Killers rendered in shades of gray

WHEN the towers came down on Sept. 11, Stephen Gaghan, the Oscar-winning writer of “Traffic,” realized in a flash that “Hollywood has done a terrible job creating villains.” It all used to be so simple, so black and white. There were the good guys and the bad guys -- not people willing to blow themselves up in order to blow up their enemies.

This fall Gaghan and the Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad will release films that represent ambitious attempts to unearth the root causes of terrorism and suicide bombers. Both happen to come from the Warner Bros. conglomerate -- Gaghan’s $50-million “Syriana,” from big Warner’s, and Abu-Assad’s $2-million “Paradise Now,” from Warner’s new specialty division, Warner Independent. Both are thrillers in a sense -- but without the genre’s usual catharsis. In a throwback to the politically engaged films of the ‘70s, the point isn’t to reassure moviegoers but to provoke them.

“The principal advantage of someone like Saddam Hussein as a villain is you knew where you could find him,” says Gaghan, whose film is due in theaters Nov. 23. “He was in a palace that was built by American contractors. We know all the secret doors. How he gets out. We can find him and drop bombs on him. After 9/11, there’s this whole shift. Suddenly there’s this guy” -- Gaghan, who’s nursing coffee in a coffee shop near his home in Santa Monica, doesn’t even name Osama bin Laden but is clearly talking about him. “He may or may not have been born in the Sudan. He may have been raised in Yemen. He may have lived in Saudi Arabia. He may be in Afghanistan. He may be in Pakistan. He may be in a cave. He’s like the ether, or the Internet. He’s everywhere, but from this cave he can deliver this incredible amount of destruction. I was just curious. Why are these people so angry? Is it just that we have military bases in Mecca?”

Two years before Gaghan began thinking about this question, Abu-Assad began researching suicide bombers. Like Gaghan, Abu-Assad, whose film comes to theaters Friday, is in his early 40s; and like Gaghan, he’s tall, lean, loquacious and charismatic. Abu-Assad spent the first 19 years of his life in Palestine, before immigrating to the Netherlands. He was aware of suicide bombers -- as a kid, he had been fascinated with Japanese kamikazes and the Egyptian commandos in the 1967 war with Israel -- and now when he returns home to visit his well-to-do, liberal family, he sees the posters all over the streets of Gaza of the self-proclaimed martyrs who’ve blown themselves up, along with various Israeli soldiers and civilians. But as he began contemplating the topic, he realized how ignorant he actually was.

“It makes you more frightened when you discover you don’t know anything,” he says over dinner in Los Angeles during a recent publicity tour, “how much you make an image from fear, which is not a realistic image. It’s so complex a deed -- at the same time you kill yourself, you become a killer.”

Gaghan’s film, which he also directed, is a far-reaching examination of what he calls the drug of the 20th century: oil. Structured like “Traffic,” with overlapping story lines, it examines the corrosive and corrupting impact of the search for black gold -- from oilmen in Texas to lobbyists and lawyers in Washington, oil traders in Geneva, corrupt and progressive sheiks, CIA agents, disenfranchised Pakistani oil workers, suicide bombers.

Abu-Assad’s film focuses on a few days in the life of two would-be suicide bombers in Nablus, from their dead-end jobs as auto mechanics, to smoking a hookah overlooking the valley, to what unfolds after they strap on the bombs and cross into Israel. These are not suicide bombers as fundamentalist zealots but as guys who are misguided yet relatable -- at least to Western viewers.

While TV has already begun to focus on the phenomenon, with miniseries on sleeper cells and plotlines of detective shows, the film business so far has largely dealt with the phenomenon of terror metaphorically, elusively if at all. Of all the arts, Hollywood is generally the slowest to respond to current events, for both institutional and cultural reasons. The middlemen between filmmakers and the screen are usually the studios, whose bureaucracies don’t move quickly and who in recent decades have been increasingly loath to step into even mildly contentious waters lest congressional leaders put a cramp on their expansion plans or Chinese officials ban Mickey Mouse figures.

Neither “Syriana” nor “Paradise Now” is a politically timid film.

“There’s trouble coming our way,” says George Clooney, who stars in “Syriana” and executive-produced it with his partner Steven Soderbergh. “We did ‘Three Kings,’ but it was five years after the first Gulf War, which wasn’t nearly as controversial as the second. I can’t think of a film that talks about what makes somebody a bad guy -- it always has had some sort of historical cushion.

“If you’re doing ‘MASH,’ it’s about the Korean War, but it’s really taking on the Vietnam War,” says Clooney, whose recent directorial effort, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” showcases journalist Edward R. Murrow’s 1954 confrontation with Sen. Joseph McCarthy but is a potent allegory about the timidity and vacuousness of today’s press corps. “[‘Syriana’] is talking about events going on right now. It’s saying there are absolute evils indeed, and if you’re going to have a war -- not against a state, like we usually do, but against an ideal -- then we’re going to have to understand what creates that passion.”

Clooney cautions that it’s not an “attack on Bush. It’s an attack on corruption. It’s not black and white. It’s complex.”

If the “Syriana” camp seems girding for a fight, then the “Paradise Now” one is gearing to tamp one down. In an attempt to publicize the Arabic-language film, Warner Independent has been screening it to groups across the political debate, from Arab Americans to academic groups to Israelis and American Jews. “I know it will spur a lot of debate,” says Mark Gill, the president of Warner Independent Pictures, who bought the film this past winter at the Berlin Film Festival. “So far it seems to be fairly reasoned debate. I don’t know if it’s going to get more heated. So far it has not, but sometimes these things catch fire. For me, [the film’s] an anthem for peace from the last place you’d expect.”

Abu-Assad says that while his film has received good reviews in Palestine and Israel, it has created controversy within the Palestinian government. He says the Palestinian minister of culture disdained “Paradise Now,” publicly calling it “an ‘orientalist movie’ -- like the West would like to see the East,” Abu-Assad explains. The film was nonetheless named official Palestinian entry for the Academy Awards.

For Western viewers, it’s novel just to see authentic Palestinian life -- streets, homes, what the checkpoints actually look like -- rather than news clips from CNN, or political demonstrations or talking heads spouting agitprop. At a recent forum here put together by USC, one professor thanked Abu-Assad for righting what she contended was the media’s typical depiction of Palestinians as “subhuman.”

Abu-Assad nonetheless chafed at the intended compliment. As he explained over dinner, “The American ignorance of the Arab people is not my problem. I will not make a movie in order to let you know more about my situation. I was making the movie for myself. I want to make a painting of reality in order to understand it better.”

A circuitous journey

NOT long after Sept. 11, Gaghan found his guide into the world of Middle Eastern politics: Robert Baer, a former CIA agent whose book “See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism” inspired Clooney’s character in the film, that of an increasingly disillusioned CIA officer. Gaghan and Baer ultimately spent six weeks traveling together, from the luxury mansions that Middle Eastern oil barons and arms magnates maintain in the South of France to Syria and Lebanon, where they met numerous sources -- among them tribal leaders, the leaders of Hezbollah, the Lebanese minister of culture and the Syrian oil minister. Gaghan took copious notes in college-ruled notebooks.

“How I thought things operated in these giant warring nation states wasn’t exactly how it happened. In fact, there are these critical people in between -- these information merchants. They could be someone just like Bob, a midlevel guy at the CIA, who’s just a nexus point for really good, accurate information for what people are intending. These guys are like lubrication for all these endeavors. They’re like a little club. Bob speaks Arabic, Farsi and French and spent 20 years there. He can pick up the phone and call a guy with Rembrandts and Van Goghs on his walls, who says, ‘I’m going out with my family on the yacht tomorrow. Come with us.’ Twenty-four hours later we’d be sitting on the fantail of a beautiful boat while seven blond Yugoslavians were serving us buffalo mozzarella.”

Gaghan soon realized that the meetings were never accidental -- that Baer was hunting for information about the whereabouts of Al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, later acknowledged to be the mastermind behind Sept. 11. (“Bob had turned Danny Pearl on to that story, and he felt some guilt about what happened.”) Baer also wanted the addresses of the families of the suicide bombers who flew the planes, a few of whom he wound up going to see as the pair drove across the region’s Bekaa valley.

Gaghan later continued his research in Europe and Washington, D.C., where he hung out with energy traders and interviewed members of the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank that is considered the neocon incubator of the Iraq War. He chatted with members of the Carlyle Group, the investment bank that boasts such advisors as former President George H.W. Bush and former British Prime Minister John Major; hung out with American oilmen; and interviewed lawyers who perform American legal work for various Gulf nations.

One such law firm, he says, received $36 million for “services rendered. I asked Bob what the check was for. It was to stop an FBI investigation.” Everybody talked to him. After all, he was, as he describes himself, nothing more than “a Hollywood screenwriter, a cliche.”

“For the grandiose plans and strategy that everybody seemed to be harboring, a screenwriter is a safe audience. You’re never going to quote them on the record. With this hubris and arrogance, they’re absolutely convinced they’re going to win you over to whatever way they’re thinking. It’s relatively safe, and yet movies are a relatively uncensored art form. They can have a small agitprop effect.

“The more I met these people -- whoever it was -- I realized how closely the notions of avarice were bubbling up just beneath the surface of whatever geopolitical strategies they were talking about. They’re all these cut-rate Talleyrands who are espousing some great vision, and just beneath it is ‘Here’s how I’m going to get mine.’ ”

The 40-year-old Gaghan, who grew up affluent in Kentucky before becoming a heroin addict and later going clean, still has a recovering addict’s exquisite sense of moral culpability. In person, he’s less a raving Oliver Stone than a man condemned to see human failing. He’s also an almost compulsive talker and storyteller.

“I have an old car. A ’66 GTO with a 6.5-liter engine. It gets five miles to the gallon. I’m driving around in that because there’s cheap gas here in America. Our lifestyle is predicated on our ascendancy in the energy business over the 20th century. We’re all beneficiaries of that. I’m complicit. You’re complicit. We’re all complicit. We hide behind the fact that we don’t understand. In a movie, which is so visual, you have the ability to cut instantly from something in the Middle East to something in America. As you put these things next to each other, they would start to have thematic resonance. A pattern could become clear. You could feel less confused by the events of the world today.”

In “Syriana” -- the title refers to the West’s ambitions to remake the Middle East -- Gaghan presents stories that echo today’s headlines: the recent indictment of Texas oilman Oscar S. Wyatt on corruption charges, the suicide bombs that blew up Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel, the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Clooney’s character, Barnes -- like the real Bob Baer -- infiltrated Hezbollah in the 1980s and, in this fictional incarnation, is assigned by the CIA to perform a hit on a Middle Eastern political leader. Matt Damon plays a Geneva-based oil analyst who winds up as the consultant to a reform-minded sheik locked in a succession battle with his younger, pro-American brother. Mazhar Munir, a Pakistani actor from England, is a Pakistani oil worker who is laid off from his job and finds himself seduced by a radical Islamic cleric. Each character -- even Baer’s -- is somewhat naive to the larger global picture, but the audience is not.

“Sometimes movies that are about something can be preachy movies,” says Jeff Robinov, president of production of Warner Bros. “The goal [here] is to make you feel for the people in the situation and have you connect to the people. I don’t see our mission to change the world. You make movies that you respond to. You can pick up the newspaper and see how oil prices are affecting the country, housing, unemployment. People are living it and feeling it.”

Still, given the cost of “Syriana,” it’s a big bet for the studio. And it could have cost even more, but Soderbergh and Clooney pressured everyone to take reduced fees to make the film, which was shot in Washington, Geneva, Dubai, Oman and Morocco.

The war in Iraq does not appear in the film, but it is clearly the off-camera elephant in the room. “You think the war in Iraq has been good for the oil business. It’s been really good for the oil business,” says Gaghan, noting that when filming began, it cost him $23 to fill up his tank. It now costs $58.

During his research, the investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh introduced Gaghan to Richard Perle, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who is considered one of the neocon architects of the war in Iraq. It was weeks before the American invasion, and the screenwriter had just returned from Damascus, where he heard prognostications of what a quagmire the war would be.

“I’m in Perle’s kitchen. He’s passing out favors in the Bush administration. He’s dispensing wisdom and making me a cappuccino from this $3,000 cappuccino machine. He’s really smart, really clever, and I’m having a great time. I feel really lucky. I asked him, ‘Mr. Perle, I have just one question. Who’s going to run Iraq?’ He said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, we’re not going into that. Who says we’re going into Iraq?’

“I said, ‘Really, if we went in, who’s going to run the country?’ He said, ‘It’s a shame we haven’t done a better job of supporting Ahmad Chalabi. He’s a wonderful man.’ I said, ‘Listen, Chalabi hasn’t been in Iraq since 1959. He wears a Hermes tie. He lives in Paris. If he goes back there, they’re going to reject him like a bad organ transplant.’ ”

Gaghan says that suddenly Perle got very serious. “He looked at me like ‘Who let you in here?’ He stared daggers at me for about a minute.” Suddenly the doorbell rang. “He said, ‘Excellent. I’ll introduce you to Bibi on the way out.’ It was Benjamin Netanyahu, dropping by with nine Uzi-wielding Mossad agents.” As Perle ushered Gaghan out, Perle’s wheaten terrier puppy, Reagan, began jumping around and, as Gaghan describes it, “pawing the crotch of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu just stands there and shakes with rage. So I pulled the dog away from him and said, ‘Now, now, Reagan, not on former heads of state,’ and they just held the door open and let me out.”

Portraits of impotence

ABU-ASSAD’S journey also began with research. He talked to people who knew suicide bombers. He read Israeli police files about suicide bombers. Most importantly, he interviewed a lawyer who represented suicide bombers who had failed on their missions, whose bombs had not gone off as intended, and who thus had wound up in Israeli jails.

What does he think motivates them?

“I think the feeling of impotency, literally and figuratively,” says Abu-Assad, who speaks Arabic, Hebrew, Dutch and English. “It’s human nature. Somebody with his power is humiliating you. It makes you feel worse. It makes you feel like a coward that you can’t do anything. You don’t have an appetite for food. You don’t have sex. The moment I was once humiliated by a soldier, it took me a long time to enjoy sex again.”

His humiliation wasn’t even a particularly big deal. “A checkpoint thing. Facing the wall. You are afraid.”

Abu-Assad’s film is much like a Palestinian “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”: It focuses on two people on the periphery of history and watches them breathe. If the culminating event is horrific, the day-to-day buildup is almost surreal in its very mundaneness. When the two heroes make their martyrs’ video -- in the same spot in Nablus where real suicide bomber farewell videos are shot -- the camera fails to work, so they have to redo it. Their guerrilla group handlers watch and noisily eat their lunch -- packed by the unsuspecting mother of one of the would-be bombers.

Indeed, the guerrillas appear less ideologues than thugs preying on young men’s despair. When one of the friends suggests they’ll get to paradise afterward, the other smacks him on the head as if to knock that naivete right out. One of the protagonists is motivated by family shame -- he is the son of an Israeli collaborator killed by Palestinians. Yet their anguish seems palpable -- born of some mixture of poverty, hopelessness, fatherlessness and disenfranchisement. Abu-Assad shows their journey from the poor streets of Nablus to the beautiful and prosperous high-rises of Tel Aviv, a shocking journey, no doubt, but for American viewers it is unfortunately no more shocking than a trip from South-Central to Santa Monica.

Abu-Assad is a pacifist who doesn’t believe in the values of suicide bombing, but he does place the blame for Palestinian suffering squarely on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and formerly Gaza. Still, he didn’t intend to make a polemic. “If this is the case, I could make an article about it. I didn’t need to make a film.”

He says he struggled to find the balance between “two different worlds and different thoughts, between the world to condemn suicide bombers and the world who finds them a hero.... The tragedy is he wanted to be a hero and protect his society from injustice, but he ended up being a terrorist. It’s this balance you have to keep throughout the whole film, and you can easily fall.”

Abu-Assad, whose previous film, “Rana’s Wedding,” was financed by the Palestinian ministry of culture, shot the movie over 40 days in Nablus, Nazareth and Tel Aviv, which he says he wouldn’t have done if he’d known how hard it was going to be. “You have to shoot in a real place in real time in a war zone. It’s not a safe studio that you can control. The place is in control, not you.”

The filmmakers had to contend with the Israeli army and rival Palestinian factions who were all suspicious of their motives. A land mine went off yards from the set. There was an Israeli missile attack, and Palestinian gunmen ordered them to leave (six European crew members did); ultimately one Palestinian faction, afraid that Abu-Assad and his crew were making an anti-suicide bomber film, kidnapped their location manager. Although he’d never met him, Abu-Assad contacted Palestinian Prime Minister Yasser Arafat, and two hours later the crew member was released.

Abu-Assad says that the biggest surprise for him came when he began showing Islamic fundamentalists some respect. “Believe me, I was the first one in Nablus to fight against fundamentalism. Me. At the time, I was 19. We thought they were against civilization and progress. We were accused of being CIA agents or Mossad.” A member of his own family became a fundamentalist, and the family thought he’d been brainwashed and ostracized him.

Twenty years later, Abu-Assad contacted his relative and then talked to fundamentalist leaders. “When they discover you respect them, just respect, they become so very, very human and alive, and you don’t believe how much they open for you,” he says. “If you think you’re superior, you create fanatical people on the other side, especially if you’re stronger. You don’t know how much understanding you create when you are the strong and you do nothing but just listen.”

Contact Rachel Abramowitz at calendar.letters @latimes.com.