siddig was eager to take on the role of Prince Nasir. "I unashamedly chased down this part because Nasir is the voice of the Arab world that I wanted to represent right now," he says. "It's the sense of humanity that he has. Some contemporary Arab leaders have an enormous humanity, but in the West, it's a point that's easily missed these days. When I grew up, the only time you would see Arabs onscreen would be in something like Sinbad where they're climbing over the side of the ship with a saber in their mouth. When you have the opportunity to speak through a character like this who wants to use his power as a force for good, for real progress, you have a chance to let the Western world know that men like these exist in the Arab world. That's the kind of contribution to a greater dialogue an actor doesn't often get a chance to make."

Damon felt similarly compelled to be a part of such an ambitious film. "Stephen gave me a lot of background reading for the movie and I used it as an excuse to learn as much as I could in a short time," says the actor. "It's an interesting subject and it's set in a fascinating part of the world. The more I know about it, just as a human being, the better off I am."

The film's final storyline follows the trajectory of Wasim, a young Pakistani who, along with his father, has been fruitlessly trying to earn a living in the oil fields of Nasir's country, but finds nothing but poverty, disappointment and alienation at every turn. When they are laid off from their jobs working in the field, their situation turns more desperate.

Their story mirrors that of the thousands of Pakistani laborers who have left their homes and families to try and find work in the Gulf. When they are met with job scarcity, sub-human living conditions, and struggles with immigration officials to stay in the country long enough to find employment, the disillusioned young men are drawn to the madrassas, or Islamic schools, some of which may seek to indoctrinate them into a radical interpretation of Islam. A number of these boys may become involved with terrorist organizations, and a few are ultimately persuaded to sacrifice their lives as suicide bombers. Such is the path that Wasim finds himself on as his life in the Gulf unfolds.

When his friend Farooq introduces him to a cleric at a nearby madrassa, for the first time Wasim feels he has a place in the unfamiliar country, and becomes more and more drawn into the cleric's radical teachings. He and Farooq are soon preparing themselves for a deadly act from which they will not return.

Wasim is played by Mazhar Munir, a young actor making his major motion picture debut in Syriana. Born and raised in London, he has appeared on several British television series, including the award-winning Doctors. "Wasim is no different from any other teenager," says Munir of his character. "But where someone of his age should be concerned about the new pimple growing on his forehead, he has to worry about making money to feed his family, and just trying to survive. He understands that there is more to life and wants better things for himself and his family, but each time he makes an effort to improve his life, forces beyond his control prevent him from doing so."

There were several days of shooting in Dubai during which Munir and the rest of the production got a firsthand look at the quality of life experienced by immigrant workers like Wasim and his father. "It was scary," recounts the actor. "There were six or seven men and boys squashed into these freight containers that were converted into some form of housing quarters, in 100 degree heat and with no adequate ventilation systems and very little light. I hope when audiences see what the lives of such people are like, they'll understand what draws them down such a road and try to understand and not judge Wasim. Hopefully, the film will enable viewers to begin to understand how people are manipulated into performing such horrible acts."

"To me, the audience's greatest emotional connection in the film is through these two young boys," George Clooney muses. "I think it's a really interesting thing when you take the two most likeable characters in the film and then watch as they're sucked into this fundamentalist group. And you begin to understand how something like that could happen. It's not an excuse for it at all, but it is saying that you can't just categorize things. They are human beings and they make decisions - some of them wrong, but we understand what led to those decisions."

That Munir made his motion picture debut in a complex and thoughtful film like Syriana made his experience that much more fulfilling. "The story of Wasim needs to be told, and I don't think this story has ever been told in this way. For the first time you get to see the entire process of how one gets involved in such terror. It's really sad how such evil minds recruit and play God with these children, using religion as their justification. Knowing that there are boys like Wasim who are subjected to this kind of manipulation made it quite emotional for me to play this role. I'm glad this movie has been made, and working alongside great artistic minds like Stephen Gaghan was a treat."

Gaghan has similar feelings about his experience working with his entire ensemble of talented actors. "One of the incredible things about this cast," says Gaghan, "is that every time you're working on a storyline that involves one of these guys, you want to see what happens when he walks out of the room. Christopher Plummer, playing this über-lawyer, you look at him in his black tie at this Washington party and you want to know who's on his phone list, who he's calling. I can't imagine anybody working with Chris Cooper who wouldn't walk away saying I've got to write a movie for this character. I had a clear image of one scene that William Hurt does with George Clooney in a theater, and the way these guys played it was 50 times better than the way I'd envisioned it. Working with this cast was an amazing experience."

BREAKING LANGUAGE BARRIERS

Throughout the making of Syriana, it was of the utmost importance to everyone involved that the film achieve the greatest degree of realism and cultural and regional accuracy possible. Throughout the film, many of the characters speak fluently in their native languages, while others speak languages other than their own, but inflected with the appropriate accent for the character's place of origin. Great care was taken to ensure that not only the words but the accents and inflections were accurate.

"It was important to all of us that the Arabs in this movie be portrayed as realistically as possible," explains producer Georgia Kacandes. "We were sensitive to the fact that people's language is a point of pride to them and we wanted to show that respect to the Arabic people who would be watching this movie. Otherwise, it would be like having someone who's supposed to be from Brooklyn speak with an accent from Mississippi. At the very least, it takes you out of the reality of the movie; at worst it makes it appear the filmmakers didn't care about the people they were representing."

The production hired a team of translators and dialect coaches. Some of them took on the task of working with the English-speaking actors of Arabic decent - some of whom had never set foot in the countries of their parents' birth. While most of the Middle Eastern-bred actors were able to speak some Arabic or Urdu, there was one actor who would be required to speak Arabic and Farsi who had grown up in Kentucky and likely never heard the language anywhere except on television.

The job of teaching George Clooney how to speak fluent Arabic fell to Samia Adnan, a Sudanese linguistics professor from London who served as the film's main dialect coach. "It's interesting, you know, because there's no Latin derivative, nothing you can latch on to," Clooney relates. "If you're speaking Italian, which I'm trying to learn, or any of the European languages, there are words, there are sounds that are sort of familiar. I had to learn some Farsi; I had to learn to say some things in Arabic which, at first, I just learned phonetically. But it can't just be this disconnected jumble of words. So, you have to find ways to connect them, to make them expressive. It was tricky. It was also interesting - and fun."

For Samia Adnan, teaching the English-speaking actors to speak an Arabic dialect as if it was their second language was understandably easier than teaching those playing Arabic characters how to sound as natural as a native speaker. "Prince Nasir and Prince Meshal, for example, are two of the most important native Arabic roles in the movie," she explains, "but neither of the actors knew Arabic before they began, and Alexander Siddig did not know the Arabic alphabet. Both were raised in England and first had to overcome their English accent. They both worked very hard, not only to speak with a standard accent, but also to sound like princes."

"Being an English actor," says Alexander Siddig, who plays Nasir, "my challenge when delivering lines in Arabic was that an Arabic audience will not only understand what those lines mean, they will understand all the nuances of this prince character that culturally is part of their mindset. So in a way, it necessitated employing two acting styles for different idioms at the same time."

The young oil worker characters Wasim and Farooq are Urdu-speaking Pakistanis. Mazhar Munir, who plays Wasim, speaks several languages including Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi, but not Arabic. "Part of their story was that they speak broken Arabic," says Samia Adnan. "Well, that wasn't hard: I taught them Gulf Arabic and just let them break it by their nature."

While Matt Damon speaks English throughout the film, as expert oil analyst Bryan Woodman he was faced with some sophisticated industry dialogue that needed a bit of translation. Damon made sure he understood every word that came out of his mouth. "Even if ninety percent of the people who see the movie believe you, the two percent who you really want to believe you are the experts in the field," notes the actor. "I wanted the people who actually do Bryan's job to look at the movie and feel like everything was believable."

COSTUME DESIGN

Authenticity was just as vital when it came to costuming the actors, and the filmmakers took great care in ensuring that the many cultures represented in Syriana were accurately depicted throughout the film. That considerable responsibility fell to costume designer Louise Frogley, whose previous films include Traffic, Spy Game and the acclaimed television movie Live From Baghdad. Frogley was charged with maintaining authenticity while creating an enormous, international array of wardrobe changes that crossed cultural and class lines.

"We made great effort to be as ethnically correct with our costumes as possible, because each state, each country is so incredibly different," explains Frogley. "For example, in the madrassa scenes, the boys are mostly Pakistani. So we made contact with a man in Pakistan and bought some sportswear from his factory. He also went into the village and bought lots of second hand clothes, which he then shipped to us, so it was all authentic.

At times, it was important not to include details that would call out a particular segment of society. "We also created a number of generic looks," explains Frogley, "either because we didn't want to offend a particular group - for example, we might not have wanted all the terrorists to look Saudi, so we dressed them as generic Arabs - or because we wanted to avoid getting too specific with the region being represented - for instance, if you're in a specific part of Pakistan, you might see a lot of jeweled hats."

Wardrobe was reflective not only of region, but specific to the characters' personalities and histories. For instance, Prince Nasir and his brother Meshal were educated in Europe, and so while their father wears traditional Arab clothing, his sons dress in a distinctly western style. Nasir's wife wears a headscarf and covers her arms and legs, but did not wear a traditional burka, in a nod to her and her husband's progressive views in regards to women.

George Clooney as Bob Barnes was dressed down in cheaper suits, while industrious lawyer Bennett Holiday displays a distinctly sharper style. "We thought Bennett's character would be a very snappy dresser," says Frogley. "He's the type of person who would probably line up his pencils in a row, so we extended that attitude to his style. And it worked."

Frogley's department created over 2,000 costumes for characters whose origins ranged from corporate America to the slums of the Gulf States.

PRODUCTION DESIGN

Syriana was filmed on location, rather than on a soundstage, with production traveling around the globe to capture the inimitable essence of the landscape and societies they would be depicting. "For example, the light in the Persian Gulf is pretty irreplaceable," says Gaghan. "There's so much construction going on all the time in Dubai that it throws an immense amount of dust into the air. So whether you're there in summer or winter, the sky is really leaden. You can't recreate that in the states."

The locations also served to focus the actors and filmmakers on what they were attempting to capture. "The minute you go on location you sense exactly what you're trying to do," explains Clooney. "Being in a Third World country, for example, is not a feeling you can capture filming on a soundstage. You're in Morocco and five times a day a siren goes off and everybody stops their cars and gets out in the middle of the streets and kneels down and prays. Being in a place informs any artistic work that's set there."

Giving the film's interweaving storylines a visual continuity was cinematographer Robert Elswit, whose credits include Magnolia, Tomorrow Never Dies and Boogie Nights, who shot the entire movie using a pair of hand-held cameras. This unusual cinematographic approach was intended to give the film a quasi-documentary style, providing a sense of backroom intimacy and ripped-from-the-headlines urgency that slicker, mounted-camera shots couldn't provide.

Production designer Dan Weil (The Bourne Identity, The Fifth Element) spanned a multitude of national and economic boundaries in creating sets ranging from an Emir's palace to the humble barracks where itinerant oilfield workers are housed.

A crew of approximately 200 and a cast of more than 100 covered three continents over a period of five months to complete filming of Syriana. Production began at a game preserve that location manager Todd Christensen found in Hondo, Texas, about an hour west of San Antonio. The 777 Ranch has one of the largest herds of exotic animals in North America on its 15,000 acres. It has been a destination resort for hunters and photographers for over 40 years and features over 50 species of deer, antelope, gazelle, oryx, ibex, goat, sheep and bison, among other animals from plains, jungles and forests around the globe.

Filming moved to the eastern U.S. locales of Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Annapolis where George Clooney and Matt Damon began filming.

Despite heavy post 9/11 security, the production was allowed to shoot on the streets of D.C., not far from the White House and Capitol Dome. The filmmakers had hoped that the political balance of the script would help in negotiating permissions to film in the politically sensitive environment of the nation's governing nerve center. Location manager Christensen had to meet with a panel of 12 personnel from the Justice Department who would decide if and how filming would occur in D.C. While all the locations involved certain restrictions, the company was able to achieve what it wanted within those parameters.

The production also gained a rare permission to film around the Maryland State Capitol building in Annapolis. Other U.S. locations included the Enoch Pratt Library in Washington which served as Donald Farish's Justice Department office, a 1940s diner in downtown Baltimore called the Sip 'n Bite where Bob Barnes has an intense late night meeting with Dean Whiting, and the woodsy setting of the Piper Rudnick law firm, which served as CIA headquarters. The company also created the Tengiz oil field out of an industrial construction site in southern Baltimore.

Production then left the country to begin shooting in Casablanca. Morocco's largest city and commercial capital, Casablanca rests on one of the biggest and busiest man-made ports in the world. Although Islam is the dominant religion - with the grandest Muslim temple besides those found in Mecca - Casablanca boasts a large and vibrant Jewish community as proof of its tradition of tolerance. In 2003, on the day after suicide bombers attacked multiple targets in the city, including a Jewish-owned business and a Jewish cemetery, two million people took to the streets to protest radical fundamentalism. Syriana was the first movie to film there since the bombings and security measures were extensive.

Casablanca would fill in as three different locales where filming would not be possible for even greater safety reasons: Tehran, Beirut and an unnamed, oil-producing Persian Gulf country. Interestingly, Casablanca is almost identical to Beirut in its layout, a city on a bay with dominantly French architecture. Much of Beirut has been rebuilt and looks like a modern city, which might've been difficult to duplicate in Morocco, but Gaghan wasn't interested in doing 'postcard' establishing shots, opting instead to capture an environment that was close in feeling to the older parts of Beirut.

Likewise, Tehran is more of a stripped down version of Casablanca but surrounded by huge mountains that can be seen from any part of the city. Production wasn't looking for vistas, but rather for buildings that evoked the feeling of Tehran without any specific identifying characteristics. The greatest challenge in re-creating Tehran in Casablanca involved the stripping away of layers of French and Moroccan influence.

The production did have to put up a poster of the Ayatollah Khomeini in a particularly populated portion of the city, which raised a few eyebrows in this secularly-governed Islamic country. Other details also had to be tended to in order to authentically re-create a country governed by orthodox religious laws. A playing card motif in a kabob shop had to be removed because gambling would not be allowed in Iran, and actresses had to remember to put scarves on their heads before going out on the streets.

There were also some political sensitivities that the filmmakers had to work around. Taking down Moroccan flags and putting up Lebanese flags was acceptable, but putting up the Iranian flag was problematic. Production also had to get permission to put an oil tanker in the harbor near Morocco's biggest refinery and close it down for three days, which required quite a bit of diplomatic maneuvering.

Parisian-based production designer Dan Weil has had a good deal of exposure to the Middle East and incorporated much of what he had observed in his travels in establishing the realism that Gaghan demanded. Weil, whose designs have run the gamut from the super-stylistic The Fifth Element to the very cinéma vérité The Bourne Identity, explained the importance of shooting on location rather than building sets on a stage for Syriana.

"Beirut was quite easy to shoot in Casablanca, but using the city to stand in for Tehran was more complicated," the production designer notes. "We in the West have this idea of Tehran as an Arabic city when actually it's more like a Ukrainian city. When you look at photos, it reminds you more of Kiev or Odessa. Also, the people are Muslim but they are not Arab."

Among the locations utilized in Casablanca were an historic French military headquarters in the Old Medina, a beachfront along a resort coastline, the city's government buildings, and an inner city neighborhood where most of the inhabitants didn't own TVs and many didn't have electricity.

After wrapping in Casablanca, production moved on to Geneva. Despite its physical beauty and historical importance, there hadn't been a major movie shot in this European city since GoldenEye had filmed a few days there a decade earlier.

The Presidential Suite in the grand Hotel President Wilson, adjacent to the site of the former League of Nations, was the setting for several scenes in which the Emir and his sons conduct business.

Scenes were also set in the English Garden, created in 1854 and set on the left bank of Lake Geneva against the backdrop of the city's trademark Le Jet D'Eau. Other key scenes were shot in a bank that stood in for the brokerage where Bryan Woodman works, and at a private house that served as the home where the Woodmans lived happily before the tragedy that transforms their lives. That particular neighborhood included homes owned by the eldest son of the founder of Saudi Arabia and an Indian prince. The production also utilized the city's largest cemetery, Cimetiere des Rois (King's Cemetery), founded in the 16th Century, as the site of Max Woodman's funeral.

From Geneva, the company moved to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The Emirates is one of the world's newer nations, officially declaring the unification of its nation-states as a single national entity in 1971 when seven Emirs ruling seven different portions of adjacent territory joined forces under an enlightened leader to form the United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is one state.

The terrain of the U.A.E., combined with its pro-Western inclinations, makes an ideal location for movies. Dubai, in particular, has all the elements a movie might wish to incorporate into its narrative: beach, mountains, desert and a mega-modern city.

There had never been a major Western movie filmed in Dubai with official permissions. Michael Winterbottom had broken new ground with shooting some of his futuristic Code 46 in and around the concrete corridors of this rapidly expanding metropolis, but it was mainly guerilla filmmaking, without permits and certainly without the high-tech equipment and high profile of Syriana.

The film packed a unique load of potential diplomatic dynamite for a trailblazing movie production in this Arabic country: The Emirates are close allies with Yemen, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, whose governments might not take kindly to some of the portrayals of Islamic fundamentalism and discontent among the migrant labor pool.

Further, the movie would be shooting there during the holiest of Muslim holidays: the month-long festival of Ramadan, the month of fasting and prayer during which no food or drink, smoking or gum-chewing are permitted in daylight hours. Many members of the crew, as well as the locally-cast extras, were observing the holiday, and production made every effort to be respectful and accommodating. Special tents were set up where non-observing members of the production team could eat and drink out of sight of those who were fasting, and as soon as the sun went down, production slowed and a break-fast meal was served before shooting continued.

The fact that there was no precedent upon which to gauge possible outcomes from filming was cause for the filmmakers' initial hesitation in committing to filming in Dubai. But the growth of Western business interests in the U.A.E., an enlightened leadership and the presence of an experienced television commercial production company in Dubai combined to give the production confidence they could make it work.

While it presented unique challenges, Dubai also offered cinematic opportunities that couldn't be found anywhere else in the world. In fact, while initially Syriana was only going to be in Dubai for about four days, with the city serving primarily as city backdrops, once the producers got a look at all the city had to offer, they decided to extend four days shooting into four weeks.

"It's a very interesting place in that it's a very modern city - perhaps the only major city to have been built in the 21st Century," says Weil. "I found it interesting that it looks very much like certain modern American cities like Houston - also built around oil riches. But you couldn't shoot this in America because there is a specific look to the Gulf States that you don't find anywhere else."

The civic authorities of Dubai, an independent governing body from the U.A.E., had some concerns about the film's content and timing that had to be overcome. But they ultimately concluded that giving permission for the company to shoot - even during the Holy month of Ramadan - would benefit the state more than it would hurt it. Dubai wants to develop its film industry and its leaders wanted to demonstrate that they were open to a large degree of freedom of creative expression. "Dubai is really unique," says Gaghan. "They're undertaking a pretty amazing experiment. They're trying to build an economy that's not dependent on oil - they're pursuing this idea of trying to make it a technological center."

Dubai proved its versatility for several key scenes. The Royal Mirage Hotel, the grandest resort on Dubai's Jumeira Beach, served as the Marbella Estate home of the Emir. The Al-Maha Resort, set on a 225 square kilometer reserve and billed as the "first Arabian eco-tourism resort," was the setting for Prince Nasir's catalytic meeting with Bryan Woodman. The Shangri-La Hotel not only housed the cast and crew but was used for several of the interior scenes, as well as a part of a climactic sequence at the Emir's party.

Production also incorporated the vast desert, as well as the opulent city backdrop, the creek which divides Dubai from adjacent Deira, and a barracks near a construction site where migrant workers are housed. In the scorching heat of the desert, at times temperatures hit 120°.

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