There’s no cool intellectual sheen or pretense to filmmaker Richard Shepard. Meeting for an interview in the bar of a Beverly Hills hotel, he’s whip-smart but instantly sociable, and he retains the raw
enthusiasm of a college kid just talking movies — minus any of the
manic geek factor awkwardness that can shade conversations with
similarly effusive filmmakers, like  Quentin Tarantino. His is a laidback personality that’s somewhat at odds with the stamp of
intensity most usually associated with authorial moviemaking. Age and
experience, however, have taught him important lessons. Unlike many a
headstrong, would-be indie wunderkind, the early 40-ish Shepard knows
facile entertainment can be an entrée into something more
intellectually and emotionally substantive.

Richard Gere),
who reconnects with his former cameraman Duck (Terrence Howard) in
post-war Bosnia, the scene of his nationally broadcast meltdown five
years prior. Now stringing for a variety of low-rent international
outlets, Simon convinces Duck that he knows the whereabouts of Bosnia’s
most wanted war criminal (Ljubomir Kerekes), a brutal former Serbian
commander known as “The Fox.” Along with rookie reporter Benjamin
(Jesse Eisenberg), a recent college graduate and the to-the-manor-born
son of a network vice president who’s been handed a tag-along ticket to
this reconciliation coverage as a means of getting his first
international “merit badge,” Simon and Duck embark on a dark and
dangerous mission that takes them deep into hostile territory, where
The Fox is still a hero of the people. Along the way they uncover a
tangled web of international complicity that seems to help shield a
killer and ethnic cleanser supposedly being sought at the highest
levels of government.

Though it takes place in Bosnia, and not during wartime, some parallels between The Hunting Party and the mysterious, now six-year search for Osama bin Laden are undeniable. Shepard is obviously a political animal — speaking not of his specific
views, but his grasp of the birds-eye interconnectedness of policy,
rhetoric and state action, both public and covert — and in interviewing
source writer Anderson and all the other journalists who comprised his
coterie, as well as officials from the UN, NATO and the Hague, Shepard
began to get a more complete sense of the black comic potential that The Hunting Party
offered, of an interesting story with definite relevance to today. “We
all say that we want to catch war criminals, and yet the biggest one,
Osama bin Laden, hasn’t been caught,” Shepard says. “And maybe it’s
because we’re not really looking. And if so, why wouldn’t we really be
looking?” For the full feature interview, from FilmStew, click here.