''I think it's really important to go out of the theater wondering about its meaning," confirms Gaghan by phone. There's plenty to wonder about. His movie plumbs the game of geopolitical powerball played by Big Oil, the US government, and competing Mideast powerbrokers. Most have the integrity of a gnat and wallow in a world of espionage, assassination, and terrorism.
''Everything isn't explained in two hours," he concedes. ''The world is a big, complex, inscrutable place. Why take a complex world and reduce it to simple truths? That's kind of false."
(The filming of ''Syriana" was as complex as the meat of the movie. It was shot at 220 locations on four continents in five languages.)
For the record, the title ''Syriana" is, first, a metaphor, says Gaghan, like the title of the movie ''Brazil." ''It is the perpetual dream of the West to re-create the East to suit its purposes." It is also a specific term he heard in Washington think tanks while doing research for the film: ''It's about creating a new country with parts of Iran, Iraq, and Syria." (Iraq is never mentioned in the movie. ''It's too time-sensitive," he says.)
Like his mentor Steven Soderbergh, Gaghan is a pure writer-director who craves control of both arenas. ''I can't separate the two," he says, which is why he'll do both honors again on his next project, a film version of Malcolm Gladwell's ''Blink."
Talk movies with Gaghan and hold on. Ask about the provenance of ''Syriana" and he'll take you back to paranoid thrillers of the '70s, like Alan Pakula's ''The Parallax View" and Sydney Pollack's ''Three Days of the Condor." He'll throw in Bertolucci's ''The Conformist" too. (Gaghan considers the late Pakula, who also directed ''Klute" and ''All the President's Men," to be ''hall of fame.")
''I still don't understand everything in 'The Parallax View' and I've seen it 10 times," he says about the film in which Warren Beatty plays a reporter who stumbles onto a murderous corporate conspiracy.
