"So, You Ever Kill Anybody?"

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How Gaghan, 40, got such latitude is a tribute to the virtues of failure. In his teens and 20s, he had a serious drug problem that led to more than a dozen arrests. On his way to sobriety, he became perhaps the only writer in history to be rejected by both Baywatch Nights and Red Shoe Diaries before landing a job on NYPD Blue under celebrated writer guru David Milch. But struggling for years imbued him with an uncommon sense of purpose. After winning an Oscar for Traffic in 2001, Gaghan turned down seven-figure offers to write the fourth Indiana Jones movie and adapt The Da Vinci Code. Instead, inspired by an anecdote about an oil lobbyist in See No Evil, a memoir by former CIA officer Robert Baer, Gaghan decided to make a complex, journalistic movie about the politics of crude. "It's rare in Hollywood to get the chance to work on something that you actually care about," says Gaghan. "The tragedy of the place is all these talented people trying to get excited about stuff they themselves would only view at gunpoint."

Steven Soderbergh, who directed Traffic and whose production company, Section Eight, bought the rights to See No Evil, negotiated the deal with Warner Bros., even though details about the movie were nonexistent. "In those situations," says Soderbergh, "you never expect the studio to see the UFO, but you've got to make them believe you saw it." Still, Gaghan needed a story, and See No Evil was no help. Even Baer admits that much of the book is so esoteric that it's "wasted on everyone but Israeli intelligence."

So Gaghan did what everyone in Hollywood does--lunch. Sitting across from Baer for the first time, at a Santa Monica restaurant called Pedals ("A little fey for a high-level spook meeting," says Gaghan) in 2002, he sensed that the ex-spy, who was once accused of trying to arrange the assassination of Saddam Hussein, was far better movie material than his book. As it happened, Baer, who speaks Farsi and Arabic, was a willing conduit into the culture and characters of the Middle East. "Summer was ending, and I had to take my daughter back to boarding school in Europe," says Baer, 53. "All the players in the Gulf spend August in the south of France, so I told Gaghan, 'Come along. We'll see some arms dealers, some people from Fatah intelligence, some oil traders.' I wasn't a consultant on the film. This was just a road trip. The terrorism-arms-dealer-oil-trader tour!"

Gaghan, Baer and Baer's then 13-year-old daughter Charlotte met up in Nice. Within a few hours, they were relaxing on the yacht of a former Fatah intelligence officer. Then a representative of the Carlyle Group, the global investment behemoth, anchored next to them. "It kept getting crazier and crazier," says Baer. "You could see Gaghan beginning to frame a picture." Part of the insanity was the disconnect between Baer and his old associates. "I'm an ex-bureaucrat," says Baer. "I have no money. I got a $70,000 advance for my book--which in their world is a three-day trip to New York. I think Gaghan saw the tension there."