by Patricia Thomson
Unit photography by Phil Bray, SMPSP
Additional photos by Craig Haagensen
Photos courtesy of Universal Studios and Craig Haagensen

In the winter of 2004, an unprecedented act of diplomacy took place in the office of United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, but this time, it wasn’t the Noble Peace Prize winner who was mustering his powers of persuasion — it was director Sydney Pollack.

Pollack sought permission to film his new project, The Interpreter, on U.N. premises. No movie had ever been shot there, not even Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

Pollack was aware that the U.N. is not supposed to be used for commercial activity of any kind, and by most counts, a Hollywood film is as commercial as it gets. But he believed The Interpreter was the right film to break precedent. “The U.N. has got far more important things to do than to worry about movies,” the director notes wryly. “I was very careful not to try to sell Mr. Annan. I just wanted to tell him about the film, and I assured him that there was nothing in it that would be embarrassing for the U.N., and that my sympathies were with the spirit of the U.N.” By the end of the 30-minute meeting, Annan gave the green light.

Certainly, few could dispute Pollack’s credentials as a director of thrillers with contemporary, relevant themes — he helped define the genre with pictures such as Three Days of the Condor and The Firm. To bring The Interpreter to the screen, Pollack tapped Darius Khondji, ASC, AFC, a director of photography with his own distinguished record in the suspense genre (Seven, Alien: Resurrection, The Ninth Gate, Panic Room) whose diversity had long impressed him. “I saw [that Darius] was capable of a very wide range of work, all the way from the super-stylized photography of Evita [see AC Jan. ’97] to much grittier stuff, like Seven [AC Oct. ’95], and that range was interesting to me,” says Pollack. “I wanted The Interpreter to have a base in absolute reality, but heighten it slightly. I wanted something more beautiful, more vivid than documentary reality.”

For his part, Khondji was delighted to have an opportunity to work with Pollack. “When it comes to storytelling, Sydney works like a journalist,” he says. “There was something very real about what he wanted for the film, and to me, that’s more exciting than the influence of painters or photographers.”

The Interpreter opens with Sylvia Broome (Nicole Kidman), an African-born interpreter, translating in the U.N.’s General Assembly. She later returns after business hours to retrieve her forgotten purse and hears voices coming through the headset. Flipping on the light and donning the headset, she realizes she is eavesdropping on a plot to assassinate the leader of her African homeland during his upcoming address to the U.N. She tries to turn off the light in the booth before it flickers all the way on, but it’s too late — she is plainly visible to the plotters on the dark General Assembly floor.  Enter Tobin Keller (Sean Penn), a Secret Service agent assigned to protect Broome from the would-be assassins. As he investigates the matter, however, Keller begins to suspect that his ward knows more than she’s admitting, and that she might have her own agenda with regard to the African president and rebel groups.

Like Three Days of the Condor, in which Robert Redford plays a New York-based CIA agent who stumbles across a rogue group within the spy agency, The Interpreter takes full advantage of New York City’s inimitable skyline, landmarks and urban pulse. Although filming in the U.N. was a big question mark at the outset, the filmmakers always planned to do extensive shooting in the city; the story involves surreptitious meetings in city parks, scenes around Sylvia’s Greenwich Village apartment, a suspenseful chase through the streets of Manhattan, and a bus explosion in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights.

As Pollack began working his way up the ladder toward Annan, construction got underway on a partial re-creation of the General Assembly room at a soundstage in Toronto. (The plan was to add the room’s domed ceiling as a CG set extension.) This was to be supplemented by a dozen Toronto locations that would act as stand-ins for the U.N.’s neighborhood. “We examined possibilities around the world, and Toronto had some architecture that was the closest,” says executive producer G. Mac Brown. “But honestly, if the U.N. had said no, we were never very clear on what we could do to sell [audiences] another way. We had some ridiculous notions about building the General Assembly at three-quarter scale, finding buildings, and doing visual effects out of windows. I don’t think we could have done it, but we were certainly trying.”

When Annan’s permission came through, the team heaved a collective sigh of relief. For Khondji, the advantages of shooting inside the U.N. were numerous. “I was so inspired by its architecture,” he says. “The place is just unbelievable. The building is very, very strong — it sweats ambience. Our production designer, Jon Hutman, was really good, and I would’ve trusted him to build that set, but it would never have been the same as shooting in the real place. The grit of the natural daylight coming in, the practical lights, the feeling and patina of the real place are things you cannot re-do on a set. It’s a direct line of juice you get from the soul of the place.”

However, filming at the location also had its disadvantages. The U.N.’s rules, which were strengthened considerably after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, were non-negotiable: every piece of equipment taken into the building had to be sniffed by dogs, the production had to be able to evacuate with three hours’ notice, the filmmakers could not hang lights or touch walls in key areas, and filming could only take place on weekends. The latter stipulation “was the biggest chore of all,” says Brown. “At 6 o’clock on Monday morning, it had to appear as though we’d never been there. I’ve been told that we used more lights in the U.N. lobby than had been used on any one location in New York City before. It’s one thing to do that, and it’s another thing to do it over a weekend with no pre-rigging and no wrap time!”