Arms & the man

A scathing new film about the international arms trade stars Nicholas Cage as an amoral businessman looking to drown the world in guns. Michael Dwyer meets Lord of War director Andrew Niccol.

A timely, hard-edged and uncompromising drama laced with black humour, Lord of War is the first movie that directly addresses the matter of international arms dealing. It sets its tone in an alarming opening sequence that follows the progress of a bullet from manufacture to entering the head of a helpless African boy.

On the soundtrack the movie's anti-hero, Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage), an amoral arms trader born in the Ukraine and raised in New York, notes that there are over 500 million firearms in the world, one for every 12 people, and he wonders how to go about arming the other 11. The film closes with a caption stating that the world's biggest arms suppliers are the US, the UK, Russia, France and China - the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

"I like to call them the insecurity council," the movie's writer-director, Andrew Niccol, commented drily when we met in Toronto recently. Lord of War registers as thought-provoking and original after so many hundreds of movies actively celebrating gun culture.

"Nobody ever focuses on the guns," says the 41-year-old New Zealander. "I've made or written four movies before this and none of them had a single gun in them - which is almost regarded as a crime in Hollywood."

At one point in the film, Yuri tries to justify his trade by claiming that car manufacturers and tobacco companies are responsible for killing far more people. "He has a lot of rationalisations," Niccol says.

"You could accuse him of being responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and he would reply that he has been responsible for no deaths because he never pulled the trigger. These people have a mindset that compartmentalises life and refuses to see those consequences. He's a complex character.

"There is one scene where he takes a toy gun off his young son and tosses it away, which is quite a powerful moment for me because he's protective of his own family and yet in the next scene he'll be in Africa courting carnage. So it's not the true definition of a family man, even though he might think otherwise with his different moral code.

"I'm always intrigued when good things happen to bad people, because arms dealers thrive while causing so much death and suffering. The reason these people succeed, I think, is because they're not encumbered by the sense of morality or crises of conscience most of the rest of us have, and they can just forge ahead."

Niccol met many arms dealers while researching his screenplay; he also needed them for logistical reasons. "All those tanks you see in the movie came from one arms dealer in the Czech Republic, and he was willing to supply them on condition he had them back by a certain date as he was selling them to Libya."

But isn't Libya now supposed to be a born-again peace-loving country? "Yes, so why do they need 50 ex-Soviet T-72 tanks?" Niccol replies. "And all the guns you see in the armoury scene are all real. It was far cheaper to get real AK-47s than fakes, so I bought them for the film in an elaborate rental and then sold them back without making much of an arms deal out of it, although I could have solved some of my financing problems on the film if I had."

Given that the quoted average of one gun for every 12 people in the world would take on a different proportion in the US, it's hardly surprising that Niccol failed to secure American finance for the film, despite having a cast led by Nicolas Cage, Jared Leto as his brother, and Ethan Hawke as a dogged Interpol agent.

"In America they ignore the statistics that so many of those guns are turned on themselves," Niccol says. "And the statistics of other so-called democracies where there aren't in any way as many deaths caused by gun violence. It's a different mentality in the US, where you can walk into a Wal-Mart and buy a gun. What the film tells you is only the truth, but I guess quite a few people won't acknowledge that.

"When I say that America is the biggest arms supplier in the world, it is, and by a long way, but that's the same whether Bush is president or Clinton is. That's the way it works."

Lord of War is cynical and critical to the end, eschewing the option of any soft cop-outs, and this, Niccol believes, scared off the Hollywood studios.

"There is no phoney epiphany for the Yuri character," he says quite proudly. "A lot of international finance came in. I was blessed that the French had such problems with the controversy over the latest Iraq war, and money came in from Germany, Spain and South Africa. The foreign investors were all fine with the film, whether their countries were members of the Security Council or not."

One of Yuri's best customers in the movie is the president of Liberia, depicted as a ruthless dictator whose closest ally is his equally cold-blooded son.

"They are composite characters modelled on certain dictators, and one in particular," he says. "There is an ex-president of Liberia who is very litigious. He was so furious about a book written about him that he threatened to sue, but then he realised that if he had to take the publishers to court in London, he could have been indicted for war crimes. The funny thing is that he seemed most concerned about his good name, which makes you wonder what goes on in that man's head.

"Things like that constantly amaze me, and they contributed to the surreal, satirical tone of the film. We have these scenes set at an arms fair. I can't believe it's actually called a fair, as if it were a carnival. At those fairs you have mortal enemies acting in a very civilised way, buying the same munitions from the same arms vendor and then going off to their separate countries and blowing the hell out of each other."

Now living in New York, Niccol started out in advertising at home in New Zealand, then moved to London as a commercials director. "That was my film school," he says. "I eventually stopped selling soap and started to sell ideas." Those ideas have all been concerned with contemporary themes and the malaises of modern society: in his screenplays for The Truman Show and The Terminal, and in the movies he has written and directed, Gattaca, S1m0ne and now Lord of War.

"I'm just curious about the world," he says. "I've interested in what's going on and I want to make films about what's relevant today."

Released in 1997, The Truman Show proved eerily prophetic in its theme of extreme reality TV, following a man who unwittingly is the subject of a round-the-clock show that draws huge ratings.

"Even I thought it was farfetched at the time," Niccol laughs. "I'm appalled that people seem to be so voyeuristic. I have no explanation for it. The irony of it is stupendous. Orwell was terrified that we would be forced to watch Big Brother. If only he were alive to see us actually wanting to watch a show called Big Brother. It really is the theatre of the absurd."

Niccol wanted to direct The Truman Show, but producer Scott Rudin was unwilling to entrust someone who hadn't directed a feature with an $80 million movie, and the job went to Peter Weir. Instead, Niccol made his feature debut with the more modestly budgeted Gattaca, an imaginative and touching drama dealing with genetic engineering in a totalitarian environment.He then directed S1m0ne, starring Al Pacino ("a joy to work with") who loses the star of his new movie at short notice and replaces her with a digitally created actress, played by model Rachel Roberts, who married Niccol.

"Everyone uses digital manipulation all the time now," he says. "But it's still very hard to replace flesh and blood, and it's too expensive, even if at times we would love to do it. You really shouldn't be able to see the digital effects, and if you do, then the movie has failed."

Niccol says he's too superstitious to talk about his next project. "I tend to have expensive ideas that are also unconventional, and that is the worst combination in Hollywood. I'm sure they run when they see me coming."

Lord of War opens next Friday