Gere Says He's Not Making Message Movie

Since he came onto the scene 30 years ago with his breakthrough performance in "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," Richard Gere has performed in just about every film genre there is -- from comedy to musicals to drama.

Now in his new film, "The Hunting Party," he combines them all as he plays a reporter who has gone off the deep end searching for the world's most wanted man in the war-ravaged former Yugoslavia.

As veteran TV news correspondent Simon Hunt, Gere has covered conflicts around the globe and has seen it all -- until he sees too much one day in Bosnia, causing him to snap and deliver an epic meltdown live on the air.

Five years after the end of fighting in Bosnia, he thinks he has a phenomenal scoop that will help him revive his career: He knows the location of the feared war criminal known as "The Fox" (Ljubomir Kerekes) -- based on the Serbian leader Radovan Karadžić, who murdered thousands of Bosnian Muslims and has since gone into hiding in the mountains. The movie is based on a true story.

"Well, when you're in a place like that and you spend enough time that you really can feel the place, you feel the ghosts everywhere, the acting becomes much easier because you're not feeling you're out to project that," he told The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith, who reported from Bosnia during the brutal war in the 1990s. "You own it at a certain level. And the place itself owns it."

Simon enlists old pal and longtime cameraman Duck, played by Terrence Howard to join him on this quest. The third member of their makeshift team is Harvard grad Benjamin, played by Jesse Eisenberg, a novice who comes along to earn his reporting chops.

A group of reporters actually came closer to Karadžić, who was holding poetry readings and attending openings of the plays he wrote, than the CIA, NATO and the Hague were able to. The movie strives to capture the absurdity of that dichotomy. But Gere said he didn't make this movie to prove a point. In fact, he says he doesn't like to make "message movies."

"I think what you do is create an environment where you're bringing enough reality and version of that, including absurdity," he said. "I don't know about your life, but I assume from my own life a lot of what goes on is totally absurd in all of our lives and we wanted that to be on film. I think for myself, I'd like this to reach deep enough in the people that it resonates in their own emotions and they come to their own conclusions about the world and maybe responsibility in the future."