Killers rendered in shades of gray

WHEN the towers came down on Sept. 11, Stephen Gaghan, the Oscar-winning writer of "Traffic," realized in a flash that "Hollywood has done a terrible job creating villains." It all used to be so simple, so black and white. There were the good guys and the bad guys -- not people willing to blow themselves up in order to blow up their enemies.

This fall Gaghan and the Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad will release films that represent ambitious attempts to unearth the root causes of terrorism and suicide bombers. Both happen to come from the Warner Bros. conglomerate -- Gaghan's $50-million "Syriana," from big Warner's, and Abu-Assad's $2-million "Paradise Now," from Warner's new specialty division, Warner Independent. Both are thrillers in a sense -- but without the genre's usual catharsis. In a throwback to the politically engaged films of the '70s, the point isn't to reassure moviegoers but to provoke them.

"The principal advantage of someone like Saddam Hussein as a villain is you knew where you could find him," says Gaghan, whose film is due in theaters Nov. 23. "He was in a palace that was built by American contractors. We know all the secret doors. How he gets out. We can find him and drop bombs on him. After 9/11, there's this whole shift. Suddenly there's this guy" -- Gaghan, who's nursing coffee in a coffee shop near his home in Santa Monica, doesn't even name Osama bin Laden but is clearly talking about him. "He may or may not have been born in the Sudan. He may have been raised in Yemen. He may have lived in Saudi Arabia. He may be in Afghanistan. He may be in Pakistan. He may be in a cave. He's like the ether, or the Internet. He's everywhere, but from this cave he can deliver this incredible amount of destruction. I was just curious. Why are these people so angry? Is it just that we have military bases in Mecca?"

Two years before Gaghan began thinking about this question, Abu-Assad began researching suicide bombers. Like Gaghan, Abu-Assad, whose film comes to theaters Friday, is in his early 40s; and like Gaghan, he's tall, lean, loquacious and charismatic. Abu-Assad spent the first 19 years of his life in Palestine, before immigrating to the Netherlands. He was aware of suicide bombers -- as a kid, he had been fascinated with Japanese kamikazes and the Egyptian commandos in the 1967 war with Israel -- and now when he returns home to visit his well-to-do, liberal family, he sees the posters all over the streets of Gaza of the self-proclaimed martyrs who've blown themselves up, along with various Israeli soldiers and civilians. But as he began contemplating the topic, he realized how ignorant he actually was.