Leading His Own 'Hunting Party'

Never underestimate the power of a good conspiracy theory.

That's how director Richard Shepard found himself making his new movie, "The Hunting Party," about three journalists' attempt to capture a Bosnian war criminal five years after the killing there stopped. Once the director started doing his own research, he was hooked.

Shepard says he's no Oliver Stone, and his latest is not just a political film. "At the end of the day, I wanted to make an offbeat, entertaining movie," he says. "If you get a little riled up by the politics of this movie . . . I think that's okay."

In "The Hunting Party," Richard Gere plays TV journalist Simon Hunt, whose on-camera meltdown in the middle of the Bosnian war made him a cautionary tale for young journalists. His former cameraman, Duck (Terrence Howard), has since moved on to a cushy job as a cameraman for a network news anchor. When he and Simon run into each other in Sarajevo five years later, Duck is intrigued by Simon's claim to know where one of the war's chief architects is hiding. Along for the ride is Jesse Eisenberg's Benjamin, a green reporter -- and son of a network VP -- who's looking to land his first big story. (See review on Page 33.)

Though the trio is fictional, the action is based on Scott Anderson's 2000 Esquire magazine article, "What I Did on My Summer Vacation," about how he and four war correspondent buddies went on a haphazard search for one of the most notorious war criminals, Radovan Karadzic. Karadzic was responsible for the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, for whom the term "ethnic cleansing" was coined.

For "The Hunting Party," Shepard (whose previous hits were 2005's "The Matador" and the pilot for TV's "Ugly Betty") imagined a similar outlaw called "the Fox," and he collaborated with Anderson to make the story as authentic as possible. Even then, Shepard acknowledges that the story seems unbelievable, and he includes this statement in the movie's opening sequence: "Only the most ridiculous parts of this story are true."

Shepard's trip to Bosnia fueled his passion for the movie. "I went to Bosnia, in a car, up the mountain past a guy watching on the side of the road, up to the bar with the animals [mounted] on the wall," he says. Afterward, he says, "I stayed around and I got to meet a lot of people from NATO and from the Hague. . . . No one would give me a straight answer about why they haven't caught [Karadzic]."

He adds: "It's an outrage that this guy hasn't been caught! He is accused by the Hague of genocide."

Shepard shot parts of the movie in and around a Sarajevo Holiday Inn where foreign correspondents stayed during three years of war in the 1990s. "I wanted the actors to see the bullet holes in the wall, which were real, and I wanted a local crew of people who had lived through the war."

Those crew members added to the authenticity of the film, Shepard said. "Everyone we talked to had a story to tell: 'My sister was killed here,' 'My father was shot here.' I felt like it helped the whole movie."

Plus, he says, "if we were going to spend millions of dollars, I'd rather spend it there because they really need it. We employed hundreds of extras, we stayed for weeks in hotel rooms, ate at restaurants. . . . Richard Gere and Terrence Howard walked the streets every day."