Like far too many recent movies have shown, Hollywood's obsession is following trends, not setting them: movies now exist almost exclusively to capitalize on successful formulas rather than re-invent or raze them completely. But Andrew Niccol has never been one to yield to convention. His first produced screenplay, The Truman Show, not only afforded Jim Carrey his first opportunity to strike out as a dramatic actor, but presaged the now-ubiquitous phenomenon of reality TV. Gattaca, his directorial debut, peered into the not-so-distant future and examined the controversial prospect of genetic engineering. And Simone reveled in the concept – now very much a reality – of a completely computer-generated lead actress.

His latest film, Lord of War , looks at an equally prescient and controversial subject: arms dealers who auction off their wares to the highest bidder. Nicolas Cage stars as Yuri Orlov, a weapons dealer who begins to consider the moral ramifications of his trade when an Interpol agent (former Niccol collaborator Ethan Hawke) targets him for apprehension. Niccol recently sat down with IGN FilmForce to discuss his controversial new film, the prospect of aligning with actual arms dealers in order to assemble the hardware needed for his production, and his evolving interest in subjects that possess significant and lasting real-time resonance in contemporary culture.

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That was intentional, just to be a little subversive and make almost like a 'how-to' film – how to be an arms dealer – and I thought that would be a more interesting way into it than a typical story structure.Nicolas Cage's character is based on five different arms dealers; he's sort of a composite character. But you would be surprised how much access you can have. I mean for instance, all of the tanks you see in the film are owned by one guy in the Czech Republic, and I said, 'I need 50 t-72 Soviet tanks,' and he said, 'Sure, I've got them.' And also, one of the interesting things about this guy is that he's really efficient – even more efficient than my crew – and he was jovial; he said, 'There's only one catch – in December I'm going to sell these to Libya,' and he was serious about it. So all of those tanks that you see lined up [in the film] are now in Libya.I do sometimes obviously go into the near future, but here I'm going into the recent past. I mean, I just write what interests me; I know it's arrogant to say, but you just have to go into it hoping other people are interested as well.Right. But I also can't go into a film if I don't think it has some kind of timelessness to it. These guys – arms dealers – are not so interested in the war du jour because they know that there's going to be another one next week, and they know that violence is part of human nature. One of the things that's interesting to me about them is that they're not necessarily violent themselves, but they see the violence in human nature and they will exploit it.I sort of had the timing from hell. We submitted the script a week before the latest war in Iraq, and for some reason Hollywood studios didn't want to touch it at that time – they thought it was too controversial. Everyone took a pay cut to do it; they all came for the material, and it was flattering, but it had to be made with foreign money and eventually it came back to America.