Facilitating the Interpreter
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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"The Interpreter", much acclaimed across the world, has been made possible due to the efforts of our own Shashi Tharoor.
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SHOWCASING U.N. VALUES Sydney Pollack (standing) directs a scene for "The Interpreter" set in the UN General Assembly.
The first few minutes of Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 classic thriller "North By Northwest" found his favourite leading man, Cary Grant - literally - left holding the body, after a United Nations diplomat is assassinated in the foyer of the U.N. headquarters building in New York.
But in those days, less than 13 years after the organisation acquired its famous 39-floor structure in the city, shooting within was strictly taboo - and Hitchcock had to be content with placing a candid camera outside the building to catch a shot of Grant entering - after which he had to use a mockup of the interior.
Nothing really changed in the decades since then, and the cluster of buildings which housed the four buildings: the high rise Secretariat, the General Assembly, the Conference building and the Dag Hammarskjöld Library.
In Manhattan's East Side, has remained strictly out of bounds to commercial filmmakers - till early 2004.
That was when veteran director Sydney Pollack began work on his new film.
"One of the reasons I was so attracted to `The Interpreter' is that it was an opportunity to shoot inside the United Nations and I naively assumed, that we were going to have that privilege," says Pollack.
He soon learned that movie cameras other than for news purposes, had never been allowed inside, but before resigning himself to using computer generated images, he thought he's give it one more shot: After all, no one had made a movie like this, where the UN was central to the story and much of the action was to take place within. Before he met Secretary General Kofi Annan, Pollack acquired one key supporter: the U.N.'s Under Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, India-born Shashi Tharoor.
"The basic story of `The Interpreter' seemed to me to showcase the values that this institution stands for," says Tharoor, "And when a person of Sydney Pollack's eminence approaches us with a story where the U.N. is central to the plot and not merely a convenient backdrop, it seems that it's giving the U.N. the kind of respect that a lesser filmmaker might not have brought to it" On Tharoor's recommendation, Kofi Annan agreed to allow filming inside the U.N. - including climactic scenes in the General Assembly - particularly because the main character, "The Interpreter", was passionately pro-U.N.
Filming was done over five months during weekends last year, with all signs of the activity removed by Monday morning when the UN's regular week began.
Persian-French cinematographer Darius Khondji, found in the opportunity a personal inspiration: "Ultimately, I felt, the U.N. became another main character in the film.
There were Nicole Kidman, Sean Penn, Catherine Keener and the United Nations!" For Hawaii-born Australian, Kidman, the film was her first bash at an all-action thriller after she saved the world from nuclear holocaust in "The Peacemaker" ( 1997).
She plays Silvia Broome a UN interpreter, from a fictional African nation, Matobo, who accidentally overhears what she thinks is a plot to assassinate the dictator-President Zuwanie ( Earl Cameron)of her country when he comes to address the UN General Assembly.
Tobin Keller ( Sean Penn) and Dot Woods ( Catherine Keener), the US Secret Service agents assigned to investigate, find her explanation too pat and suspect that Silvia might have her own interest in bumping off the President - her white settler parents were killed presumably by his henchmen.
But in a style for which director Pollack has been known, ever since he made `intelligent' thrillers like "The Three Days of the Condor" and the John Grisham thriller "The Firm", the plot sucks in some tense set pieces including a bomb-laden bus ride and a final denouement within the UN assembly.
"As the backdrop for a thriller, I think the U.N. couldn't be more intriguing," says Nicole Kidman, who spent weeks observing real interpreters at work in the UN, "Like Silvia, I really came to be quite inspired by what the U.N. is trying to accomplish in bringing people all over the world closer together".
Indeed many real employees at the UN, can be seen in crowd scenes playing themselves. It all adds a dash of realism to what is essentially an old fashioned action adventure, told by a seasoned craftsman of the thinking person's thriller.
That it takes place mostly in the corridors of one of the world's iconic structures allows "The Interpreter" to smoothly bridge that dangerous chasm between fact and fiction.
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