TORONTO – Ethan Hawke says the concept of drone warfare was difficult for him to wrap his head around before he started to work on “The Good Kill.”

“That’s the reason to make the film,” the “Boyhood” star said at last September’s Toronto International Film Festival.

“I had no context for what it meant. You hear the word ‘drone’ and it sounds like something from science fiction or it sounds like ‘clone’ or I don’t know what. I imagined that we were (dropping) bombs safely from a satellite or something and you just have no context for the story.

“It’s how I imagine in 1914 people at home felt about trench warfare — you might hear that expression but you had no context — what does that mean?”

Opening Friday, “The Good Kill” tells the story of Maj. Tom Egan (Hawke), a Las Vegas-based Air Force fighter pilot who spends his days remotely dropping bombs on the Taliban, and then heads home to his wife (“Mad Men”‘s January Jones) and children.

Director Andrew Niccol, who worked with Hawke on 1997’s “Gattaca,” says he was fascinated by the dual lives such servicemen are forced to lead.

“For me it’s the schizophrenia,” he said, sitting alongside Hawke at the fest.

“We’ve never had the situation before where someone will go to work, they’ll fight a war and go home that same day … so there’s no decompression time.”

Egan is increasingly bothered that he’s no longer on “real missions” and starts to question the ethics of his job. He clashes with his supervising officer (played by B.C.-bred Bruce Greenwood) and begins a downward spiral.

“For me I always imagine that Tom Egan joined the airforce shortly after he saw ‘Top Gun’ and went in full of all these expectations of playing volleyball and riding motorcycles and saving the world,” said Hawke.

“Instead he’s faced with something very different.”

The U.S. Department of Defence declined to help with the making of “The Good Kill” but the filmmakers did convince ex-pilots to share their stories. Some of what they heard, said Niccol, seemed too unbelievable to be in the film.

“(One) guy would show us pictures of his apartment right on the Strip, and would tell us stories about the younger guys who would operate a joystick 12 hours (at work) and literally go back to their apartment and play video games with a very similar joystick.”

He added: “(How) you separate that seems impossible to me. And I couldn’t put that in the movie … because I just thought it was too outrageous, that no one would believe that fact, that you’d have a joystick war and then go home and play a fantasy with the same joystick.”

“The Good Kill” opens Friday.