It's great when you can bait and switch people - and I don't mean that in a negative way, I mean that in truth. If we were advertising this movie as a very serious indictment about the hunt for war criminals, and it's a very dark drama, it would probably get great reviews, but people would stay away from it because no one wants to be lectured.

As a writer, it's fun to free yourself enough to tap into some darker elements of your personality that sometimes I don't even know exist. It doesn't feel like work.

When you see what goes on in Iraq on a daily basis - more people dying in car bombings - you almost brush it aside after a while. To actually comprehend the human tragedy of these events is overwhelming. We see so many images, but there's always the sense, for Americans, that it's not in our backyard. That's another reason why the war in Bosnia was so fascinating; because it really was in Europe's backyard. It was in Europe. And they didn't do anything about it for years. It took the Americans to end that war, really. That's a shame.

Same thing for the bad guy. People were really after this guy Radovan Karadicz. But I came up with a combination of several people, who then became The Fox. That's who Simon Hunt and Duck are after. I did that so I could have freedom with what The Fox said and did, so that I didn't have to be stuck. Certain things I wanted to stay to the truth. Certain things I changed, and certain things are the facts.

I think people are a mixture of everything. I like desperate characters because they do things that most of us normally wouldn't do. If a character is a scoundrel or a liar you think you know them, but then I can bring some emotion to them and they become much fuller than you ever imagined. So what I try to do is have a story where you don't quite know where it's going, and characters who you don't quite know where they're going.

I'm not making a movie about the real people. I'm making a movie about what they did, and what happened to them. But I will create characters so that I can have the freedom to make them say and do what I want. The real-life journalists were fine with that.

We're all so jaded. We've seen so many movies. We know what's going to happen in every single movie. I mean, there are some movies where I'm like why do I even need to keep watching? And so, if you can make a movie in which you're completely surprising the audience left and right, and left and right, then you've won. If a jaded film critic or reporter or an audience is like, "I didn't see that one coming," that to me is like a victory.