Matt Damon provides emotional core of 'Syriana'

Actor Matt Damon is used to espionage and intrigue, having starred as rogue agent Jason Bourne in "The Bourne Identity" and "The Bourne Supremacy."

While CIA operatives play just as big a part in Steven Gaghan's new political thriller "Syriana," Damon takes on a different role, that of energy analyst Bryan Woodman, a family man caught up in a political conspiracy when he starts working as the economic advisor to the son of Iran's Emir (Prince).

Damon discusses the complex and potentially controversial political thriller in the following interview:

Question: This is not an easy film for the audience. Does the complexity come through in the process of making the film?

Matt Damon: Yeah. It's a pretty complicated topic. We all did a lot of reading. [Stephen] Gaghan had a pretty good-sized reading list. He sent me like 12 books and I read some of them. I did my best.

Q: Talk about the emotional stuff your character is going through.

Damon: That's the real part of my role that is important to the movie as a whole, the balance of the movie. You've got four storylines going. Mine is the most emotional from the outset because of what happens. So, in that sense, it's the least complicated of the four stories. It's very easy for an audience to follow what's going on with the Bryan Woodman story because it's this big visceral occurrence at the beginning of it. So, that was my job in this one - to try and make that stuff be believable. One of the things I really liked about it is that Gaghan is not reductive with his characters. It's not that the guy is just ambitious. All the characters are pretty complex, are human. They're various shades of gray.

Q: In this movie, did you get a sense of what it's like to choose your job above your family and everything else?

Damon: I don't know that what I'm doing is necessarily just. He's pretty ambitious, and he is trading on his son's death. So, I wouldn't say he's doing something that's totally noble. But, yeah, I do understand people who choose that. I met a lot of them - Bob, or guys like the technical adviser in this other movie I'm doing ["The Good Shepherd"], who put in 30 years at the CIA. They make huge sacrifices.

Q: I saw your character as an ambitious guy who decides to be the reformer and take an emotional interest in the development the Emir's country. How did you come about this?

Damon: Well, with the death of his son, it's like there's this streak of nihilism that's running through him, where he's just like, "Fuck it." He gets humiliated when he goes to pitch and he doesn't even get into the room. So, now this guy says, "I'll give you this field; one of these fields are about to open up." He is professionally a little better and personally pissed off and self-destructive enough to be able to make a suggestion like that. Plus, it's not a bad idea to hook up with existing and run the oil overland rather than sail it all the way around Africa. It's a good idea. And it's kind of one of those common sense ideas, according to them, that is radical, but it makes total sense. Anybody who knows the ins and outs of it goes, "Yeah, well, that would be really smart, but it would cut all these people out of the pie." So, it never really gets suggested.

Q: What do you think the reaction will be from audiences to this movie?

Damon: My hope is that people will really like it; people have been missing movies like that. There's a lot of pressure on people who make movies to not make them confusing because you have two hours to tell a story, and the story costs x amount of dollars, and you want the maximum number of people to see it. The problem with that is that you get movies that are just so stupid that audiences don't like them. I think people want the discourse to be elevated a little bit, to be a little more challenging with your subject matter, and with your characters, and not reductive about them. Look, it's hard to read people in real life. I don't know what you're thinking right now. But a movie is going to tell you that I'm supposed to know exactly everything about you when you walk onscreen and open your mouth? I personally don't think that's that interesting. So, when you can make a movie that is a conversation-starter, I hope that the reaction will be like, "Thank God, we've been waiting for this."

Opening soon across the Philippines, "Syriana" is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Entertainment Company.