He has eluded United States special forces, elite French paratroopers and Britain’s finest, the SAS. But Radovan Karadzic, genocide suspect and regarded by Serbs as a Scarlet Pimpernel-style figure, has finally met his match in Richard Gere.
In a film being shot on Thursday on the forested hillsides of northern Zagreb, the Hollywood heartthrob succeeds where Nato, the CIA and the SAS have failed. The good guy gets the bad guy.
Pro-Tibet activist, American Gigolo and co-star of Pretty Woman, the greying 57-year-old plays a veteran television reporter who returns to postwar Sarajevo to launch a madcap three-man hunt for a fictionalised Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader who has been on the run for 11 years and is wanted for genocide against Bosnia’s Muslims.
”Unlike in real life, they get their man in the end,” said an assistant director of the new film, Spring Break in Bosnia, before biting his lip and refusing to reveal more of the plot.
The independent $20-million production, directed by New Yorker Richard Shepard and to be released next year, co-stars Diane Kruger (Helen of Troy) as a Bosnian Serb junkie who sells information on Karadzic to a trio of American TV journalists staging a reunion in Bosnia in 2000, five years after the conflict ended.
”Only the most ridiculous parts of the story are true,” said Adam Merims, the executive producer. ”It’s a thriller with comedic elements, a lot of gallows humour. It’s not about war, it’s about the people who cover the war.”
In researching the background for the part, Gere sought to meet Karadzic, Europe’s most wanted man with a $5-million bounty on his head.
The actor talked to several journalists who covered the Bosnian war and put out feelers to contact the nationalist leader who sought to destroy Bosnia and remains a hero to many Serbs.
”He asked where Karadzic was and if he could meet him,” said Merims.
The harebrained manhunt — the journalists are seeking an alleged mass murderer nicknamed The Fox — goes awry when the predators become the quarry. The entourage of the Karadzic character suspect the US journalists are in reality an undercover CIA hit squad and hunt them down instead, an episode based on the experience of the US war correspondent Scott Anderson.
Anderson — who is also a thriller writer and New York bar owner — reported from Sarajevo during the war in the early 1990s. In 2000 he returned for a reunion with four colleagues, including Sebastian Junger, co-owner of the New York bar and author of the bestselling novel The Perfect Storm which was made into a hit film starring George Clooney.
In the real-life adventure, the five print journalists tracked Karadzic and got so close they were warned off their quest by US officials in Bosnia. Anderson’s lengthy account of the episode in Esquire magazine became the basis for the Shepard film.
”It’s loosely based on the Anderson true story,” Merims said.
Criticisms have been aired, particularly in Sarajevo, that genocide and Karadzic may not be appropriate topics for a lighthearted Hollywood romp, especially when the alleged war criminal is yet to face justice.
”We could have made the film in Afghanistan and it could’ve been about Osama bin Laden,” responded Merims, arguing that the film was less about Bosnia, the war and the war crimes than about the adventures and personal tribulations of the trio of American journalists.
The Gere character, who is said to have behaved disreputably in Sarajevo during the war, ”regains his dignity” during the ”Karadzic” manhunt. The other two journalists, played by Terrence Howard and Jesse Eisenberg, experience parallel personal conflicts during their adventure.
In retelling, loosely, the true story, the movie points to the ineptitude of the heavy international presence in Bosnia in its failure to apprehend Karadzic 11 years after he was indicted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
”It is mildly political,” said Merims, ”in that it is about the international community’s reluctance or slowness in bringing war criminals to justice.” – Guardian Unlimited Â