Martin Scorsese seems an unlikely choice to make a movie about the early life of the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama.
After all, this is the filmmaker who gave us the blood-drenched violence of Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver” and Jake La Motta in “Raging Bull,” as well as the violence-obsessed characters of his gangster trilogy “Mean Streets,” “GoodFellas” and “Casino.”
But when “Kundun” arrives in Chicago on Friday, Scorsese fans will instantly recognize the themes that have permeated his work over the past quarter-century. Scorsese’s Tibet is populated by men who live by a code, and have seen their religious ideals trampled by a violent reality. And at the heart of the film lies a story that parallels Scorsese films at their poetic best: the lone and lonely man coming to grips with a vanishing world.
The early industry buzz on the film dismissed it as merely the latest entry in Tibetan chic, the Hollywood cause du jour. Screenwriter Melissa Mathison, who spent seven years working on the script, is so devoted to the subject that she joined the board of the International Campaign for Tibet. Composer Philip Glass, who incorporated traditional Tibetan music into his inspired minimalist score, has been a student of Tibetan culture and a fan of the Dalai Lama for nearly 30 years.
Mathison, whose previous credits included the children’s fantasies “E.T. The Extra-Terresytrial” and “The Black Stallion,” conducted more than a dozen interviews with the man she refers to as “His Holiness,” and allowed the Nobel Peace Prize-winning apostle of non-violence to give his approval to the final script. Not a single Hollywood actor appears in the film. Every role is played by exiled Tibetans or Chinese-Americans.
Just making the film earned its principals a place on the Chinese government’s blacklist, along with the makers of “Seven Years in Tibet” and “Red Corner,” the other contemporary films that have tried to put China’s oppression of its people before the public eye.
But Scorsese is too good a filmmaker and the Dalai Lama too shrewd a politician to allow “Kundun” to drift off into a sterile didacticism. In a short scene near the beginning of the film, the feudal nature of Tibetan society is revealed through the young boy’s eyes. He watches the country’s leaders quarrel over how much land should be given to his father, a poor peasant, before the boy was identified as the reincarnated Dalai Lama.
And near the end, when the Dalai Lama, now a young man, is about to flee to India, a single line reveals the complicated nature of feudal Tibet’s interaction with China. “The saddest thing is we were about to change,” the Dalai Lama says to no one in particular. “We were going to do it alone.”
It’s a level of realism and political sophistication one rarely finds in a Hollywood film. But then, this is a Scorsese movie, albeit the first explicitly political film he has directed since the anti-Vietnam War documentary “Street Scenes” in 1970.
“I didn’t want to have a political film, but you can’t help it,” Scorsese said in an interview at a posh mid-Manhattan hotel just a stone’s throw from his Park Avenue office. “The very nature of it is political. But what I didn’t want to do is make a propaganda film. So I did want to try to give a sense of where the Chinese are coming from.”
However, the filmmaker whom Steven Spielberg called the “greatest artist” of his generation has also drawn from his deep well of film knowledge to emotionally convey the stark oppression of the 6 million Tibetan Buddhists and their pre-Maoist culture. Their mystical rituals and transcendent beliefs, lovingly re-created for the film by Tibetan exiles, has been all but eliminated from their native land at the cost of at least a million lives.
Yet to portray the harsh repression, Scorsese did not employ the graphic violence for which he is well known. When the boy’s father is given a traditional Tibetan sky burial, where the body is hacked to pieces and fed to vultures to complete the circle of life, the scene is interspersed with shots of the Dalai Lama walking along the side of a river and hearing for the first time the demands by China that Tibet give up its sovereignty. The border war waged by Tibetan guerrillas is only hinted at, never shown.
To symbolize China’s destruction of the monasteries, the film re-creates a Dalai Lama dream where he’s standing in a monastery surrounded by bloodied and dying monks. As the overhead camera pulls away, it reveals an ever-widening circle of the dead, an eerie borrowing from “Gone With the Wind,” when Scarlett O’Hara stood in an Atlanta street amid the Confederate wounded and dying.
“I didn’t want to show the atrocities. I wanted to get to something deeper here,” Scorsese said. “The camera pulls up. You show thousands of dead bodies. What else do you have to show? Juxtapose that image with the Dalai Lama’s behavior, how he behaves in that situation. It’s spiritual strength that he develops.”
It hasn’t been an easy journey to bring “Kundun,” which literally means the presence of the holy one, to the screen. In December 1996, Disney Co. and its Touchstone Films division received word that the Beijing regime was threatening to upset Disney’s plans to build a theme park in China in retaliation for making the film.
That news set off alarm bells in Morocco, where the $28 million film — a pittance by today’s standards — was already under way. For Scorsese, who heard the news from satellite television, the situation was a painful reminder of his first attempt at making a politically controversial film: “The Last Temptation of Christ” in 1983.
That film, an adaptation of the Nikos Kazantzakis novel, was one that Scorsese, whose strict Catholic upbringing provided a steady stream of potent symbols for his earlier movies, really wanted to make. But after heated protests from religious fundamentalists, then Paramount Pictures Chairman Barry Diller, citing financial concerns, pulled the plug just four days before shooting was to start. In the days leading up to the decision, Paramount’s then president, Michael Eisner, insisted the film was a “go.”
When he finally got to make a stripped down version of the film in 1988, Scorsese told an interviewer that “my whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else.”
That obsession has taken its toll on his private life. When asked what led to the breakup of their marriage in the early 1990s, Barbara De Fina, the most recent of his four ex-wives, said simply, “He’s a very intense guy.”
When the Chinese began raising a ruckus about “Kundun,” Eisner, now chairman of Disney and one of the richest men in America, hired Henry Kissinger, a confidant of the Chinese Communist Party leadership, to smooth over the flap. If nothing else, the imbroglio gave Eisner a chance to prove he stood for something more than the bottom line, although how much more remains to be seen. “In this country, you put out a movie, it gets a lot of momentum for six seconds and is gone three weeks later,” he told Charlie Rose on his late-night television show.
It would be a shame if that became the fate of “Kundun.” For 55-year-old Scorsese, the chance to make “Kundun” has represented an opportunity to bring full circle the personal obsessions that have motivated him throughout his career.
“I’ve made pictures most of my life where violence is the main form of expression, where people settle things with violence,” he said. “But I was always fascinated by characters like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, people who actually had the guts to stand up and be pacifist and non-violent. Because it takes even more guts to be non-violent.”
When he talks, Scorsese cuts at the air with the side of his hand. His slicked-back hair is graying now, although his bushy eyebrows remain a Sicilian jet black. For a day of interviews with film journalists, he sported a decidedly Upper East Side attire — a checked sports jacket over a dark silk shirt buttoned to the throat. But his disjointed phrases poured out in the rapid-fire staccato of the Lower East Side’s Little Italy, where he was born and spent most of his childhood.
It could have been a very different life for Scorsese. His garment worker father, like so many Italian immigrants in the 1940s and 1950s, moved to the suburbs, in his case, the outer borough of Queens. But a business reversal landed the family back in the tenements.
Though the youngster was exposed to the mean streets that would become the source material for his breakthrough 1973 film, the primary influence on his early life stemmed from a bad case of asthma. To protect him from pollution, his parents dragged him from movie to movie to keep him indoors. Or, while most neighborhood kids were running around in gangs, he stayed home to watch movies on the first generation of black and white televisions.
To this day, his discussions about the techniques used in his films are peppered with references to movies that deeply impressed him in those formative years: Alexander Korda’s “The Thief of Baghdad,” “The Four Feathers” and “Elephant Boy,” and the films of Orson Welles, John Ford and Howard Hawks.
After he was rejected by the Jesuit Fordham University because of bad grades — he wanted to be a priest — he gravitated to New York University’s film school, only a few blocks but a world away from Little Italy. It was the early 1960s, a time when the influence of the French and Italian New Wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini and Francois Truffaut was at its height. John Cassavetes became an influence and a supporter of Scorsese’s early work.
“What these films gave us was a sense of freedom, of being able to do anything,” he said during a lecture in London in early 1987 that eventually became the book “Scorsese on Scorsese.” What they also taught him was that the art of filmmaking was not just about having the technical ability to create moods through shots. It was about having something to say.
“Ultimately, you have to find your own voice if you want to continue to make films — at least this kind of film,” he told a jammed auditorium of current NYU film students recently after a screening of “Kundun.” “That’s what’s so great about the independent cinema and the films coming out of here. If you really want to say something, you’re going to scrape together the $10,000 and say it.”
Yet while Scorsese puts his indelible stamp on any project he gets involved with, much of his best work has been done on films whose initial inspiration came from someone else. Ellen Burstyn brought him “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974), the “woman’s film” that spawned a television show. Screenwriter Paul Schrader’s haunted memories as a Vietnam War veteran was key to “Taxi Driver” (1976). And it was Robert De Niro, the actor most closely identified with Scorsese’s ouvre, who convinced his friend, despondent from the critical failure of “New York, New York” (1977), to tackle what turned out to be perhaps his greatest film, “Raging Bull” (1980).
After the critics panned the underrated “King of Comedy” (1983) with Jerry Lewis and his studio fiasco with the first version of “The Last Temptation,” Scorsese had to rebuild his career with the low-budget “After Hours” (1985), a black comedy set in lower Manhattan’s Soho art scene. “The Color of Money” (1986), a sequel to “The Hustler,” with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise, was a conscious exercise at re-establishing his ability to make big-budget Hollywood films.
Indeed, the pattern of Scorsese’s filmmaking in recent years has been to follow a bankable project (“GoodFellas” in 1990 and “Casino” in 1995) with films that reflect his more literary and philosophical aspirations — “The Age of Innocence” in 1993 and now “Kundun.”
In a documentary made for British television last year that has just been released in book form by Hyperion, “A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies,” the director describes how the best directors have worked within the Hollywood system over the years. “There were projects that allowed for the expression of different sensibilities, offbeat themes, or even radical political views,” he says, “particularly when the financial stakes were minimal. Less money, more freedom!”
That freedom is on grand display in “Kundun,” a politically sensitive tale brought to you by the makers of “The Little Mermaid” and “The Lion King.” “This definitely is a labor of love,” Scorsese said, with a combination of amazement and audacity in his voice. “Because we got the picture made, without actors, without movie stars.”
SCORSESE’S FILMOGRAPHY
“Who’s That Knocking at My Door?” (1968)
“Mean Streets” (1973)
“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974)
“Taxi Driver” (1976)
“New York, New York” (1977)
“The Last Waltz” (1978)
“Raging Bull” (1980)
“The King of Comedy” (1983)
“After Hours” (1985)
“The Color of Money” (1986)
“The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988)
“New York Stories” (1989)
“GoodFellas” (1990)
“Cape Fear” (1991)
“The Age of Innocence” (1993)
“Casino” (1995)
“Kundun” (1998)
