"So, You Ever Kill Anybody?"

Very few screenwriters get kidnapped. In Hollywood, where most of them live and work, they're considered low-value targets. But moments after arriving in Beirut in 2002, Stephen Gaghan, the Oscar-winning writer of Traffic, found himself in what seemed to be a hostage situation. His cell phone rang, and the voice on the other end said, "I've got something really special you can do, but you have to do it right now and I can't tell you what it is." Gaghan walked out of the airport and got into a car with a stranger. As they drove, he was stripped of his backpack, pens and belt, and was blindfolded, hooded and thrown into the back of another car. "There was a bad 10 minutes in there where I'm thinking, 'You are really an idiot,'" he says. "'You're like Mr. Magoo. You just wander over to the Middle East and, literally, within the first 20 minutes get kidnapped and beheaded. World record!'"

The abduction turned out to be standard procedure for anyone visiting Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, spiritual leader of the Lebanese Shi'ite militia Hizballah, who, unbeknownst to Gaghan, had an interest in movies and had decided to grant the screenwriter an audience--even though Gaghan hadn't requested one. Naturally, the near kidnapping found its way into Gaghan's new film Syriana, which dramatizes the politics of oil, terrorism and the Persian Gulf in much the same way Traffic spun entertainment out of addiction, drug policy and the U.S.-Mexico border. If anything, Syriana, which opens Nov. 23, is more ambitious and demanding than its predecessor. The movie has multiple narratives that are deliberately confusing. It casts an actor known for his likability, Matt Damon, as an oil trader profiting on the death of his son. It takes a star, George Clooney, known for his sex appeal and hides him behind a thick beard and a ring of flab. "It's a miracle this film got made," says Gaghan.

More miraculous is how it was made. Before agreeing to write and direct the movie, Gaghan got Warner Bros. to give him an unlimited research budget and no deadline. For a year and a half, he read books on the Middle East in his Malibu beach house and then, at his leisure, jetted off to meet people he had read about. He crossed Lebanon's Bekaa Valley on the first anniversary of 9/11, dined with men now suspected of killing former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, and sipped cappuccino in the kitchen of former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle. Being a guy from Hollywood was often all it took to get people talking. "Steve got to do some amazing things," says Clooney, who is also Syriana's executive producer. "Other screenwriters probably want to kidnap him out of jealousy."