Quotes of the Day

Making a movie is tough enough without having to teach your actors to speak English. But when director Stephen Frears set out to create the shadowed world of immigrant asylum seekers in London for his urban thriller Dirty Pretty Things, he thought the language barrier might actually help. Frears — who manages to unite the gritty realism of his indie breakthrough My Beautiful Laundrette with the color and rhythm of his Hollywood hit High Fidelity — pulled together a group of acclaimed European actors, all of whom speak different languages. "I don't know what possessed me," he says. "I can't believe that we undertook what we did."

Since the London of Dirty Pretty Things is a parallel universe most Londoners walk by every day — populated by European and Middle Eastern immigrants who hold the jobs the English don't want — Frears' casting, an almost over-the-top mélange of culture and identity, makes perfect sense. In the film, which opens in the U.K. on Dec. 13 and across the Continent early next year, French cinema darling Audrey Tautou (who won hearts around the world as the bright-eyed dreamer in Amélie) stars as a proud Turkish Muslim chambermaid. The Spanish actor Sergi Lopez — whose popularity went global when he took the lead in the French film Harry, He's Here to Help — turns in a wonderfully sleazy performance as a corrupt hotel manager. And Croatian Zlatko Buric, now working in film and television in Denmark, plays an egotistical Russian doorman. They all work together in a seedy London hotel, as if they're gathering for an Esperanto convention. Thanks to intensive training with a dialect coach, the actors learned to deliver their lines phonetically. "It was an absolutely idiotic idea," Frears adds. "Which we seem to have pulled off."

"I didn't realize how difficult it would be," says Tautou, who delivered her lines in English but had to grapple with a Turkish accent. "I wasn't confident at all. When you work in a foreign language, it's as if you are deaf. You can't judge yourself and you can't correct yourself. I couldn't improvise or try anything different. I felt that I was losing my freedom in a way." But that sense of isolation helped her create Senay, a tough but scared woman trapped in an unfamiliar, hostile society.

To find her character, Tautou spent time with a group of Turkish women, many of whom had stories similar to Senay's. "I always knew that it was hard for immigrants, that they don't have enough money and always live on the razor's edge, never knowing when they are going to leave," she says. "But I hadn't realized how hard it was for them to leave their countries. The women I met were feeling so isolated and scared. And they were ready to do just about anything to leave their countries, even if the conditions they were going to weren't perfect. It was just the fact that they didn't need to hide anymore."

Dirty Pretty Things — the title refers to the nasty stuff people do in private and the workers who clean up after them, making dirty things pretty again — follows Okwe, an illegal immigrant from Nigeria (accomplished British stage actor Chiwetel Ejiofor) who divides his time between driving minicabs and working the night shift as a hotel receptionist. While fixing a blocked toilet, he discovers a human heart stuck in the plumbing. This gruesome find kicks off a plot that quickly unveils some brutal truths about the plight of asylum seekers in Europe — poverty, organ trafficking, prostitution and constant fear of deportation. A British film in which the British are a minority, Dirty Pretty Things presents audiences with an underworld they rarely see and a reality they often choose to ignore. As Okwe puts it, they're the invisible people: "We're the ones who drive your cabs, clean your rooms and suck your c___s."

"I used reality to create the characters," explains writer Steven Knight. "Because if you look at reality, the night porter will almost certainly be African and the chambermaids will almost certainly be Turkish. By opening one door that's marked Staff Only you enter a world that is filmically wonderful." To step through that door in his first screenplay, Knight used the research skills he honed when helping to create the wildly popular TV quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He visited consulates to learn refugee law, police stations to track the movements of immigrant populations in London, and spoke with people in North London's Turkish community to hear first-hand accounts of sweatshop labor.

Although the film is more entertainment than political statement, its story could have been lifted straight from the latest headlines. The closing of the Sangatte refugee camp near Calais, France — as well as the 99 asylum seekers who commandeered a nearby church two weeks ago — has prompted criticism of Europe's treatment of asylum seekers. And throughout Europe there have been reports of a grisly trade in organs from immigrants and the poor. So when a panicked Okwe tells a friend who works in a morgue what he's found, his friend asks, "You didn't know that people sold their organs?"

While the characters' shaky legal status provides the tension for what Frears calls his "Gothic horror story" (they can't go to the police for help and fall victim to blackmail), it also points out how far people will go just to survive. Senay moves from cleaning rooms to a sweatshop, resigning herself to abuse and humiliation from her employers. Fleeting references to the government are openly critical. And the two immigration officers who barge into Senay's home and track her down at work come off like a pair of mob henchmen.

The director shrugs off any suggestion that he might be calling for specific changes in immigration policy. "Am I responsible for the human race? No, I am not. I'm responsible for telling a decent story and trying to entertain people." That's all? "More and more I think that, yeah." But he admits he was drawn to the story in part because he sensed a general unease among the British about the growing immigrant community in their midst. "I would sing out about the virtues of a multicultural society, but by looking at the people who have seen the film so far, I can see that some of them find it very frightening. I live in the country a lot of the time, where there are no black faces, and I can see people there are afraid of their countryside just disappearing. One of the fears is clearly about immigrants."

Nor is Frears bothered that officials might see the film as an attack on Britain's asylum system. "I think the British government knows that the world in this movie really exists and they know perfectly well that the economy would collapse if it didn't. Someone has to do this grubby work. A cabinet minister saw it the other night and he wasn't denying anything. In fact, he loved it."

Dirty Pretty Things isn't meant to redefine multiculturalism in film, but it does celebrate a colorful and hidden part of society many don't get to see. After all, Frears has a history of pulling those on the fringe into center screen. In 1985, he rattled the cage by telling the story of a mixed-race gay couple in My Beautiful Laundrette. Five years later he made con artists cool with The Grifters and earned himself a Best Director Oscar nomination. In 1996 he introduced Dr. Jekyll's housemaid in Mary Reilly. Now, once again, Frears has seen something pretty in what others don't see at all.

• JUMANA FAROUKY
• Dirty Pretty Things explores the harsh life of London's immigrants