NEW YORK — In the spring of 2000, journalist Scott Anderson and four fellow reporters embarked on a brandy-inspired search for one of the most wanted war criminals in Bosnia, a surreal expedition in which they were mistaken for a CIA hit team, garnered the attention of the actual CIA and prompted the launch of a real black-ops mission.
By the time it was over, the mysterious American military official who put a stop to their freelance operation admitted that they had stumbled into a truly unique misadventure.
"You know, in my twenty years of service, this is the strangest thing I've ever been involved in," the lieutenant colonel told them, according to Anderson's account, published in Esquire in October 2000. "It'd make a helluva movie."
It took seven years, but a cinematic version of the journalists' trip through the rabbit hole of postwar Bosnia finally hits the theaters Friday.
"The Hunting Party," starring Richard Gere and Terrence Howard, blends drama and dark comedy in its tale of three journalists who try to rectify the sluggish international criminal justice system by single-handedly rooting out one of the war's most brutal killers.
The film was written and directed by Richard Shepard, who read Anderson's article shortly after finishing shooting another dark comedy, 2005's "The Matador." At the time, Shepard was interested in telling a story about postwar intrigue along the lines of "The Third Man," a 1949 film set in Vienna in the wake of World War II.
"It wasn't my dream in life to write a movie about Bosnian war criminals," he said. Once Shepard read Anderson's piece, however, "it scared the pants off of me, purely because I loved it so much."
Intrigued by the tale, he took a weeklong trip through Bosnia guided by Philippe Deprez, a Belgian journalist who was part of the original escapade. By the end of it, "I was like, 'I don't know how I'm going to write this, but I've got to write this,' " Shepard recalled.
The writer-director decided to forgo a straight drama and instead set out to make "the B side of a double feature for Warner Bros. in 1943, an adventure movie that had some edge."
Using the experiences of the real journalists as a jumping-off point, Shepard turned the film, originally titled "Spring Break in Bosnia," into a story of a bizarre road trip, at turns ridiculous and sinister.
