‘In 1995 co-writer Brian Ward and I pitched an idea for a thriller about an interpreter to Working Title. Tim Bevan said to us “I don’t like that idea much but I love the idea of a movie about an Interpreter. Go away and think of something else”. So we came back with a much bigger and bolder movie set in the United Nations about an interpreter who speaks not only the five main languages at the UN but an indigenous South American language she overhears when someone thinks the mikes are switched off. Ten years after our original screenplay and with the input of three more writers and the legendary director Sydney Pollack, our Latin American country was turned into the fictional Matobo, arguably a thinly disguised Zimbabwe under Mugabe and it finally reached the screen as a $90 million+ Hollywood blockbuster and one of Working Title’s highest grossing films.