You couldn't have made this film five years ago. You couldn't have made a photo-realistic lion like Aslan five years ago, or joined animal legs unto a human body realistically as we did with centaurs and minotaurs five years ago. Now is the right time to be making this story.

In “Crimes & Misdemenaors,” Martin Landau did a terrible thing and his conscience gave him trouble. But my feeling is that terrible things are done all the time all over the world, and if you¬íre not guided by your own conscience, then there is no higher power to punish you. The same thing is true here with Jonathan Rhys Meyers. If his own conscience is not going to punish him, then he got away with it.

I go wherever the script takes me and then I try to get deeply into the life of that place. The best way of getting to know Venice was to experience it in person. I am fortunate to have been able to shoot the script in a location that inspired the story and every single person in the production.

It was interesting being completely anonymous. I have tried other disguises before and they haven't worked. But if you put on 30 pounds and grow a thick beard, you can walk into any restaurant in town and not get a table.

While “Syriana” is a very real term used by Washington think tanks to describe a hypothetical reshaping of the Middle East, in the movie, it is used more abstractly. Syriana, the concept, the fallacious dream that you can successfully remake nation-states in your own image, is a mirage. Syriana is a fitting title for a film that could exist at any time and be about any set of circumstances that deal with man's unchecked ambition, hubris, and the fantasy of empire.