With a career spanning more than 25 years, producer Charles 'Chuck' Roven is not letting a huge hit like The Dark Knight sidetrack him from the kinds of films he has always enjoyed making.

'After a hit like that, maybe there are more opportunities to select what I'll be doing next,' says Los Angeles-based Roven.

But, he adds, pointing to films ranging from Three Kings to The Bank Job to City Of Angels, 'it won't affect the kinds of movies I want to make. I've always enjoyed that in my career I've made so many different kinds of movies. If there is a constant across those films, it's characters making decisions, rising to the occasion, the belief that men can fundamentally show the best of themselves in adversity.'

The next man rising to the occasion in a Roven project is Clive Owen in Tom Tykwer's The International, a US-Germany co-production backed by Sony Pictures which had its world premiere as the opening night attraction at the Berlin International Film Festival.

'The International was shot on location in Berlin; Tom is from Germany; it seemed like a great fit,' says Roven, who previously launched 1996's 12 Monkeys at the Berlinale.

The film shot at Studio Babelsberg and qualified for funding from the German Federal Film Fund (Dfff). Roven says the rebate of $7.9m (EUR5.8m) was a key piece of the financing. 'I don't know if this film could have been made without it,' he says. 'It certainly wouldn't have had the same production values.'

The International is a longtime pet project that Roven had been developing for a decade with producer Richard Suckle. They got Sony interested and attached Tykwer to direct.

The team had to wait for Tykwer to finish shooting his 2006 thriller Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer, but started the casting process that led to Owen taking the lead. 'We thought Clive was perfect to play this Interpol agent, Louis Salinger,' Roven says. 'You're not sure if he's going through a breakdown or not. So this man is strong but very, very vulnerable.'

Roven's other ongoing production is Dominic Sena's Season Of The Witch, a 14th-century plague thriller starring Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman which shot recently in Austria and Hungary. And, of course, he has other projects in mind. 'I'm constantly developing movies,' he says, adding that he is 'too superstitious' to discuss specifics in advance.