There was also the matter of the building’s sheer size, which complicated the moving of equipment. Four trucks loaded with grip and lighting gear were in the U.N.’s underground parking garage five blocks away, but that distance proved impractical for both hauling equipment through the connected buildings and transporting it with a smaller stake-bed truck. Instead, every Friday night those trucks would unload and go through the dog search at a certain time. But fetching anything extra was “an interesting process,” says key grip Mitch Lillian. “We’d come in at 6 a.m., and everything that had been used on other locations during the week — cameras, dollies and extra grip gear — would have to be sniffed going through the gate. If we needed anything additional from the truck, we’d radio the guy stationed there, and he would bring it to the gate while somebody on our side would walk to the gate [to fetch it]. The challenge was that the U.N. stretches from 43rd Street to 49th Street, so you could conceivably have a six-block walk.”

Khondji notes that Lillian and gaffer John De Blau made invaluable contributions throughout the unusual shoot. “Mitch and John gave me excellent advice every step of the way,” he says. “And my focus puller, Erik Swanek, and his crew of camera assistants were also great collaborators.”

The production’s Arriflex camera package, rented from New York’s Camera Service Center, comprised Arricam Studios, 435s and 35-3s, and several sets of Cooke anamorphic lenses specially shipped from Technovision Paris and Joe Dunton Company (JDC) in London. “I shot Evita and two other movies with Cooke anamorphic lenses, and I love the look of them,” says the cinematographer. “They’re not quite as sharp as all the other anamorphic lenses and they have a very special quality. To me, the image they render looks the way an anamorphic image should look, with a shallow depth of field, a very round image, and very beautiful close-ups. Sometimes it’s almost a deformation of reality, bigger than life.”

Khondji adds that he also wanted the widescreen format to evoke American thrillers from the Seventies such as Klute, All the President’s Men, Serpico and, most of all, Three Days of the Condor, a key source of inspiration. Anamorphic’s shallow depth of field could effectively create a sense of claustrophobia and offer both emotional intensity and an epic feel. “I didn’t want to create a nostalgic look,” he notes. “I wanted to make a modern film, but I wanted it to be more analog than digital. We cinematographers lose something by always going toward sharpness, toward perfection, depth of field, anti-halo, anti-flare, anti-this, anti-that. We lose a certain soul we used to have.”

Still, Khondji did use two of Kodak’s newer film stocks on the picture. “We were the first to use Vision2 Expression 500T 5229 [on a feature],” he says. “It has a low contrast ratio and a very mild curve of contrast on the negative.” He filmed New York day exteriors on Vision2 100T 5212.

Among the show’s interiors, the General Assembly was the most important location. That is where Broome overhears the assassination plot, and where she later reenacts it for security agents. The famous room also serves as the setting where Broome and Keller have several key discussions, and where agents race to thwart the assassination plot at the film’s climax.

With its green-marble podium and gold-leaf backdrop, the General Assembly offers significant aesthetic appeal. “The room’s lighting is interesting because of the dark wood, the gold background and the dark-blue walls,” says Khondji. “We just made it more interesting by enhancing it. I increased the contrast by turning off some lights, and I highlighted the gold.” Doing so in a massive auditorium with 3,000 seats and an 85'-high domed ceiling posed some special challenges, however. Foremost among these was the practical lighting system, which was created during a renovation in the 1970s. High in the dome is a narrow catwalk that accesses a lighting grid. “They have hundreds of lamps up there, but to get to them, we literally had to crawl,” recalls De Blau. Adds Lillian, “It was really challenging to get out there. Anyone who weighed more than 170 pounds had a really hard time squeezing through the crack.”

But squeeze they did, and the crew hung nearly 60 Par cans between the existing units that stayed up for the duration of the shoot. Another semi-permanent fixture during the shoot was the filmmakers’ truss rig on chain motors, which was used to facilitate a dramatic overhead shot and for hanging a teaser to cut spill. The U.N. did granted permission for some alterations — such as the installation of breakable glass on an interpreter’s booth.

However,  the crew was told to not remove tables or chairs from the General Assembly floor, because that furniture was wired with shell-shaped earpieces for simultaneous translation. This meant that camera movement was mostly restricted to dollies or tracks on the room’s sloping aisles, or laterally across the front and back. In spite of these restrictions, the filmmakers were uniformly impressed by the U.N. staff’s attitude. “They were amazingly cooperative,” says Lillian. “At first, we thought we couldn’t do anything, but by the end of the job, we had a zillion lights. Every time we moved in there, we’d bring in a Giraffe crane and an Arrow crane. We didn’t use them that much, but we had them on hand just in case we had to reach out over seats or up to the interpreter’s booth.”

Four 20Ks on the main balcony and some Par cans were responsible for lighting the shimmering, gold-leaf backdrop. Additional 5Ks, 10Ks, and 20Ks were positioned in the windowless booths above the interpreter booths, while 20Ks were stationed atop two Genie lifts to light the podium and provide edgelight in Broome’s practical interpreter booth. (To facilitate frontal views and close-ups, the booth was also rebuilt on stage at Brooklyn’s Marcy Avenue Armory.) Kino Flos gelled with 1⁄4 Green were hidden around the assembly floor and inside translator booths to generate a blue uplight; some of the fluorescent units were also placed on the curved delegate tables, where they replaced old, handmade cathode tubes.

Overall, working in the U.N. “required rigging for flexibility,” says Lillian. “We couldn’t lock ourselves into a situation.” This was necessitated by two factors: the script was rewritten during production, and the filmmakers’ ongoing discussions with U.N. staff occasionally opened up new locations. The three-story public lobby, for instance, was initially off limits, but the U.N. eventually relented, and some scenes were moved to this location.