New York – Though it has its own fire department, post office, security force and, until recently, one of the last bars in New York City that allowed you to smoke a cigarette, the United Nations still needs the world around it.
Or at least Hollywood.
That might be one lesson gleaned from the organization’s unprecedented decision to allow director Sydney Pollack to shoot scenes from his new thriller “The Interpreter” inside its Manhattan headquarters.
“We aren’t, let’s put it bluntly, a film set. We have a job to do,” says Shashi Tharoor, the U.N.’s under-secretary-general for communications and public information. “But if a film wants to reflect that job, and the principles on which we work, then that’s something we consider very seriously.”
While it didn’t go to an official Security Council vote, the decision did involve some diplomatic maneuvering.
Pollack reportedly lobbied New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to apply pressure on U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The initial answer was “no,” but Annan changed his mind after seeing a copy of the script.
After Annan’s nod, Tharoor first had to secure approval from the General Assembly’s president, Julian Hunt of St. Lucia, a country in the Caribbean. After that, he approached the Security Council president, who brought it before a closed door informal session.
“A few ambassadors took the floor to say they welcomed the idea,” Tharoor says.
Film work would normally be considered outside activity and against U.N. rules, but in the case of “The Interpreter,” some people were given special dispensation from the secretary-general to appear as extras.
The most striking extra is the building itself, where filming took place only at nights and on weekends. Never before have we seen so much of this high-security structure, from inside the General Assembly to the modernist lobby to the inner hallways.
Action leaps into high gear when Nicole Kidman’s character overhears a whispered conversation inside the General Assembly late at night. Someone apparently wants to kill a visiting African head of state. As a U.N. employee, she wants to resolve it nonviolently. Or does she?
Even though Tharoor says there has never been a credible threat of this magnitude inside the U.N., he says the organization is comfortable with this fiction. There are others, too. At one point, Sean Penn’s character, a Secret Service operative charged with guarding visiting foreign dignitaries, brandishes a U.N. personnel file. Tharoor says this kind of jurisdictional reach is unlikely.
What cannot be stretched beyond the truth is the job of the interpreters. To make the portrayal as authentic as possible, Pollack turned to Chief of Interpretation Services Brigitte Andreassier-Pearl, who points out the difference between interpretation – which is done live, through speech, sometimes simultaneously, and without dictionaries – and translation, which is done on the page and in a more leisurely fashion.
“Sydney Pollack would come regularly, discuss, and I showed him around, answer his questions,” says Andreas-
sier-Pearl, whose scarf and Swatch wearingare incorporated into Kidman’s character.
Andreassier-Pearl escorted the movie director to the General Assembly meetings. She then fielded his questions about the interpreters: where they lunch, how they dress, and so on.
Finally, Kidman spent a morning in the interpreters’ booth in the Security Council, asking all the right questions when not turning heads in the hallway. She wanted to put herself in the shoes of a U.N. interpreter, Andreassier-Pearl says.
Although the job might seem like a small service, it is on the front lines of U.N. business. Interpreters are put under oath to keep private meetings confidential. In many cases, they know international developments hours before the rest of the world.
Now, thanks to Kidman and Pollack, they have a new mission: interpreting the U.N. back to the world itself.
John Freeman is a writer in New York.
