Our quiet gun in Hollywood

Andrew Niccol

Andrew Niccol remembers firing guns on farms when he was growing up in New Zealand.

But the first four feature films in which the Auckland-bred writer-director was involved Stateside, didn't have any weaponry.

"Which was very un-Hollywood. I feel I am in some way redressing the balance," he laughs down the line from his Los Angeles production office.

He sure is. In his Lord of War there are guns for, well, Africa.

Great stacks of armaments and bullets are sold by Nicolas Cage's Russian-American character Uri as he goes from New York neighbourhood gun-seller to exporter of Russian Red Army surplus weaponry to the rest of the world, especially to participants in the occasional sub-Saharan civil war.

It's Niccol's third film as director and his fifth script to make it to the screen since he swapped the London-based advertising career he began in his early 20s for Hollywood.

He was Oscar nominated for his first script The Truman Show, the prescient film about one man's life becoming a television show. But as a newbie, he wasn't allowed to direct the big-budget film which was helmed by Peter Weir and starred Jim Carrey in the first of his occasional non-Jim Carrey roles.

"I always start out to direct what I write. On The Truman Show my mistake was writing the most expensive movie first - no one lets you direct that as a debut."

So Niccol found a cheaper but stylish project in DNA sci-fi thriller Gattaca starring Jude Law, Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke who returns in Lord of War as an Interpol agent on Uri's tail.

The movies established Niccol as a film-maker with unconventional ideas about identity, morals and the insanity of the modern world. His script for The Terminal eventually ended up in the in-trays of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks.

"It was in territory I had been in before with The Truman Show - the prisoner in paradise - I thought let's see what someone else can contribute."

Niccol also wrote and directed the Hollywood cyber-celebrity satire S1mOne, in which he directed Al Pacino as a film producer who finds his leading lady casting problems solved by software.

Possibly too high-concept for its own good, it failed to raise much interest at the cinema.

The tough subject matter of Lord of War and its timing meant Niccol had to raise the cash himself after failing to find interest in the traditional Hollywood channels.

"When I was going out with the script submission, it was a week before the latest war in Iraq.

"Even though I didn't perceive it in any way unpatriotic towards Americans, they did because it doesn't shy away from stating the ugly truth about America's involvement in supplying arms.

"I guess their feeling at the time was they didn't want to be perceived to be doing anything un-American."

With the movie funded by private investors, the casting of Cage and Hawke brought back studio interest in the film which was shot in New York, the Czech Republic and South Africa, the locations doubling for 13 different territories.

It was researching the gun culture of the United States, though, that helped spark Niccol's interest in telling the story.

"There is sort of a macabre absurdity of this world. Even those gun fairs - and the fact that they would call it an arms fair as if was some kind of carnival.

"Mortal enemies would go to the same convention hall and buy munitions from the same vendor and then go back to their separate countries at war with each other.

"That is why I made it more subversive. It's almost like a how-to movie for gun-runners. I wanted to take it from that point of view and show that insanity to the world."

Yes, he got to play with some of the many guns that featured in the film, getting particularly attached to one.

"In preparation for the film I fired guns to almost become more in love with them - you also have to love your character, no matter how unlovable they may be.

"I grew to love this little Uzi machine pistol and I see why a gangster would keep one in the glovebox of his car - it could do so much damage and it's just so portable."

Making a film about arms dealers in Africa sometimes meant dealing with arms dealers in Africa and living through other life-imitating-art moments. The cargo plane in the film belonged to one of the continent's most notorious gunrunners.

When Niccol was shooting a scene on a Cape Town dock (substituting for a Ukraine port where Uri is exporting a helicopter gunship as a rescue craft) Mark Thatcher, the arms-dealing son of the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was in court down the road for the same crime.

And Niccol laughs that various arms dealers the production encountered were sweetened by getting their photographs taken with Cage.

Why Cage in the role?

"Just because I didn't think there is anyone better at making the devil charming.

"The voice-over he did for the film, he could only do it two ways - wry or very wry. That is his range. He has a built-in sense of irony which really suited the character." Niccol says he's happy with the film's reception, especially outside the US.

Though, he says, in the US it's had a successful second wind on DVD after the film's cinematic release there last year.

As for the future, Niccol answers the inevitable question about making films back home with a diplomatic "if the right idea came along", but you get the impression that for now he'd rather remain one of Hollywood's few lateral-thinkers.

And as for his next big unconventional film idea, Niccol isn't saying until something comes to fruition. But it probably won't have as many guns.