Lord of War is a disturbing, dark satire that exposes the machinations of the global arms trade with slippery style. Writer-director Andrew Niccol gives us a charmingly amoral protagonist in Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage), a Ukrainian American who discovers he has a knack for illusion. Rejecting a career in his father’s Brighton Beach restaurant, Yuri, aided sporadically by his conflicted younger brother, Vitaly (Jared Leto), enters the arms trade and is soon selling weapons to tin-pot dictators from Lebanon to Liberia. He evades capture—and the frustrated pursuit of a green Interpol agent (Ethan Hawke)—with chutzpah, aliases, and a breathtaking knowledge of international law. Spanning 20 years and several countries, Lord of War folds censure and sympathy into the same satirical package, negating both and creating a world where all that matters is the deal itself.

REVERSE SHOT: What attracted you to this subject matter? I can’t think of another movie that deals with gunrunning except in a very tangential way.

ANDREW NICCOL: Well, you have all of these movies about drug trafficking, but arms trafficking has a far more lethal effect on the world. Most of all, though, I was drawn to the character of Yuri, who is this guy who can compartmentalize his life so much that he can take a toy gun from his kid’s toy chest and throw it away and then sell a container load of real guns the very next day. A guy who can be so protective of his own family and yet still be responsible for the destruction of so many other families. He has this ability to separate one from the other, and I think that’s fascinating. I also think that ability is in all of us, at least in part—we all make those little deals with the devil, don’t we?

RS: How much creative control did you have? Your script for The Truman Show was significantly lightened for Peter Weir’s movie.

AN: Yes, but I helped lighten it. I made my biggest mistake by writing my most expensive movie first, and once you know that somebody else is going to direct your story, then you only have two choices: You can wash your hands of it, or embrace it. I chose to embrace it. And even though [Weir] wanted to go in a lighter direction, I went with him because it was better from my point of view to try and still get as many ideas in there as possible. As far as this movie goes, well, every movie is a compromise. But because I didn’t have a Hollywood studio looking over my shoulder, I was able to maintain more of the script’s dark humor.

RS: You seem to be aiming for both a serious “message” film and an entertaining action-adventure, which one might view as antithetical goals.

AN: Well, I hope the film is enormously entertaining, and I don’t mind if some people see it for that reason alone. It’s part of the subversive way I wanted to make it. I basically wanted to make a how-to about being an arms dealer—which no one thinks I would seriously want to do—and add a satirical tone. But then some people will hopefully notice I’m not necessarily in the land of irony, either, and will take the film literally. The most interesting approach is to simply see everything from Yuri’s point of view. After one of the screenings, a woman said, “We’re all arms dealers.” And it’s really very true; the U.S., Britain, France—we all indirectly profit from the sales of arms made by our governments. That’s what paves our roads. So to me it’s interesting that in that sense we’re all arms dealers. But of course people don’t want to see that there’s a part of them that’s Yuri Orlov.

RS: Was Amir Mokri your first choice of cinematographer? His images are so critical to the tone of the film.

AN: I was originally planning to go back to Slawomir [Idziak, who shot Niccol’s Gattaca], but he wasn’t available. But I think Amir is a very good fit because he’s very much like Slawomir in the way he moves the camera, which is very, very beautiful. Because Yuri is always traveling in the film, the camera is always traveling; and the important thing about the shooting style is we always move the camera for a reason—not for some tricky effect or to disorient the audience, but to tell you something about the story. I’m not really into those kinds of showy visual gymnastics. The trickiest shot in the film is probably the opening [where the camera rides a bullet from manufacture to destination in the brain of a young boy], which we shot last because I ran out of money and had to go back to the producers. But it’s really important—it was in the script from the beginning—because it sets the tone for the whole film. It may not be a tone everyone loves, but for me it was the right one.

Amir was also a very good fit because he helped me with the film’s subversive style by making it look so slick (which is what you’re saying some critics have objected to). But the whole point is, I wanted the devil to be glamorous. That’s why I chose Cage: I wanted evil to be charming.

RS: The poster for the film is being copied somewhat by The Weather Man , with Cage’s pose, framing and expression virtually identical.

AN: I think that’s the only expression he has! I fought for that poster, and I really like it. Cage is a very sweet and also very ironic guy, and the camera captures both these aspects of his personality.

RS: Why did you use Yuri’s voiceover narration throughout?

AN: We had to span 20 years, so the narration is just an efficient way of getting us through that length of time. But I also wanted to get you into the head of this guy who’s also somewhat of a sociopath and just see what’s going on in there. The narration also tied in with the instructional goal of the film, so it’s almost like a quasi-documentary.

RS: Some critics are accusing you of hypocrisy because, as they see it, you are asking us to despise national policies yet to empathize with Yuri, who is glamorized and not even punished at the end. How would you respond to them?

AN: My response would be that I’m just telling the truth! The fact that Yuri is released at the end of the movie is torn from the headlines. A well known arms dealer who lives in Florida was about to be indicted on arms trafficking charges. He got his passport back and was allowed to leave the country because he was far more valuable to some government agency on the outside than locked up in prison. So I’m not manipulating the facts for my own agenda, there’s a precedent for everything that happens in the movie. As for glamorizing the character, that’s just his superficial side. You also get to see the inside of Yuri, and there’s nothing glamorous about that to me at all. I doubt it will become a recruitment film for arms dealers! But I do understand it will be a very polarizing film, and a lot of people will think even using this antihero as my lead character is despicable. But I just do what I do, and whatever people say about it is out of my control.

RS: Were the locations difficult to find and set up?

AN: South Africa has to stand in for 13 countries—which it does very well—and the Czech Republic stood in for Ukraine. When you don’t have a lot of money you have to be creative, and in Africa there wasn’t a mosque we could use, and I couldn’t build anything, so we just laid out 10,000 bricks. Because bricks are cheap, and you just lay out a field of bricks and it looks like someone’s drying them in the sun. And the juxtaposition between that and these hi-tech weapons Yuri is selling is quite powerful.

RS: How much difficulty did you have financing the film?

AN: No Hollywood studio wanted to touch it, so it’s all foreign money—a lot of French money, in particular. One insane French producer actually spent his own money, which is taboo for a producer.

RS: The press notes say you based the character of Yuri on five actual gunrunners.

AN: Well, I don’t know about five, but definitely several! I’ve been collecting information for a long time, because I’m interested in these characters and the world they move in. The fascinating thing—and it’s also why it’s so hard to stop them—is that you don’t know if they’re legitimate or not. They always tell you they are, or that they may have done something in the past but they’ve now cleaned up their act. It’s hard to get them to divulge anything unscrupulous, so you have to get that from news stories. But I really liked these guys; they were charming salesmen. When one guy said he was going to bring 15 Soviet tanks onto a military base at 8 a.m. on a Monday morning, they were there. He was very efficient—more efficient than my crew! All those guns you see when they walk into that armory in the film? They’re all real, because it was far easier to get 3,000 real Kalashnikovs than 3,000 fake ones. All the bullets in the opening scene are from an ammunitions factory in South Africa. All the tanks are owned by one arms dealer in the Czech Republic, and the airplane is owned by a dealer in Africa. Nothing was fake or digitally multiplied. In this film, life kept imitating art.