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 cliché."

"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.