For a long time, he was bitter. Somehow, though, the movie "Hotel Rwanda" has helped him allay some of that pain — which stemmed from the world ignoring the hellish situation.

"Whenever I talk about the genocide, whenever I will see the movie, I see it as if it was happening yesterday, or today in the morning," says Rusesabagina, 50, who now runs a heavy-duty transport business in Zambia.

His family lives in Belgium, where he visits often. A cement bond exists among him, his wife and four children, he says, because they all feel there's almost nothing they can go through now that could top what they've already endured. They can always tell each other: "We have shared worse."

Don Cheadle, who plays Rusesabagina, said he thought he'd find a much more tragic figure.

"I expected to find somebody who was really haunted and really shell-shocked in a way. Because the stories I had read and the tapes I had seen and the accountings I had heard were horrific, and I just couldn't imagine myself, what I would be like, if I had experienced and witnessed all of that," says the actor, who's received an Oscar nomination for his performance as Rusesabagina.

"But meeting him and spending time with him and having dinner with him and getting drunk with him and just hanging out with him in that way, it made perfect sense once I got to know him.

"Paul sees every day since he got away from there as a bonus. Every day is like, 'I'm alive!' ... Every day he thought he was going to die. He woke up with that thought every day, like: 'I wonder how I'm going to die today. I wonder where it's going to happen in the hotel. I wonder what it's going to be with. Am I going to get shot? Is it gonna be a machete? Is somebody going to throw me off the roof?' "

"That was my day-to-day life," Rusesabagina said, in a separate interview.

The movie has a few scenes where it appears Rusesabagina is going to be killed. Rwanda's Hutu extremists were massacring Tutsis (and moderate Hutus), and they were livid that he was sheltering people they wanted to slaughter. (In 100 days, hundreds of thousands were slain.)

In one instance, he escaped simply by pointing soldiers who asked about the hotel manager's whereabouts in one direction while walking in another. In other instances, he finagles his way out of death by buying off soldiers with jewels or a general with Cohiba cigars and single-malt Scotch.

It's so relatively unbloody that some critics have complained that "Hotel Rwanda" downplays the colossal carnage.