United Nations, Jan 30: The United Nations said that a movie starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn would be made at UN headquarters in New York, where Hollywood has failed for decades to get permission to film. The movie, to be directed by Sydney Pollack, is called 'The Interpreter’. Kidman would play a Kenyan-born UN translator who overhears an assassination plot, becomes a target herself and helps stop the killing of an African leader addressing the UN General Assembly.
Shashi Tharoor, the UN Under Secretary-General for Public Affairs, yesterday said it was the first time in recent memory the world body, including Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the presidents of the Security Council and the General Assembly, had allowed a feature film to be made in the building.
The United Nations rejected Alfred Hitchcock's overtures to shoot part of the 1959 film 'North by Northwest’, which opened with scenes of UN lounges.
''It is a way of making the united nations accessible to people who would not ordinarily think of the UN,'' said Tharoor, instrumental in getting approval for the film.
''We certainly expect to reach far more people than any public affairs initiative we could have undertaken,'' Tharoor said. ''Our consistent effort under Kofi Annan is to demystify the organisation and give people a sense of what the UN is all about, how it looks and how it matters.''
Bureau Report