Roy Dupuis as Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire and James Gallanders as Major Brent Beardsley in Shake Hands with the Devil Courtesy of Seville Pictures

Spottiswoode met with Dallaire in preparing for the film, a meeting he describes simply as "unreal":

"Obviously it was fascinating. There is a man who was enormously affected and terribly broken by what had happened. So part of him is fractured and cannot ever be put back together. Another part of him is this very vital, very powerful, interesting and complicated man," Spottiswoode explains, noting that he and a colleague spent a weekend (and then more time later) with the former general. "And he said things to us that are part of some of the scenes in the film, the therapy scenes, which I couldn't believe that somebody would talk about. What leads one to try and kill oneself? What leads one to despair? What leads one to not be able to continue? And how inescapable the past is. There are things that those people saw, and it is not just him."

Spottiswoode seems as concerned with the emotional legacy of the ethnic violence, the long-term scarring of the Rwandan genocide on the region as with the bloodshed itself.

"There were many people there who have been enormously damaged and many people who have committed suicide," the director says, and then points to a "very interesting fact" which he cannot verify but feels should be brought to light. "I guess somewhere [Dallaire] learned from the Veterans Administration in America that, now, the number of Vietnam veterans who have committed suicide has exceeded the number who died in Vietnam, a little known and unpublished fact, because nobody wants to say that, of the number of soldiers that went through that war, an equal number killed themselves and could not live with what they had done or seen in Vietnam. So it is over a 100,000."

Roger Spottiswoode, born in Ottawa but raised in the United Kingdom, is the son of a film director-producer and initially worked in television and as a documentary film editor. In the early '70s he worked on three Sam Peckinpah projects before making his 1980 directorial debut with Terror Train, starring Jamie Lee Curtis. A decade later, he enjoyed high-profile success with Turner and Hooch and Air America. In 1995, he directed the ambitious docudrama series Hiroshima but has never made a documentary. As Peter Raymont had already adapted Shake Hands With the Devil as a documentary film, Spottiswoode never considered the project as anything but a dramatization.

"I adore documentaries," he says, "but I think that there are things that documentaries can't do. And… I think there are things that a dramatization can do. I have my own rules about [it], which is that you don't make anything up. But I think if you are lucky enough to have an actor as we did, you can put that person on screen and watch what happened to them. It is easier, in a way, to connect and to experience and to begin to feel and have a different kind of understanding than a documentary gives you; which is you get all the factual information, and you can be shocked by photographs but the emotional experience of the people who go through it, and what happens to them and what would happen to us and allowing us to have a different view of events — that is something that can only be done by having a character play it, by drama, and not a documentary."