Like an accidental tourist, Terry George stumbled into filmmaking while penning a semi-autobiographical stage play with scribe partner Jim Sheridan about a failed prison break. Stemming from that first true-story collaboration, he has continued as both a writer and director, chronicling the triumph of the human spirit, and helping to catapult injustices in Ireland and the heinous genocide in Rwanda into our national consciousness with the critically acclaimed Hotel Rwanda. In conjunction with the regional premier of his new film Reservation Road at the Austin Film Festival, we (and a panel of writers) got the chance to speak with George about his political views, the single greatest fear of a parent and the damn shame of never getting to see any good movies at these film festival thingies.

Panel: What made you want to make Reservation Road?

Joaquin Phoenix, in two words. I was looking for something to work with him on, so he handed me the script and said "I'm interested, take a look," and then I read the script and then the book and thought that it was drama on a Greek tragic level. When you go back to the basics of drama, this is it. The family, the children, the rift in the family. It had that basic dramatic element to it. And then I saw a chance to say something about the futility of revenge, particularly creating a monster in your own mind that you can do violence to, demonizing the opposition to the point where you can do violence to it. I thought post 9-11 that this was a problem that has sort of infected the world. I think there is a difference between revenge and righteous indignation. I think this country and some of the western countries and certainly the other side, being the jihadis, there is no stepping back to assess the deeper roots of what was going on and reassessing where we are. Here we have this small story where you can see that in action.

Austinist: What do you think it is about the human psyche that drives people to try to pin blame on something or someone? We immediately try to find out who wronged us, not necessarily care for those who were affected by the action.

I think after 9-11 you didn't have to care about the people who it affected but you certainly did have to stand back and see what the roots of it were in order to deal with it. That's what I mean by righteous indignation. There is nobody in their right mind who could come to the conclusion that Osama and Zarqawi and so forth are not evil men and don't have an evil philosophy, but in the analysis of what has happened afterwards, the creating of monsters was manipulated in a way for obviously, particularly the Iraq war, for me and it's a political opinion, to be a complete diversion. So the creating of the monster right at the minute to allow people's rage to be used for political context is....it happened in Northern Ireland. There was a point where the Thatcher government so demonized Gerry Adams, the head of Sinn Féin, that they were incapable of negotiating or talking and it prolonged the war much longer than it should have been. Why did they do that? Why did people buy into it? Because they feel genuine rage and want to strike out. It is hard to step back and look behind your immediate impulses and ask questions, but I think they are very necessary.

Panel: Now I hear you going into a lot of really specific political things. You are obviously very interested in that. I don't know if this is a sensitive subject, but I read that you were arrested in 1971 for your involvement with....

It was 1975 and it is no longer sensitive. It's, like, public knowledge.

Panel: Did that help shape some of your political views today, did that inspire you to become a filmmaker and get your point across?

Well, not for a second when I was in Long Kesh, which is the prison camp that I was in, did I expect to be doing a roundtable in Austin, Texas on movies I'd made. The dream of that is too far from my perceived reality. It certainly changed my perspective on life. I ended up in prison as many of my neighbors, colleagues, friends and basically a good portion of the youth, certainly the Catholic young in Northern Ireland did, out of our outrage at an invasion, an occupation. But I then gained a sense of looking behind the event and the people involved and analyzing what was going on and it led to three movies. All of the movies that I did with [Jim] Sheridan are offspring of that. They are a combination of his sense of family and my knowledge of the political events in the north. I think I also learned a sense of stepping back from the event itself and looking to the greater impact of it on a more universal side. With Hotel Rwanda, the politics on the ground weren't that far removed from those of Northern Ireland: extremists manipulating the fears of people to reinforce their position was very similar. There is a central theme, not so much for me, because the survival was not that difficult, but the triumph of the human spirit over adversity or catastrophic events and the ability to come out the other end is very important for me. And it is the topic of, you know, Schindler's List, Missing, The Killing Fields, that's the classic format and message of those movies.

The filmmaking was total happenstance, roll of the dice, coincidence, call it what you want. I started off as a journalist, freelance in New York, and when I was doing that I was writing a play at the same time. I took it to a place called the Irish Arts Center. The play was about a prison escape that I actively participated in with the digging of a tunnel. But it was sort of allegorical, as most of my work is, as we thought we were digging a straight line and nobody thought to get a compass, we were actually digging in a curve and almost dug ourselves back into the place we were trying to dig out of, which seemed to me an allegory for Northern Ireland itself. I took that play to the IAC and Sheridan was the artistic director then. He directed the play and we became very close, so when he went of to do My Left Foot, I stayed as the temporary artistic director and it was then that I met Jerry Conlon who was the subject of In the Name of the Father. So we were sort of stumbling through this thing and obviously the success of In the Name of the Father catapulted me and he already had My Left Foot to go on into this business and he, having watched him direct In the Name of the Father, it was either he or I who were going to do Some Mother's Son and he didn't want to do it after having done that, so I kind of jumped into directing.

Austinist: It seems that you are most interested in adapting real life stories: your own, other peoples, so what were the challenges of taking a written work of fiction and translating that to the screen?

Right, well I am, but the thing about Reservation Road is that it's only a step removed from reality. It very easily could have been a true story because this is an event that happens 50,000 times a year across the United States. I can't remember the exact figure, but it's big. Hit-and-run accidents, people driving away and the websites in the film are real, I didn't invent them, so it's a real event. It's fictional in that John Burnham Schwartz (author of the novel, Reservation Road) came up with the story, but I could take the real events that I knew from Ireland and so forth, the grief of families trying to deal with death and that is what really interested me.

There is a line or two in the movie about taking a place like Connecticut - one of the safest, most affluent, comfortable places in the world - and visiting on a family an event that could be in Baghdad or Bangkok or Belfast. I wanted to see how they dealt with that grief and let it become a message movie in a way about redemption, in that Joaquin's character learns to move on and go back to what Jennifer [Connelly's] character is trying to deal with. So all of those elements are close enough to reality that I feel it is a true story, actually, and in feeling that it is a real story, being very careful to not turn them into fictional characters. In a funny way it is the most accessible movie that I have done in that anyone in the audience can imagine themselves in the shoes of the characters and can say "What would I have done?" and "There but for the grace of God go I," whereas not for a second would you imagine that you would be in a British prison or in the middle of a genocide. So that appealed to me as well.

Panel: Hotel Rwanda, like you said, is not exactly accessible to everyone and not everyone is going to understand it. It didn't necessarily have a great box office run, but it was kind of a pioneer for being a huge phenomenon on Netflix. How does that feel being a pioneer in that realm?

I guarantee you that Reservations Road will be the same way, I mean this is an extremely difficult box office sell. Not a lot of people are going to say "Let's go out on a Friday night to see the 'dead child on the road' movie." If we get critical acclaim and the acting is superb, I think, then maybe we'll get on the awards roll and get a little bit bigger box office. But if you go into Blockbuster or wherever and you see Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Connely and Mira Sorvino on the box, you're gonna take it out. And that's the nature of the business.

With Hotel Rwanda, though, it struck a chord, a nerve across the country, not as much in Europe, which was not strange to me when I thought about it, but it became a byword for caring about Africa or at least having a sensibility of what went on. And that was kind of gratifying that that had happened, because that was the objective of everybody involved. We were perfectly prepared that it would do $300,000 at the box office and then disappear out of sight, that was kind of our belief because that is the tradition of difficult movies.

Panel: So it being able to live on in great success is gratifying for you?

Well, of course, but it is more important to me that it is there as a message and, what's the word, as a caution or a reminder, particularly for politicians and the people in Darfur today, not to say "Never again," because even though they said "Never again," after Hotel Rwanda, here we are, never again. You know, and a lot of people used Hotel Rwanda as their excuse for what they had done about Africa. "Oh, I went to see Hotel Rwanda." Well, get out and do something! [President] Bush saw it twice and initially Condoleezza Rice and those people declared Darfur to be a genocide, which is an easy thing to say and I'm not sure in the legal stature that it is, but subsequently, they have done some stuff that is good and gone further than most governments, but it's almost like holding politicians feet to the fire. Well, you talked about Hotel Rwanda and you see this, so let's pay the check for that now with Darfur and Congo and Uganda. So, that's gratifying.

The work that Don Cheadle has done since the film is remarkable. He is the flag carrier for action on Darfur and mobilizing [Geroge] Clooney, the book he wrote with John Prendergast. All of the actors he knows he mobilizes.

Panel: Did you have the same sort of goal with Reservation Road and the issue of hit-and-runs?

No, because it's not the same. The thing about hit-and-run accidents, and we touch on this a little bit in the movie, it is very hard to legislate about those things. You could put a maximum sentence on, but each individual event needs to be considered on its own, because as you see in the film, you don't know the circumstances. In Joaquin's head, 10 years in prison is not enough. By the time you get to the end of the movie, I guarantee you that there is not a person in that cinema who wants Mark Ruffalo to go to jail for 10 years. You want to empathize with the people involved.

We did some research with M.A.D.D. Obviously drunk driving is a different thing that you can definitely legislate about, but what happens in a hit-and-run is that each case must be considered individually. So what I wanted to do was empathize with the people who had lost and were victims and try to understand them. It's more about anti-revenge, studying what has happened to you and finding the strength to move on as Jennifer Connelly's character does.

Austinist: You made a decision that in the movie you were not going to demonize Dwight's character (Ruffalo) or play him as the scoundrel that he is in the book. Why did you choose to do that?

Because I thought it was too easy in the book, and not to criticize John, that's his decision he made. It's more black and white in the book than it is in the movie. The movie is all gray in its morality. I've learned in adapting books that people read a book, they pick it up, they put it down, they pick it up again and they become much more forgiving, not just in the plot, but in the scenarios in their head and how they create them. The book is very much a character study of four separate individuals in their heads and that is what engrosses you rather than the thriller element of it. When you come to do a movie, I always start off from the position of "How can I make this entertainment? Why would someone pay $10 or $11 to go and see this?" I wanted to emphasize that thing about the reality behind the monster. That is specifically why we cast Mark Ruffalo. His basic thing in all of his movies, no matter what he does, is his basic decency and honesty. You know that he is a good guy in reality, he just emanates that sense.

Austinist: Mark Ruffalo said in a previous interview that he didn't think he could have made this movie if he didn't have children. Do you feel the same way?

No, that's Mark's thing. Joaquin doesn't have children and he actually had the, not the tougher role, but the role more directly related to the loss of a child and so forth. Joaquin is a genius actor, a natural of extraordinary caliber and can go to a place in his head that few actors can go to, I could name them on the fingers of one hand, maybe two. Jennifer Connelly has two kids and she deliberately tried not to bring that knowledge to it out of the fear of generating fear for her own family. Mira Sorvino had just had a child. I have two grown children and for me it wasn't so much the fear of the death, although that is the greatest fear a parent can have, a child dying before you is the single greatest fear any parent can have. For me it was about my kids and their connection to the ritual and the process of grieving and death, because I think in the United States the ritual of grieving has been processed and sped up to the point where you do the funeral or the cremation quickly and then people are left on their own.

Where I grew up, there was this extended family thing where the community gravitates around you and takes you through that process. What I think has happened in American and Latin America and in the Middle East is that we no longer build up the armor to deal with the pain and we become disassociate with it because if you see the women in the burkas on t.v. carrying the box in Baghdad and they are screaming, that is just what it is. It is a 30 second flash, whereas Reservation Road is what it is! Basically the thought was that when I was their age, I had been to about 100 funerals and they had been to two and that difference really interests me.

Panel: Joaquin Phoenix wasn't exactly huge coming into Hotel Rwanda, but did that part help him get into some of the Walk the Line stuff?

He was learning the guitar, practicing. Hotel Rwanda was a favor to me. He did it for virtually nothing, I think we paid for his expenses or something. And this is the power of the actor himself, he crystallized and condensed the whole western attitude towards Africa in a few sentences, particularly that one line that became the mantra of the movie, "People will see this on their TV, they will say it's terrible and they will go on eating their dinners." Then he got into Walk the Line. If that movie comes on late at night, I will sit and watch the whole thing again, not just because he is my friend, he embodied the soul of Johnny Cash. It's easy to do a mimic of these things and when you see him on stage with Reese it just comes alive, and that is what you hope for from these actors. In Reservation Road, the transformation from the rock of the family to this man, an ordinary, boring, middle-class college teacher who becomes consumed and eaten alive by his inadequacy, is amazing.

Panel: Have you had a chance to see We Own the Night Yet?

No, I haven't. The terrible thing about promoting a movie, I mean, I went to Toronto and never saw a thing. You don't get a chance. You are talking to reporters all day, you go to receptions, you go to the opening of the movie, the start, you don't stay to watch it, and literally I have yet to be at a film festival promoting a movie where I could see a film. I saw Tony Gilroy who did Michael Clayton and he hasn't seen Reservation Road and I haven't seen his film. He is my friend and we are mutually embarrassed about the situation. The flip side of that, and it's kind of sad, is that I will get all of the DVDs from the Academy and see every one of them. But you don't get to see them on a big screen unless you stay up late at night. In the movies in the circle at the minute, I don't think I have seen any.

Austinist: If you could see one film while you are here in Austin, what would it be?

What's on here?

Austinist: Juno, Control...

Control. Alright. I want to see them all. Sydney Lumet's film.

Austinist: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead?

Yeah, there is not a film among those that I don't want to see. I'm really interested in all of them.

Panel: You're story in becoming a director is definitely not typical in relation to a lot of Hollywood directors. How do you relate to the college aged directors and help them?

I tell them the experience of how I got into film and starting in the theater. I tell them "Don't send your script to CAA or ICM, it's a complete waste of time. They won't even recycle the paper." You have to find an active role in the overall process, whether it is as I did in theater, but now, there is a gold rush moment for people who want be involved, to be writers and directors, and that is the internet. YouTube and MySpace. You can literally get a group together, make a short film, make clips of a long film, put it out there and with a little bit of inventive promotion you can have an audience, maybe as big an audience as I will get for Reservation Road. There are short films - there is a famous clip, I don't know if you've seen it yet, from a safari tour that some South Africans were taking in Kruger Park that is, you'll just never see anything like it on National Geographic. It's called the "Battle at Kruger." 21 million hits. It's stunning. I think Will Ferrell's little ninety second thing with his agent's daughter has 11 million hits.

Austinist: The Landlord!

Right. Well, if Will charged 10 cents a hit, he's got 1.1 million dollars. The potential is there to do that and there are agents from every agency trolling YouTube and MySpace and all the viral video looking for talent. So, write the script, get the camera, get the actors and get out there and do it. But be inventive about it. It challenges you to be inventive, which is what needs to happen.