Fionnuala Halligan, for Asia Times, 20th May 1997

Martin Scorsese is defiant. It's less than four weeks before the final print of Kundun, his US$35 million biopic of the Dalai Lama, is ready to show to its backers at Disney - who have been scorched by the fires of Chinese ire over this project. A small, wired man, Scorsese has been acknowledged as America's greatest living director through classics such as Mean Streets, Raging Bull and Good Fellas, but Kundun is not the first time he has faced down a mighty power over his right to reinterpret religion.

A native of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Scorsese stood off against the Vatican over The Last Temptation of Christ - and lived to tell the tale. Now he's looking East. "Why should we care about what the Chinese government has to say about a movie that's made in America?" he barked. "Who cares?" Disney may feel otherwise.

Kundun, which deals with the life of the Dalai Lama between 1937 and his exile from Tibet in 1959, is taken from a script by screenwriter Melissa Mathison (the pen behind ET and also the wife of Harrison Ford). Co-financed by Disney's Touchstone Pictures and French film backer UGC, Touchstone had committed to distributing the film in the United States and Britain by the time production started in Morocco (China was out of the question, and India refused Scorsese permission to film) starring a cast of unknown exiled Tibetan "actors".

Last year, however, the Chinese authorities reacted angrily to Disney's participation in the project; after a series of tense negotiations, the Foreign Ministry went public in threatening Disney with expulsion from China should the company go ahead with its plans. The news was humiliating for Disney, which had put great stock into developing a relationship with "prestigious" director Scorsese - forcing the company to choose between him and its ambitious plans to flood China with Mickey Mouse merchandise and films. Disney finally released a terse statement saying it would go ahead with Kundun, and there the matter has stalled.

Scorsese refused to comment at the time; but while he was at Cannes to attend the film festival's 50th anniversary celebrations he said he was still as angry as he was when the row first broke out. He spoke of "genocide" in Tibet and angrily asked "how can governments cut deals with the Chinese government when they know this is happening over there?" There will be no deals cut over Kundun as far as he's concerned. "They can try to stop it by pressuring economically, but it's being made, this picture will still be seen somehow," he said. "What is the rest of the world worried about? Why does everybody cave in? It's an outrage. It's crazy. I'm not talking about the Chinese people, I'm talking about the government power. They can say what they want, but it's still going out.

"Touchstone is releasing the picture, UGC is releasing the picture. One never knows how they'll do it, and after all, you've got to remember that this is a film with no stars. But it's being released at Christmas and I'm reasonably confident I can put pressure on them. I know them well. And I know that Touchstone will release the picture in America and England in a big way."

Scorsese arrived in Cannes during a week when China was in the French headlines - for preventing its filmmakers from attending the festival. First, Zhang Yuan, who made East Palace, West Palace, a film about Chinese homosexuality, had his passport confiscated, preventing his attendance. Apparently, when it became clear that Zhang Yuan's film would be shown anyway, China's cultural mandarins retaliated by pressuring the producers of the new Zhang Yimou film, Keep Cool, into removing their film from competition.

Scorsese angrily claimed these actions prove his point: "I contend that the best filmmakers in the world today are Chinese, and what's happened? They're not at Cannes. It's an outrage. I think the rest of the world should put pressure on their governments to protest; it's such a pity. Zhang Yimou's not here, Zhang Yuan isn't here, why isn't there an outrage? There should be some sort of pressure put on them by the artistic community in the rest of the world. China has always had a different way of thinking about privacy and freedom of the individual than the rest of the world that we [don't] comprehend. Something has to change."

Screenwriter Mathison started Kundun seven years ago, after first reading Charles Bell's book on the 13th Dalai Lama and submitting a short treatment to the Tibetan spiritual leader. She was given the go-ahead for the film, and interviewed the Dalai Lama 15 times before she gave a draft of the script to Scorsese. While not a student of Buddhism, Scorsese had always been interested in Tibet, he said, and had been fascinated by religious themes since his childhood.

"I grew up in a very tough neighborhood, Lower East Side Manhattan. Basically a place where the law of the jungle ruled; people survived by being strong," he explained. "But the other issue has always been the power of non-violence that was being taught in the church. The idea of love and compassion, the contradiction of it with the outside world. I think that ultimately the non-violent person is more powerful. Because that person can touch a certain part of our humanity which is maybe the very reason, the very core of what a human being is - decency and love and compassion and non-violence. You know, that idea of where there is no love, put love in. I don't know how you do that, but I admire people who can."

Scorsese committed his considerable weight to Kundun because of "the confrontation between a man who is representing compassion and love and non-violence, and an ideology which is like another religion in a way, one that is very forceful", he said, adding that the root of the problem lay in the West. "At the time Tibet was annexed by China, the communists were fighting for the very survival of China. They were coming out of what the Western world had done to them in the late 19th and early 20th century. It's a problem that the Western world contributed to, what we did to China. That created a situation where a government could come into power that exists the way it does. The country was destroyed. It had to be rebuilt. But people who profess non-violence are suffering - people like the Tibetans.

"How can the Western world sit by and make deals with the Chinese government when they're wiping these people out? Which is what they've done. They'll say 'Come, you'll see they're there', and yes, they're there. But it's like what we did to the Native Americans, they're there too. But are they? Their culture is gone. All the Dalai Lama is talking about is live and let live, if they believe in their religion let them practice their religion."

Scorsese feels that the ideology of communist China is also best compared to a religion; "when pure emotion and faith take you, reason goes", he said. But he does not practice Buddhism, and doubts that the making of Kundun has changed him in any basic way. The most he could say was that the "generosity, the fundamental decency" of the Tibetans on set "lifted my mood".

"It was their seriousness," he explained. "They had a real fervor in seeing that everything was done right, which is impossible on a movie set, but their determination was still affecting."

Scorsese had other things on his mind, however, during the tough shoot in Morocco. "I had my own personal stuff," he acknowledged. "My mother was dying. It was nerve-wracking for me, trying to shoot and wondering if she'd last until I got back. But she did. She died a week after I got back to New York." Did Buddhism help him cope better with her death?

"Looking at their idea of impermanence, the way they try to fit into the rhythm of the world instead of trying to change it, helped me at that difficult time," he said. "That was interesting to me. Your mother's going to die? Everybody's going to die. We all die. I went back to New York for one day and I got to see her, although she didn't recognize me. But it was the best I could do. And the Tibetans were praying for her. That whole film [is] permeated with that sense of major change in my life. I won't say that in my next movies I won't be dealing with organized crime, I think I will be, but this was the movie during which the biggest changes of my life have occurred."

During the course of the interview, an intense Scorsese frequently flashed annoyance when the subject of artistic repression came up - it's obviously a subject close to his heart. But his biggest anger is saved for the inference he may just be on a Hollywood bandwagon; sucked into the role of Tibetan chronicler - or mouthpiece - by the media-friendly Dalai Lama.

"There was no such thing as me sitting down with Melissa Mathison and Richard Gere and everyone and saying, let's all make movies on Tibet right now," he barked. "It's taken 38 years for a movie to be made about Tibet - that's not great networking on the part of the Tibetans. A movie should have been made while the goddamn fighting was going on, in 1958 and 1959.

"The Dalai Lama is just out there trying to get the message out," Scorsese concluded. "I think it's important for the world to have a moral authority, who preaches non-violence. He says his job is to care for every human being. That's nice. I couldn't do it. It's nice that maybe there's one person who has that job, who thinks about it, who really tries to do it.

"He's trying to help his people. They're suffering. There's a lot of Chinese people living in Tibet. I believe from what I can gather that it's genocide that's occurring. I'm trying to be careful about making wild accusations, but I think it really, really is genocide of a people who have proven to be non-violent. And what are we going to do about it?"

Fionnuala Halligan is a contributing writer for Asia Times based in Hong Kong. She filed this article from Cannes, France.