HOLLYWOOD - Design studio Yu + Co recently created the main title treatment for the film, "The Interpreter." The studio's design team collaborated with director Sydney Pollack on the spare title graphics, which suggest suspense and intrigue, while elegantly evoking the film's central theme of language.
The title graphics appear over the film's opening scene, which introduces Silvia Broome (Nicole Kidman), a United Nations interpreter, and suggests how she becomes caught up in a plot to assassinate an African leader. The Yu + Co design team selected a clean font for the graphics and created a distinctive manner for revealing them.
"We were very careful in our choice of typeface; we wanted something that would complement the film's character as a very refined thriller," explains Yu + Co art director Yolanda Santosa. "Ultimately, we selected a classic font because of its handsome look, readability, and because it associated well with suspense."
The design team applied a subtle visual effect to the title graphic itself. "The characters ghost on, then recede gently into the background," Santosa notes. "The technique suggests discovery, as a police detective solving a crime, as well as the ephemeral nature of language and the elusive quality of the interpreter's art." The placement of the titles was also done with great care. The sequence, which occurs primarily inside the United Nations Building, includes a lot of action and camera movement, and as a result it did not naturally lend itself to the placement of graphics.
The studio also created English subtitles for several scenes in the film involving foreign language dialogue.
Credits for Yu + Co include creative director Garson Yu, executive producer Claire O'Brien, associate producer Ryan Robertson, typographers Synderela Peng and Martin Surya, animator Etsuko Uji, and editor/Inferno artist Zachary Scheuren.