Traffic (2000)

Traffic is a 2000 American crime drama film directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Stephen Gaghan. It explores the illegal drug trade from a number of perspectives: a user, an enforcer, a politician and a trafficker. Their stories are edited together throughout the film, although some of the characters do not meet each other. The film is an adaptation of the British Channel 4 television series Traffik. 20th Century Fox, the original financiers of the film, demanded Harrison Ford play a leading role and that significant changes to the screenplay be made. Soderbergh refused and proposed the script to other major Hollywood studios, but it was rejected because of the three-hour running time and the subject matter — Traffic is more of a political film than most Hollywood productions. USA Films, however, liked the project from the start and offered the film-makers more money than Fox. Soderbergh operated the camera himself and adopted a distinctive cinematography tint for each story so that audiences could tell them apart.