ZAGREB, Croatia — Croatian actor Goran Visnjic, the brooding Luka Kovac on CTV's ER, is in line to star in a movie from his homeland about imprisoned war crimes suspect Ante Gotovina.

Visnjic, whose fictional character in the emergency hospital series lost his children during wars in the Balkans, said recently he would like to play Gotovina in a movie being planned by Croatian director Antun Vrdoljak.

And Vrdoljak has told The Associated Press by telephone that he "definitely" plans to make the movie, even though it still is just a "wish, a plan, an idea."

"Gotovina is a metaphor for today's Croatia," Vrdoljak told The Associated Press over the phone.

Gotovina, a retired general, is seen by many in Croatia as a hero of its 1991 independence war. But the UN war crimes court charged him in 2001 with allegedly orchestrating murders and expulsions of Serbs from Croatia in 2005, when Zagreb retook areas that Serb rebels seized in 1991.

Gotovina fled the arrest warrant in 2001. He was eventually apprehended in Spain on Dec. 7, 2005, and is awaiting trial before the court in The Hague, Netherlands.

Croat nationalists insist his indictment is unjust, even fabricated. Western governments' insistence that he be arrested, and his four-year flight, have made him a kind of a legend.

Posters with his photo are still plastered across Croatia; T-shirts, mugs and lighters bearing his image are sold and the Spanish wine he drank when arrested was sold out when it appeared in Croatian stores in December.

There is already at least one book about him, published while he was still a fugitive, describing the former French Legionnaire as an adventurer, patriot and a lover.

Vrdoljak said the movie would be primarily about the 1991 war, with Gotovina as the main character.

The two men met before and when he starts making the movie, he plans to talk a lot with him.

In The Hague? "No, I hope, I'm certain even, that we'll talk in Croatia," Vrdoljak said, alluding that Gotovina could be set free.