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The inner Scorsese - director Martin Scorsese - Interview

Interview, Jan, 1998 by Graham Fuller

Purgatory, passion, and violence have always loomed large in Martin Scorsese's soul-searching street-level movies. But his latest film, the magnificent Kundun, breathes a different air

GRAHAM FULLER: Why did you want to make a film about the Dalai Lama?

MARTIN SCORSESE: I thought, perhaps naively, that the existence of a society that explores living at a spiritual level - though I don't say all Tibetans do - is something we could learn from and something that's important to nurture for the whole world. I guess my attention went to the Dalai Lama when he won the Nobel Peace Prize [in 1989]; until then, I hadn't realized that the devastation of Tibet was so complete.

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GF: It was genocide. The Tibetan government- in-exile believes 260,000 Tibetans died in prisons and camps from the '50s to the early '80s.

MS: And it was accomplished in less time than it took us to carry out our holocaust of the Native Americans. I became interested in the wiping out of Tibetan culture, and in the mid '80s I started watching these BBC documentaries incorporating 16mm footage shot by Heinrich Hatter in Lhasa. I also saw the Dalai Lama a few times. In deciding to make the film, I didn't want to be part of the Tibet chic that fascinates Hollywood. Not because of snobbery or a desire to disassociate myself from other Hollywood figures who embrace Buddhism - because I don't necessarily embrace Buddhism - but because I resent the romantic idea of Tibet shown in Frank Capra's Lost Horizon [1937]. For me, Lost Horizon isn't even one of Capra's best pictures; the Shangri La that he projected was rather boring and unbelievable. The only interesting thing about it was that the Tibetans in it lived to a great age; you might as well make a film in the Caucasus, the Ural Mountains, or Georgia [Europe], where people live even longer. So, going in, I didn't have any fantasies about Tibet being some special world where everything is perfect, and we hinted at that in Kundun by showing the political intrigue there. But, as you know, the politics don't interest me that much.

GF: Did the philosophical aspects of Tibetan Buddhism appeal to you?

MS: I still don't know much about it. I do know that some Buddhists are able to attain peace of mind. And as I've gotten older, I've had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things. Eradicating a religion of kindness is, I think, a terrible thing for the Chinese to attempt.

GF: Some will observe that Kundun is a perverse film for you to have made, given the violence in your earlier work. Yet Mean Streets [1973], Taxi Driver [1976], and obviously The Last Temptation of Christ [1988] can all he regarded as quests for spiritual peace.

MS: Mean Streets particularly. And definitely Raging Bull [1980], which echoed other things that were going through my life at the time. I've always stated that the Jake La Motta character at the end of Raging Bull reaches an understanding of himself and a certain peace and spirituality that I was hoping to gain at the time but just wasn't able to. I certainly wasn't able to get it when I was a kid growing up on the Lower East Side; it was very hard at that time for me to balance what I really believed was the right way to live with the violence I saw all around me - I saw too much of it among the people I knew. I was around people who were hungry and stole in order to eat, or used strong-arm tactics to get what they wanted; it was all very primal. I didn't see much kindness around me, and no tolerance. And what loomed over that area was not just gangs and street violence but organized crime, with its special codes of behavior. We couldn't have cared less about the government, especially the city government, which produced policemen who did nothing but take graft. I know there were many good policemen who died doing their duty. Some of the cops were even friends of ours. But a cop can go both ways.

Then, in the Church, I saw priests and nuns who tried to live good spiritual lives by taking care of other people. The neighborhood priest, whom I liked a lot, always talked about Dorothy Day [founder of the Catholic Worker movement], and I saw her once working with the bums down on the Bowery. I was impressed by that and the fact that people like her had great conviction about their pacifist beliefs. These were the extremes I grew up with, and they raised big questions for me. Pacifism? Violence? What do you do in certain situations?

GF: Actually, there's more bloodshed in this film than in any of your previous movies. At the time of the Chinese bombing of Tibet, the camera pulls back on the Dalai Lama standing amid hundreds of corpses of monks. Why did you turn that shot into an abstraction?

MS: That was based on one of the Dalai Lama's dreams. Another dream was of the fish pond filling with blood - he loved those fish.

GF: I was struck by the similarity of the sequence where the mounted search party first finds Kundun to paintings of the Magi arriving at the birth of Christ. I wondered about the mythic resonances of that - you know, In the same way that there are similarities between different creation myths and grail myths. The child's mother, too, has a Madonna-like presence.

The inner Scorsese - director Martin Scorsese - Interview

Interview, Jan, 1998 by Graham Fuller

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