Published by: World Tibet Network News Thursday, October 16, 1997

by Gordon Laird

TORONTO, October 8, 1997 (The Globe and Mail) -- In the making of any movie, there's usually a story behind the movie - a tale of celebrity love, studio politics, or the epic itself of staging a big-screen spectacle. One of the untold stories behind Seven Years in Tibet, a $60-million tale of an Austrian war refugee in the last days of the Dalai Lama's home rule, is about its unique Canadian connection. Several of the 130 Tibetans who appeared in the movie are actually Cannucks, people who fled the country in the wake of the failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959 and eventually wound up settling in Canada.

For Pencho and Tsering Rabgey, the 38-year journey from Tibet to a Hollywood movie set was, in their words, "quite accidental." As a monk who'd studied for 20 years in several of Tibet's finest monasteries, Pencho left the country in 1959 as a bodyguard to Dalai Lama, fleeing the Chinese army who pursued them right to the Tibetan border, a conquering force eager to capture the young spiritual leader. "They gave us a gun and we walked," remembers Pencho, "half way out we heard there was shooting, that there was war in Lhasa. Then we were running almost day and night." Over the course of eight or nine days, the Dalai Lama's party followed a perilous escape route to India - a more direct version of the pilgrimage that had once taken Heinrich Harrer, Brad Pitt's movie character, the better part of two years to complete.

By the time Tsering Rabgey escaped Tibet in 1960, she'd witnessed the aftermath of China's military rule, as portrayed near the end of Seven Years in Tibet. "We saw so many dead bodies. *We had no radio, no television, no reporters," remembers Tsering, "It was an awful, hard time. Nobody knew what was happening." Like many Tibetans, Pencho and Tsering have seen family members and friends disappear during the Chinese occupation, only a few of the estimated 1.3 million Tibetans who've lost their lives since 1951.

Exiled to India, Pencho married Tsering and in 1971 moved their family to Canada, settling in Lindsay, Ontario. As one of the first Tibetan families in Canada, the Rabgeys set up the Potala Tibetan Dance Troupe in 1975 and, more recently, founded the Chompa Tibetan Cultural Foundation. Recruited by Hollywood in 1996, they travelled to Uspallata, a remote town in the mountains of Argentina, to help re-create the Tibet they once knew, the Buddhist kingdom of the 1940s and 1950s.

With reproductions of now-destroyed temples, detailed traditional costumes, and imported yaks from Montana, the set of Seven Years in Tibet was a complicated, emotionally-charged mix of real-life history and Hollywood illusion. "Every scene was just like in Tibet," says Pencho.

"We say, 'What are we doing here? What is this, really?' We're dressed up like Tibetans. But they built all the buildings. Everybody is yelling off-camera, 'Make-up!', 'Hairdresser!' in English, French and Spanish. A big illusion."

Sometimes, the irony - and tragedy - of the illusion was particularly acute. "It's very funny. We had a country, but now we cannot have that country," says Pencho, "This country belongs to us but now we play it in a movie, just like watching a mirror." At times, there was more drama off-camera than on-camera as the whole cast and crew broke down and ended scenes in tears, such as when Tibet signed its 1951 agreement with China, the first step towards the 1959 take-over. "They had to stop the scene several times, because everyone was crying after the Tibetans began crying," remembers Tsering.

During filming, when Chinese army finally rolled into Lhasa for the first time, things got a little carried away on set. "Chinese tanks and jeeps were around; troops were pushing people around with guns," says Tsering, "We knew that, we once saw that. In the movie, we were acting - but then we were hitting them for real and they said, 'Cut! Cut!'" In some scenes, actors who were playing Chinese soldiers often couldn't maintain their composure, spontaneously crying in their uniforms, unable to carry out their roles or deliver their lines.

Despite all the Hollywood spectacle and celebrity glamour of Seven Years in Tibet, Director Jean-Jacques Annaud managed to earn the respect of people who'd actually lived the movie. "It wasn't 100 per cent perfect, but it's still a good account of what happened," says Tsering, "If they were doing a fantasy movie, we wouldn't have stayed there."

With its ambitious melding of past and present, its free-form mixing of an ancient culture and modern-day movie stars, Annaud's production frequently illustrated the old Buddhist concept of life and time travelling in cycles. Like the image of the wheel that's so often found in Tibetan art, the making of Seven Years in Tibet brought many of its participants full circle.

For example, upon arriving in Uspallata, the Rabgeys were surprised to discover that Hollywood was inadvertently re-uniting friends and family who had been tragically separated decades earlier. Thirty years ago, Pencho had spent years studying with one monk in India: "We didn't recognize each other for two days. Then we both said, 'You look like someone."

The movie's casting and script produced some interesting twists of karmic fate. Like many of the Tibetans in the movie, Pencho Rabgey was able to re-live some of his own history, not as a young monk at Lhasa's Sera Monastery, but as an older, wiser minister in the Dalai Lama's cabinet. The Dalai Lama's sister, Jetsun Pema, even played her own mother in the movie. (Stranger still, Pema's daughter is playing the same role in Martin Scorsese's upcoming Tibetan epic, Kundun, in which the daughter's character, The Great Mother, is pregnant with Pema.)

Even movie stars - the secular deities of North America - seemed like

regular folk sometimes. Pitt, in particular, earned the respect of many.

"Even between shots, he was so polite," recalls Tsering, "He'd give you his

seat, stay and talk during parties, learn Tibetan dances. He's nice, him and

his girlfriend [actress Gwyneth Paltrow]. Too bad they broke up." During some

down-time on the set, Pencho chatted with the sojourning Paltrow for a few

hours - and received some handy acting tips: "'Nobody goes without mistakes,'

she told me. She's like a normal person - but with a body guard."

The persistent hordes of paparazzi, snoopers with telescopes, pushy reporters and roving packs of hysterical teen-age girls were some of the movie's many off-camera challenges, not the least for global heart-throb Pitt. "Once the cameras came, he'd have to leave," says Tsering, "Poor boy."

Of the people who weren't phased by the perils of movie-making and celebrity were the Tibetans, who instilled the set with a sense of calm. Earlier this year, Pitt marveled at some of his fellow actors: "You'd be working in 100-degree heat and there would be an 80 year-old Buddhist monk standing there all day, smiling. That's the polar opposite of Hollywood."

In the end, the only time when things appeared truly normal was when everyone was in front of the camera. Dressed in traditional clothing inside a re-creation of the Jokhang, Lhasa's main temple, the Rabgeys and other Tibetans were, by all appearances, back in their homeland. And surrounded by Buddhist monks, nuns, lamas and lay-persons, besieged movie stars like Pitt temporarily escaped their own celebrity cults and predatory paparazzi.

Oddly enough, Annaud's make-believe Tibet in Argentina sometimes seemed more real than reality itself. In re-making history with Hollywood, the famous and the not-so-famous found themselves faced with the old cliche about truth in art. The film set had become a refuge, a place where all sorts of people could find some truth in Tinseltown's world of illusion. "On the set, nobody can come," says Pencho, "Then everybody is free."

[Gordon Laird's book, Slumming it at the Rodeo: The Cultural Roots of Canada's Right-Wing Revolution, will be published next fall by Douglas & McIntyre (Vancouver).]