Meryl Streep in Lions for Lambs Courtesy of United Artists

As a producer, did you have any say in the casting?
At least with the big three, I didn't need any say. Meryl was the first domino, really. In July, I think, of last year, I got a call from Kevin Huvane, her agent, saying she was in. My god, that will be a red-letter date in my life for the rest of my life. Because I don't know how you write an American woman and not think of Meryl Streep first and foremost. And once her imprimatur is on something, it attracts kind of the best eyes after that. So for those three, absolutely not, they're kind of who anybody would want. But for the rest, yeah. It was really Bob Redford — the fact that I call him that is ridiculous — and Tracy Falco, the producer, who was really there every day, day in and day out, doing so much of the heavy lifting, and myself sitting in on auditions and trying to figure out among the three of us who was the best. So there was some say. Terrifyingly enough.

Between this and The Kingdom — which, originally, was going to end on a much darker note with the FBI team getting hit by another suicide bomber — are you working out your own political frustrations?
I was a political science student, and I'm really kind of a military history buff from way back. My brother Joe and I are the first two Carnahans to not have served in the military. My great-grandfather in World War I, my grandfather in World War II, my dad in Vietnam, so I come by it honestly, my interest in these things, at least. So I have that natural kind of love of politics and [the desire] to be engrossed in the conflicts that define specific times. That's just a natural interest of mine. So when you combine that with September 11th — it quite literally changed my life. I started writing right after that. Quit the job that I had — the job that I had involved a lot of travel, four cities in five days kind of travel. And on September 10th, I had flown from Dulles to Los Angeles, and it wasn't the exact route of the plane that got jumped the next morning, but less than 24 hours earlier I was in the same airspace. It just felt like, and it's probably my own blowing things out of proportion, but it felt like Russian roulette that I had won, somehow. So those two things, absolutely, that's where The Kingdom and this script came from, because I thought that that moment would be a galvanizing time for our generation, and it hasn't been, and in many ways it's had the exact opposite effect, and I feel so pissed off about that and frustrated about that, that I can't quite think of other topics. Or at least I couldn't when I was writing these scripts.

Were you concerned about the change in the ending to The Kingdom? Because a lot of people were critical of it, calling it wish fulfillment that the characters find the bomber and kill him. It could almost be seen as propaganda.
Yeah, I mean, hindsight's 20/20, but, frankly, the bomb maker was always found [in the script]. So that was always there. And remember, when I wrote this, this was 2002 when we first had the meeting, 2003 when I really started cranking away at it. At that time, it wasn't so great a leap to think that we could actually go in and catch somebody, you know? The time that passed has kind of really opened up a pretty valid criticism in my mind, in fact, the most valid criticism that, "Wait a minute. The three guys most responsible for 9/11 still walk the earth six years on, 4,000 American lives have been lost, and yet in your movie four guys catch the guy in three or four days and no Americans die?" Absolutely valid, and I can only say that in every single version at least until we started shooting, Chris Cooper's character died in that highway bombing, the kind of penultimate attack. And for whatever reason, I don't know why, that was done away with. So, yeah, it's, getting back to your question, there was a little bit of wish fulfillment in there, I think in part due to when I wrote it, when it seemed like we could prevail in relatively short periods of time. I don't think the original ending that I had would have made the movie better, I truly don't, and that's not just kind of retrospect talking, another explosion at the end of that movie, in a movie of explosions, I think you really would have lost a lot of people. And I think leaving on those simple words of "We'll kill them all. We'll kill them all" just to show how kind of intractable this thing is becoming, I think did a far greater service to that story than [Sergeant] Haytham blowing himself up and taking out untold members of the team.