Stephen Gaghan, writer of Traffic and Syriana: 'When basic reality is satire, drama’s backed into a tight corner'

The Oscar-winner discusses new film ‘Gold’ and his ten-year absence from filmmaking

The speech by Kenny Wells, played by Matthew McConaughey, is Stephen Gaghan’s is most personal moment in Gold (Getty)

You’re no doubt familiar with the term “the pen is mightier than the sword”. Stephen Gaghan, in many ways, is empirical proof of the fact. Not to suggest that the Oscar-winning writer of Traffic and Syriana would ever opt for the metaphorical weapon over his irrefutably talented way with words, though.

Gold marks a departure for Gaghan – it’s his first feature directing from someone else’s script. There was one part he couldn’t resist tinkering with, however. The scene in question sees Matthew McConaughey’s protagonist, the recklessly ambitious Kenny Wells, deliver a speech while accepting a Prospector of the Year award. It’s a speech about hope, ambition and ultimately achieving something previously thought unattainable. Gaghan tells me this is Gold’s most personal moment.

“The way I’m wired, I have a lot of self-doubt,” he tells me. “I’m always wondering whether I’ve done the right thing. Should be, would be, could be.” He trails off.

One watch of Gold and it’s clear that Gaghan rose to the challenge enthusiastically (“I was surprised by how much I enjoyed working from someone else’s script,” he admits) but has no qualms with stating his preferred method of filmmaking.

“I think it’s always better to shoot your own stuff because you come with such an advantage; you just know the answers to all the questions already. But often the thing I’m interested in isn’t the thing the world is interested in,” he stops, adding with as much care as he would a line to a scene: “Or doesn’t know it’s yet interested in.”

Perhaps this is why it’s been more than ten years since Gaghan’s last film (2005 oil drama Syriana starring George Clooney), a pressure he felt heightening within himself every new day.

“I was working on something every single day, trying to get it made,” he explains. “I had all these movies. I’d be right there on the one-yard line and then something would happen, and it’d happen again and again and again. At a certain point I thought, “Wow, I’m pretty angry. I got to get something’.”

After years of excavation, Gaghan unearthed the script for crime adventure Gold and eyed an opportunity to broaden his directing horizons. He was instantly drawn to the material, in the same breath mentioning John Huston’s 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre starring Humphrey Bogart.

“I mean, that movie’s a classic – I don’t mean to mention it in the same breath – but Gold has the same genre shifts. It has serious drama, human wreckage, unbelievable highs, comedy, the last act is a thrill. I’m self-critical and set the bar very high by asking questions like: ‘What the f**k would John Huston do?’”

But his point stands – Gold is the kind of film that’d fit right at home in a past decade, chief of the several things it has in common with both Traffic and Syriana, in their own way, they are crime dramas eschewed towards political corruption. With mention of the “p” word, it’s difficult to prevent the conversation from flowing towards events currently gripping his homeland courtesy of the newly-elected President, Donald Trump.

“You know, I think the current political situation presents an enormous challenge in that, at the top, you have caricature – something unbelievable – that it’s hard to dramatise it, It’s hard to top it. When basic reality is already a satire, drama’s backed into a tight corner.”

Over the approaching decade, the adept writer will no doubt feel a responsibility to put pen to paper on such an era-defining subject, a fact that’s not lost on him.

“I’m really thinking about it,” he mulls. “I’m gonna do something [on Trump]. I have a lot of ideas brewing up.”

Fortunately for deep-thinker Gaghan, at least he now has the material to propel him onwards should he require inspiration: that very speech performed by McConaughey in Gold.

“That speech is on how I feel about the creative life, about trying to write and create something from nothing while having this enormous amount of faith. That’s what work is like for me,” he muses. “You’ve got to go out there in the world, slay a dragon and make something happen so you can feel good about yourself. What you create is deeply tied to how you feel on the inside.”

Gold is in cinemas now