Talking About Traffic

Coming at the end of a particularly tepid year for movies, Traffic has been building anticipation with its controversial War On Drugs theme and its pairing of newlyweds Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Recess Associate Film Editor Greg Bloom caught up with screenwriter Stephen Gaghan as he was driving in his '66 GTO convertible through the mean streets of Brentwood....

Your movie Traffic has been getting some serious buzz about its drug war politics. Do you think of your script as a political piece?

You know, Lyndon Johnson said that all politics are personal. On some weird level, particularly with drug consumption, the personal is the political. At the end of the day, [a movie] is not a policy paper-it's entertainment, and hopefully good entertainment.

Do the politics or the characters come first, especially in this story?

Well, I've done a lot of research at the Pentagon-it's this big undertaking, with lots of points of view. And you get all this information, and all that's fine--very dry-but at some point you have to sit down and get the voices out. Stuff just pops in your head. I had researched for like a year and read like 50 books, and one morning in my beach house in Malibu, at 10:30 in the morning I just sat up in bed and there was this voice in my head, and it just said "Duck salad? You never eat duck salad."

That's...weird.

And I couldn't go back to sleep so I wrote it down and I realized it was from the Catherine Zeta-Jones character having a conversation while being served at a country club. That ended up being the first scene of the movie I wrote, although it doesn't happen until 20 minutes into it.

Your last movie, Rules of Engagement, also has some serious political issues in it. Do you find that Traffic and Rules of Engagement have conflicting politics?

I think that certain places are coming close to it. I think we're limping toward tolerance. Putting people in prison doesn't work-the only thing that does work is treatment. Hopefully we'll move away from finger-pointing and making addiction a moral failing, to tolerance and empathy. When I hear someone like Jesse Helms babble on about the war on drugs, it's like dealing with a space alien. He has no relevance to the issue. The people left to carry this debate forward are going to be people like you and me, and I think we have very different attitudes towards it. I don't know anybody under the age of 40 that doesn't think the war on drugs is moronic. Start trying to help people-it's much cheaper.

One more question about Traffic: The trailer didn't once mention drugs or anything related to the subject. Do you think the studio is trying to distance the movie from its politics?

I'm not sure actually.... I don't really know much about marketing movies. They might be. Hollywood is a place that is very reactionary. Let's just be straight about it-there was never a single movie made indicting the Vietnam War until long after the Vietnam War was over. Hollywood was not out in front saying, "Hey, let's make a movie about Jews getting killed out in ovens in Germany." Instead they say, "Let's not ruffle any feathers."

Hollywood is generally thought to be very liberal.

It's a mixed bag; it's a reflection of America. America gets the Hollywood it deserves, not vice versa.

Speaking of Hollywood, this past season has been pretty weak. Is there one script that you've seen this year that you wish you could take credit for?

I really liked Dancer in the Dark and Best in Show, which was very funny and profound in a way. I sorta liked The Contender. I didn't think it was a perfect film, but I thought it was interesting. And I enjoyed Requiem for A Dream. It's like the world's greatest drug statement. It's almost the polar opposite of Traffic--very much style over story, while our movie is story, story, story. I think it makes a nice companion piece to Traffic in a weird way-the two films taken together give you a real interesting overview of the whole emotional experience of the world of drugs.

I see that you are planning to direct one of your screenplays [Havoc]. How is it different to write a film that you are also going to direct?

Most directors start out as writers. It happens a lot. Steven Spielberg, Ingmar Bergman, Steven Soderbergh-you name it. It's a really natural progression because film, although it's obviously visual, is a narrative art. People eventually evolve if they have success as a writer and the right opportunities present themselves to make a movie. It's what all the training has been about--all the writing is a kind of training.

So your ultimate goal is to be a director?

If I get lucky and everything goes right, I'd like to direct movies and also write novels. I can't imagine anyone aspiring to be a screenwriter. Turning something very personal to you over to someone else to take over the goal line and interpret is a very hard process. I think that if you have the opportunity and have the skills, you can become a filmmaker and then work the art from beginning to end.