By Danielle Capalbo

These journalists have a lead – and it’s not tomorrow’s big story. In “The Hunting Party,” they’re on the search for a fugitive war criminal.

The film, directed by Richard Shepard, opens nationwide Friday and follows two journalists and a veteran cameraman on an unauthorized mission to post-war Bosnia to find “The Fox:” Radovan Karadzic, an international fugitive and war criminal. They’re the only ones searching for him and when they are mistaken for a CIA hit squad, the journalists become the hunted.

Richard Shepard, director

Shepard loosely based his script for “The Hunting Party” on a 2001 Esquire magazine article by reporter Scott Anderson, one of five professional journalists who searched for Karadzic. Karadzic went into hiding in 1997. Despite efforts of Anderson’s team, the war criminal remains at large.

On Monday, Shepard fielded questions about the film during a conference call with college students from around the country.

Q: Given the tumultuous state of the world, what is the relevance of a film wherein journalists endanger their lives to uncover significant, war-related information?

A: What we have now, in the situation in Bosnia at least, is this guy who has been indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal for genocide, and no one seems to be looking for him. And, the fact that the real reporters ended up basically doing what the CIA hasn’t been doing, and no one seems to be doing, seems to me very relevant especially when you compare it to the search – the so-called search – for Osama bin Laden, where we continue not to catch him either.

Q: How faithful to the true story do you stay in your movie?

A: I told the journalists themselves in the beginning that I was going to tell what happened to them, but I wasn’t going to tell their specific story. There were five journalists and they were all about the same age and [had] very similar personalities, and I ended up making them three people who were of different ages. A lot of it was my own research … along with their story. In the beginning of the movie I say, ‘Only the most ridiculous parts of this story are true,’ and stand by that in terms of the stuff that you would never believe