Published by: World Tibet Network News Saturday, January 10, 1998

Source: Box Office Magazine

Date: January Issue

COVER STORY

Legendary Director Martin Scorsese Makes a new King of Religious Epic With "Kundun"

by Ray Greene

Martin Scorsese hates to fly. As luck would have it, another round of "El Nino" stormfront rumors was circulating on one of the few recent dates when Scorsese decided to make the New York-to-L.A. run. Los Angeles might yet wash off into the ocean at some point during the winter, but it didn't this time: In a pattern that had already repeated itself all summer long and into the early fall, roadcast commentators nationwide were gleefully predicting L.A. rainfalls of biblical proportions for Scorsese's late September travel day, only to have

nothing more than modest, periodic and only slightly noticeable showers materialize.

Still, given his flight phobia and the meteorological speculation Scorsese woke up to, it was a near chance that he might decide to call off his east/west trek (thereby potentially derailing the January cover plans of a certain national film periodical that shall remain nameless). But Scorsese's love of movies apparently supersedes all other considerations: At the last minute, he threw caution to the winds, chanced the white-knuckle plane ride to the City of Angels, and arrived just in time to attend the kind of event the film buff in him just loves: an American Movie Classics salute to the golden era of Hollywood

film noir.

As with almost any subject related to films and filmmaking, Scorsese's comments on the AMC tribute are ultimately a statement of his philosophies as a director. "There was a genuine warmth, a real love, you could say, of the images," a scratchy-voiced Scorsese says on the morning after the event. "It's a world that's gone by, but we have these incredible artifacts, and the artifacts make you think about history.

"I'm addicted to history. And I think when you're addicted to history it's really about studying human behavior. What happens [when you watch an old movie] is that these people are up there on the screen behaving. And they're not really behaving for themselves, they're behaving for a whole culture of that time." Over breakfast, Scorsese seems both whip-smart and a bit the worse for wear after his journey. He is highly verbal-almost parodistically the fast-talking native New Yorker. Words spill from him in staccato torrents, with rapid-fire, fully articulated ideas and opinions seeming to compete for mastery in his conversation.

The loud clanking of a barman wiping down waterglasses sets him on edge, actually derailing his train of thought more than once, as does a particularly shrill cellphone that goes off at regular intervals over the course of the meal. He flinches at the sounds-piercing and reverberant in the paneled half-light of a restaurant off the foyer of his posh Beverly Hills hotel-and then laughs the reaction off. "I get like Roderick Usher now," he says. "You know, `The Fall of the House of Usher'?" He clenches his hands and hunches forward in a burlesque of horror movie menace worthy of Dwight Frye: "The cat's paws drive me mad!"

Given the thematic complexity of his films, it's no surprise that Scorsese is a sharp interview, or that the jangled, nervous energy that seems such a part of his directing style is also part of his personality. He is, after all, the man who kickstarted his career and redefined the American crime film with the bloodsoaked gangster morality tale "Mean Streets" in 1973, making stars of Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro in the process. "Taxi Driver," his scary tale of an obsessed gun lover and would-be political assassin, proved potent enough to incite a 1980 copycat assassination attempt by John Hinckley against then-president Ronald Reagan. And "Raging Bull" (1980), Scorsese's poeticized rendering of the violent life and times of boxer Jake LaMotta, is routinely hailed as the greatest American film of its decade and, along with Robert Wise's "The Set-Up," is the most realistic depiction of the brutality of the fight game ever committed to film. It would be a contradiction in terms if Scorsese came off like, sa

y, a mild-mannered small-town librarian.

What is surprising is that this most urban and American of filmmakers has gotten up early on a gray L.A. morning to discuss a project that, on the surface at least, seems to play against almost all of his acknowledged strengths. "Kundun"-a rural religious epic set in Tibet and featuring an all-Asian cast of nonprofessional actors-chronicles the early life of Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

"Why not?" Scorsese says when asked if he thinks he's the kind of director for this sort of material. "It's basically a story about a man who lives a life in the spirit, and how one lives a spiritual life in this world, which is to a certain extent what Charlie is trying to do in `Mean Streets.' You know, he was trying to lead an ethical life, according to the precepts of his religion, in a world where there are gangsters and there are thieves. [In `Kundun'] there's no magic, there are no visions. [The Dalai Lama] is trying to lead a good life and be an example, I think, to all of us."

As with so much of what makes Scorsese tick, the journey that led to "Kundun" began in the darkened moviehouses of his '50s New York boyhood. It was there that he discovered an early passion for religious spectacle, fueled by period epics like 1951's "Quo Vadis?" and 1952's "The Robe." "I remember `Quo Vadis?'-the MGM one-and my father taking me to see it," he says. "I was fascinated by

the beautiful three-strip Technicolor and what looked to me like the artifacts of ancient Rome.

"The next one was `The Robe,' and it was the first film in CinemaScope. The curtain opening at the Roxy Theatre for that new kind of image, and then the music coming up-it was quite extraordinary."

The '50s boom in religious spectaculars came at a particu-larly auspicious moment in Scorsese's development, harmonizing events from his life with impressions taken from the films he loved at a very early age. "I had spent my first year in Catholic grammar school, and I became an altar boy," he says. "And the ancient Roman world became in my mind part of the Church, and part of the ritual of the Church. The music of the Church became completely mixed into the music in `Quo Vadis?' or `The Robe.'"

A less well-known epic of the period provided Scorsese with what he remembers as his first significant exposure to an ethnographic moviemaking approach he would explore in depth later on. A fictional account of the building of Egypt's Great Pyramid, 1955's "Land of the Pharoahs" boasted one of Hollywood's finest directors in Howard Hawks and a script worked on by (of all people) Southern gothic novelist and Nobel laureate William Faulkner. Though it predated Cecil B. DeMille's more setbound 1956 remake of "The Ten Commandments," "Pharoahs" had

nothing like the commercial impact of DeMille's Barnumesque spectacle of ancient Egypt. Except, that is, in the New York moviehouse where a prepubescent Marty Scorsese saw it and found the experience indelible.

"I guess what I was really interested in there was the way Egypt looked. `Land of the Pharoahs' gave the impression that you were really in ancient Egypt, mainly because they shot there. And the scale [of the drama] was more human size [than in most '50s spectaculars] and very interesting.

"I hadn't seen architecture like that before. I had seen the film `The Egyptian' before that, but that looked more like Hollywood Egypt, very pretty," he says. "Whereas `Land of the Pharoahs' really had a sense of being like a documentary of ancient Egypt."

That realistic edge became something Scorsese started to look for as he became more interested in making films of his own. He cites "Land of the Pharoahs" as a direct influence on "Kundun," which was shot entirely on location in Morocco in order to capture the timeless rural isolation of pre-communist Tibet. "In Morocco," he says, "if you look at a village outside of Ouarzazate, you are looking at a village that has been that way for 5,000 years." This attention to realistic detail has been a hallmark of Scorsese's approach to filmmaking from the beginning of his career. "By the time I saw documentaries in the '50s and '60s," he says, "and neorealism, Italian films, I realized I would love to make films where literally you see what the person eats, the kind of food they're eating, the way it's presented, the way it's prepared. I began to realize I wanted to make films that depict the culture of the people. You get that in `Mean Streets,' you get it in `GoodFellas,' and I believe you get it in 'Kundun.'"

Still, Tibet is an awfully long way from the Little Italy of "Mean Streets," and the Dalai Lama's difficult early passage is a story that exists in a unique and very specialized milieu. "Kundun" (the title means "The Precious One") begins in 1937, when a two-year-old Tibetan boy named Tenzin Gyatso is recognized as the 14th reincarnation of the Buddha of love and compassion. "With Buddhism," Scorsese says, "the idea is that it's the same boy who was here the last time, and the one before that, and the one before that. At one point, when he's 16 years old, [the Dalai Lama] asks this fellow who sweeps the kitchen and played with him when he was little, `Do you ever wonder if the regent found the right boy?' And the man says back, `No. Of course he did. Who else would be here?'"

In the Tibetan system of the 1930s, the Dalai Lama was not just the spiritual but also the political leader of his country. Rigorous training in the philosophies of Buddhism, including the central Buddhist tenet of absolute nonviolence, occupied much of Tenzin Gyatso's childhood and early adolescence. But at the age of 15 both the Dalai Lama's life and the life of his country were irrevocably changed by an event that would eventually send the Dalai Lama into exile: the invasion of Tibet by the armies of Chairman Mao Zedong, and its subsequent annexation as part of communist China.

The collision of Tibet's nonviolent, spiritualist way of life with the militaristic and materialist culture of Maoism is the skein of tragedy that runs through "Kundun," which ends with the Dalai Lama's forced departure from his homeland in 1959. In the decades since, Tenzin Gyatso has become one of the world's most revered figures. Global interest in Buddhism is at an all-time high, and the Dalai Lama's political efforts, which continue to espouse the cause of nonviolence as well as that of a free Tibet, were rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize in 1988.

The rising interest in Buddhism as well as in Chinese politics has been reflected in a spate of recent Hollywood projects. Preceding "Kundun" into the marketplace were both Jean-Jacques Annaud's "Seven Years in Tibet," starring Brad Pitt as an Austrian climber who undergoes a Buddhist conversion experience, and "Red Corner," the political thriller-cum-expose about the oppressive realities of the communist Chinese legal system.

Although "Kundun" began as the brainchild of "E.T." screenwriter Melissa Mathison a half-decade ago and is a film that Scorsese has been involved with for more than three years, Scorsese acknowledges that his film's arrival at this time does seem to reflect part of a wider shift in Western attitudes about Eastern spiritualism.

"It's a hunger, I think," Scorsese says. "There's kind of a hunger for peace of mind. On the downside, it may signal a lack of faith in our traditional religions in the West. That doesn't mean everybody's going to become Buddhist, but I think you could learn certain things from Buddhism."

Scorsese is philosophical about the fact that "Kundun" has become part of a sort of Chinese thematic subgenre. "I would have liked to have done this film before `Casino,'" he says, "but I couldn't. It just turns out that you have [`Kundun'], and you have the Jean-Jacques Annaud film, and it all seems to be coming through in a kind of torrent. A process has happened without people even realizing it, [and] it's all coming to fruition this year."

The potency of the Dalai Lama as a symbol of Tibetan struggle is demonstrated by the ongoing hostility that "Kundun" has met with from the current Chinese regime. Almost as soon as the Scorsese project was announced, the Chinese government, in an extraordinary move, threatened to block "Kundun" maker The Walt Disney Co. from future access to China's vast and potentially lucrative markets if the project went forward.

The issue appeared to be resolved after a petition signed by a wide-ranging group of American filmmakers sided with Scorsese's right to tell the Dalai Lama's story, and Disney, to its credit, has stood behind "Kundun" from the first. Yet, even as this story was going to press, the plot continued to thicken: During the recent visit to the U.S. by the current Chinese president, China announced that it was suspending all business dealings with Disney as well as with "Seven Years in Tibet" distributor Columbia TriStar and "Red Corner" backer MGM in protest against what its government views as each film's

unwarranted attack on Chinese sovereignty.

Ironically, Scorsese considers himself a lover of Chinese culture, particularly of Chinese cinema. "I think Chinese cinema is the best cinema in the world," he says. "The film-makers, the cinematographers-I love their pictures." Scorsese does, however, draw a distinction between Chinese culture and the repressive excesses of the current rulers. "About the repression of their regime-we're talking about the regime now, not the people-I think it's extremely dangerous. I've seen articles in French magazines about their daily executions of

`dissidents,' quote unquote, or `drug dealers,' quote unquote. Kids in their 20s, they shoot them in the back of the head.... The Tibetan women who go in to have a child, and they actually kill the child or sterilize the woman. It's a matter of genocide, really.

"The thing to understand about China is, it's a very different way of thinking about life, a very different way of thinking about freedom, and a very different way of thinking about privacy-they have a lot of people there. I read an article about [Maoist guerilla] Pol Pot in Cambodia, where they killed those millions of people. [Cambodia's genocidal civil war was chronicled in the 1984 Oscar winner "The Killing Fields."] What I got from the article was that he felt those millions of people deserved to die, because it was their bad karma, so it was understandable. In Western culture, karma is not necessarily something that we believe in. Everybody has a right to live."

It is an odd coincidence that "Kundun" is both Scorsese's second attempt at religious spectacle and the second of his films to be the subject of vehement ideological attack before it has even been released. A decade ago, Scorsese's controversial adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' "The Last Temptation of Christ" inspired pickets, threats of boycott and mass demonstrations by American religious conservatives-a situation that still angers Scorsese in a remarkably

immediate way given how much time has passed. "I can understand being offended and that sort of thing, but to try to force us not to go into the theatre is outrageous," he says of the "Last Temptation" controversy. "People say, `You're offending my vision of my religion, and you're blaspheming my God.' Well, he's everybody's God, and people approach God differently. And this is America, you know? You should be able to do that.... The reality is that what happened at that time was a bullying of the American public. A bullying."

He is equally firm in his views about the fact that "Kundun" has become a very different kind of flashpoint for attempts at ideological suppression. "What does this man represent?" he asks, referring to the Dalai Lama. "Compassion. How dare we make a film about a man who represents compassion and peace, and kindness and tolerance.... Basically, it's a story about a man whose job is to care about every living thing. And to love every living thing. And the outrage that we

should be told on this side of the world that we can't make the picture. And the outrage that the story of a man like this could be considered controversial."

To Scorsese, whose signature films have so often depicted hard, brutal men caught in grim and violent worlds, there is a strange paradox in the fact that "Kundun," about the life of a man of peace, would be the subject of such political rage. "Richard Gere [who has long been one of the Dalai Lama's most public adherents] and I were talking about it, and he said, `Maybe nonviolence is truly revolutionary.' Maybe it is. Maybe that's the ultimate revolution. Because what is our nature? Is it our nature to be violent, or is it our nature to love, and be compassionate?"

Scorsese hesitates, as if pondering again a question so central to so many of his films. "It's both," he says finally. "But one has to win out some time or other. Because if it doesn't we have the ability to be extinct any second we choose.

" "Kundun." Starring Tenzin Thuthob Tsa-rong. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Written by Melissa Mathison. Produced by Barbara De Fina. A Buena Vista release. Drama. Opens 12/25 NY/LA, widens mid-Jan.