Still, Pollack sold them on his experience with thrillers, including 1975's Three Days of the Condor, which paired Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway, and 1993's The Firm, which starred Tom Cruise. It was on that film that Pollack met Kidman, Cruise's then wife. ''We lived around the corner from each other,'' he remembers. ''They came over and barbecued, and I got to know them fairly well.'' In the course of costarring with them in Eyes Wide Shut and producing Cold Mountain, Pollack informally pledged to look for something to direct Kidman in. But he felt he couldn't ask Kidman to take the Interpreter lead, since she had supposedly been attached to the Daldry iteration. ''I wasn't going to put her on the spot. I just assumed she didn't want to do it.'' He was thinking of Naomi Watts, a better prospect than any ''all-American'' actress, he felt, to evoke translator Silvia Broome's linguistic acumen. But Watts called him, he remembers, and said she couldn't take the role when Kidman, her best friend, wanted to do it. By summer 2003, Kidman was committed to start The Interpreter after The Stepford Wives.
Considering that the Silvia Broome character is, after all, an African expatriate, did anyone consider, say, Halle Berry? Apparently not, since Randolph's initial script was pointedly about a white translator coming to the U.N. as a sort of personal therapy after leaving the war-torn African country where she was born to a white English mother and a white African father. ''I chose a white African because I felt that's a story that really hasn't been told,'' says Randolph. ''I think we've historically dismissed white Africans as racists. And I wanted to portray someone who loved her country, felt an intimate connection to it, but didn't happen to be black. I never really worried about it that much.'' Neither did Pollack, who says, ''I didn't feel this is a picture in which the whites are superior to the blacks. I didn't feel I was going to get attacked for that, but we'll see. Maybe I will.''
While Randolph's script had gotten Pollack on board, it ended with a big everybody-was-lying-about-everything twist that Pollack felt didn't work. It can't have pleased the producing team that their director wanted to rip out the whole structure, but they went along. ''Sydney likes to rework everything,'' reports screenwriter Scott Frank (Dead Again, Out of Sight, Minority Report), the first of two collaborators to expand Randolph's work. (The second was Steven Zaillian, an Oscar winner for Schindler's List.) ''He likes to challenge all of the ideas. It drove us all a little insane.''
Fortunately for Pollack, Kidman got held up in Stepford Wives reshoots, which bought revision time. In daily sessions through the fall of 2003 at Pollack's Manhattan apartment — the pad happens to overlook the U.N. — he brainstormed, abetted not only by Scott but by his longtime go-to guy for character polishes, David Rayfiel. (He adapted Three Days of the Condor and has toiled uncredited on several other Pollack movies.) Everyone agreed Randolph's scenario needed more thrills. So Scott concocted a mid-story bus sequence that brings the major players together and puts them at ground zero in a terrorist incident. Would it feel exploitative? The question got endless airing, and not surprisingly in a business that depends on shock as a ticket seller, shock won out. Says producer Kevin Misher, ''To depict a movie about international intrigue and avoid [terrorism] felt irresponsible to the realities of the world.''
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