Like his friend and frequent collaborator Jim Sheridan, Hotel Rwanda director Terry George is keenly interested in exploring human chaos. And like his movie's protagonist, Paul Rusesabagina, George finds it difficult to expunge that chaos from his life. Even when he's not filming, there's no such thing as downtime.

On this morning in his hotel suite in Manhattan's Meatpacking District, George is trying to recover from a mere three hours' sleep. It seems that he spent the previous night with Wyclef Jean, who contributed a song to Hotel Rwanda's soundtrack, and Jean's entourage; George woke up this morning painfully reminded of the fact that certain nocturnal pursuits require serious training. "Man, these guys with their brandy and Grand Marnier," he says, reaching behind his wire-rimmed glasses to rub his bleary eyes.

December in New York can be a singularly gray experience. Inside the suite, things are just as monochrome. The walls and carpet are gradations of ecru and taupe, the flat-panel TV sits dark on the wall; George sits in a gray sweater and comfortably faded jeans, fatigue in his voice. "This is definitely a hair and makeup day," he tells a photographer with a smile. "I wish you'd brought a fucking digital camera."

Hotel Rwanda opened Christmas week, and before Sheridan arrives, George talks a bit about his efforts to publicize the movie. The film chronicles Rusesabagina's story during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which an ethnic rift between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes led to an estimated 800,000 deaths. Rusesabagina, a hotel manager in the capital's finest property (and a Hutu), used his hotel to shelter Tutsi refugees (including his wife) from the Hutu militia laying waste to the country outside the compound's walls. And given the movie's status as an early Oscar contender, he's been on the go all month long drumming up awareness. "We can't afford not to tour," he says, "Maybe we're just not as smart as the other guys who insist on a big junket and doing it in one day."

Sheridan arrives at the suite soon enough, preceding the room-service cart and feeling fatigued himself. "I just can't shake this cold," he says with a cough, lightly ambling over to the food. His two mini-boxes of Rice Krispies, three strips of bacon, two hard-boiled eggs and coffee come at the predictably astronomical prices befitting a boutique sensation like Hotel Gansevoort.

Now in their 50s, the two men have known each other since they relocated to New York in the 1980s--Sheridan from Dublin, George from Belfast in Northern Ireland--and they share an easy rapport. In person, they offer a visual yin-yang that matches their banter: Sheridan is shorter, sturdier, more garrulous; George taller and somewhat more reserved. Age has settled in both of their faces, but kindly. It's been 20 years since they met in the men's room of a playhouse (nothing shady; it was where Frank McCourt and his brother were performing "A Couple of Blaggarts").

They both maintain a predisposition toward complex and chaotic projects--ones that can be difficult to sell in a town where high concept rules. For example, Sheridan was able to produce last year's In America only with the help of a negative pickup deal with Fox Searchlight. And after George finished the script for Hotel Rwanda, no studio wanted it. Getting it made required 11th-hour financing involving England, South Africa and Italy, during which George channeled in a good deal of his own money to get things underway before UA came on to distribute. They live with it.

SHERIDAN: "Terry picks easy ones to finance, hunger strikes and Rwanda."

GEORGE: "Maybe I should go for the plague next time. See if we can get money for that."

SHERIDAN: "Look, one of the things about American cinema is that it's simple. The American thing is, like, civil rights, Bill of Rights, Constitution. Simple things. And the movies are simple."

GEORGE: "Not simple in a bad way. Simple in a Hemingwayesque way."

SHERIDAN: "But it's that Einstein thing. 'When I ask a simple question, and get a simple answer, I'm talking to God.' If it's complex and nuanced, people don't get it. Chaos is your friend, Terry. When you show chaos, you show the structure. The chaos is the x-ray; it's the moment you see into society, when you see what is happening under the surface."

As a photographer takes light readings in the room, the two huddle over their bacon strips and talk about Sheridan's preproduction for his newest project, Paramount's biopic of rapper 50 Cent, Locked and Loaded. The film won't be shot where 50 Cent is from, in his home turf of Southside Queens, but Sheridan has been visiting the neighborhood as he casts the movie. "When you go into Queens, it looks upper-middle class," Sheridan says. "It's got picket fences and grass. A person coming in from the outside wouldn't get what I call the 'invisible tension.' " The phrase strikes an eerie parallel to Hotel Rwanda--and to George's experience growing up in Northern Ireland during the civil rights crisis of the 1970s.

In Rwanda, the Hutu/Tutsi rift that lay at the genocide's base was a phantom distinction with no physical basis, a remnant of the nation's Belgian colonial history. In one memorable scene in the movie, an American journalist sits in the hotel's bar and asks two women about their affiliation; though the women could be sisters, each hails from a different tribe. It underscores the astonishing wrongheadedness lurking behind the disaster. In Northern Ireland, of course, the bitter strife was between British-supported Protestants and the embattled Catholic minority, a similarly arbitrary difference.

Thus when they discuss Hotel Rwanda, George and Sheridan inevitably circle back to Northern Ireland--it's a leitmotif of their earlier work together, from In the Name of the Father to Some Mother's Son, a story of IRA figure Bobby Sands which they refer to as "the hunger-strike movie." "Using fear as the tactic to exploit division in society is the same in both [Rwanda and Northern Ireland]," says George, speaking with the weary authority of a man unfortunate enough to have lived his words. "The basic premise is, 'the other side's gonna take your livelihood, and maybe your life - and that's why you have to kill them first.'"

"I think it was harder being from the North in those days," Sheridan says.

"Well, there's a frustration in getting your ass kicked," says George, deadpan. "It was like Beirut there." In fact, George was imprisoned for three years in the mid-70s on suspicion of IRA activity - sadly, not a strange thing for Catholics in the north.

Though he doesn't like to talk about it, having plumbed it exhaustively with his scripts for In The Name of The Father and The Boxer, he still manages to find relief in humor. "I did the prison half, and Jim did the family half," he jokes of Father. And as the two men have pursued solo projects, each has stuck with his particular strong suit. Sheridan told the story of his own family's emigration in In America; with Hotel Rwanda, George teases a story of transcendence out of one of confinement. For the Tutsis in Kilgari, their only hope for salvation was behind the walls of Paul Rusesabagina's hotel. With the criminals being kept at bay by a fortress, the hotel is just jail turned inside out.

"What I like about that sort of situation," George says of telling Rusesabagina's story, "is you can take that character and they become somebody who walks through this bizarre event, who becomes the audience's eyes and ears. You're able to take an audience inside an event in a way that documentaries and certainly news footage can never do."

Citing Don Cheadle's performance as Rusesabagina, Sheridan wants to cast him in his 50 Cent movie. "Can he play dark?" asks Sheridan. "Och, please!" George says. Did you see Devil In A Blue Dress? He showed up and blew Denzel off the screen. Don is really smart about holding the whole story in his head. Really very like Daniel [Day-Lewis] in that sense - on Hotel Rwanda he had the emotional arc in his head no matter what happened."

"When you give violence a tongue," says Sheridan, "that's like a holy act to me. Everybody wants to shut violence behind a door, and that's the basis of tragedy."

The steadily encroaching instability that people felt in Rwanda, like the vigilance and fear that George is all too familiar with from his past, is largely foreign to us, even post-9/11. Violence doesn't fit easily with the "simplicity" Sheridan mentions, and that's a large part of why George and Sheridan have needed to find other avenues to realize their visions. As for those, there are drug dealers to cast. And so, Rice Krispies long gone, Sheridan and George stand to go, disappearing into the invisible tension of a gray New York morning.