First things first.

Peter Sarsgaard, who was in Pittsburgh a year ago filming "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," says the movie could be headed to the Sundance Film Festival in January.

"It's the kind of movie that needs to go to a festival" and gain exposure that could lead to its purchase by a major distributor. "We have a very good producer in Michael London."

Sarsgaard hasn't actually seen the finished product, an adaptation of the Michael Chabon novel, but that's not unusual. "I don't like watching movies that I'm in without an audience. They all seem bad if you watch them by yourself," said the actor, who received widespread praise as the tormentor and rapist in "Boys Don't Cry."

Since then, his roles have included an animal lover in "Year of the Dog," a Marine in "Jarhead," an air marshal in "Flightplan," a smooth-talking lawyer in "Skeleton Key" and an editor trying to separate fact from fiction in "Shattered Glass."

In "Mysteries," he plays a hoodlum named Cleveland opposite Sienna Miller's Jane. Unlike his co-star, he had no complaints about the city, where his work preceded the birth of his daughter with actress Maggie Gyllenhaal.

"I had a great time filming there. I love all the names of everything in Pittsburgh. Any city where you've got the Monongahela and the Allegheny, those are priceless." He's from St. Louis, another river town, but notes Pittsburgh is greener and hillier, for starters.

He was on the phone to talk about "Rendition," a contemporary thriller about the government's use of rendition, the practice of capturing suspected terrorists and sending them to other countries for a more intense form of interrogation.

In the movie, an Egyptian-born chemical engineer who has lived in the States since he was a boy disappears on an overseas trip home to Chicago and to his pregnant wife, played by Reese Witherspoon, and their young son.

Witherspoon's Isabella El-Ibrahimi, who has no idea what happened to her husband, turns to a college friend, Sarsgaard's Alan Smith, for help. To research his role as a senior aide to a senator (Alan Arkin), Sarsgaard spoke to someone who held that job in real life.

"At one point, we had had it where I was trying to come up with a universal-health-care-for-children bill, and I said, how involved would a senior aide to a senator be in that, and she said very. 'You'd be totally involved.'"

Sarsgaard shot his scenes first, in a brisk 2 1/2 weeks, and he never traveled to Morocco, where the bulk of filming took place. "To be honest, when I saw the movie at Toronto, I had never realized how graphic it was going to be, and I thought, 'Oh, people are definitely going to hate my character now.'"

The movie, which premiered in Toronto, is rated R for torture/violence and language.

"The truth is, most Americans, when you say torture or waterboarding or whatever you want to call it -- whatever euphemism you have for torture -- unless you've sat in on a torture, it's not really something that is going to affect you the way that it should. You say, 'Oh, they're using waterboarding. Waterboarding, that sounds like something we do in Missouri off the back of a motorboat.' There's just no way to imagine."

The movie is directed by Gavin Hood, who won the 2005 Oscar for foreign language film with "Tsotsi," shot in his native South Africa.

"I thought that Gavin would be a particularly interesting person to direct it because he's from a country where the government ended up sacrificing the rule of law to 'restore order' and fighting its own citizens and doing things like [putting] someone in jail without charges for 12 days -- they had a 12-day detention -- and then 60 and 90.

"He's seen things erode and during that whole time, he said he would look to America because he was a student of law, and the Constitution in America just seemed like ... the ideal. And I think it takes an outsider sometimes to fully appreciate the beauty of a place, and I think for Gavin, it's all a slippery slope."

As for the timing of "Rendition," which joins other topical movies such as "In the Valley of Elah" and "The Kingdom" in theaters, Sarsgaard said there's often a five-year lag time between events such as the Vietnam War and resulting books and movies.

"It always seems like it takes people a certain amount of time to react to something, formulate a perspective and then communicate that. Hollywood isn't known to go out on a limb, I would say, especially with movies. It's rare that a movie comes out that people put a lot of money into that's contrary to the majority of popular opinion, or they make it incredibly funny and a little bit salacious, like Michael Moore."

"Rendition" is many things, particularly timely, but funny and salacious, it's not.