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The inner Scorsese
Interview, Jan, 1998 by Graham Fuller
MS: We were guided by the historical accuracy of the script. But there's no doubt that the mother is very important to me in this movie. I happen to be partial to Madonna-and-Child images, and I think that may have robbed off on the picture. Richard Price was talking once about my lack of comprehension of modern art, and he said, "Anything beyond Madonna and Child, you don't get." [laughs] It's true; I can't understand anything beyond Renaissance art - it doesn't say anything to me. Actually, the Dalai Lama is also partial to Western images of the Madonna and Child.
GF: There's a repeated tag line In the film, which goes, "Things change." But as momentous events swirl around the Dalai Lama, he is unable to change himself without going against his beliefs.
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MS: What the Dalai Lama had to resolve was whether to stay in Tibet or leave. He wanted to stay, but staying would have meant the total destruction of Tibet, because he would have died and that would have ripped the heart out of his people. The other action, the one he didn't want to take, was leaving, but that meant the continuance of Tibet by taking the word out to the rest of the world through the diaspora. That's what the Nechung oracle meant when he announced to the Dalai Lama in 1956, "The light of the Wish-Fulfilling Jewel will shine in the West." Probably if he hadn't have left we wouldn't be talking here today, because there would have been no movie. However hard it is for Westerners to grasp, that kind of nonviolent action is action, and the film is about internal action.
GF: The Dalai Lama's journey out of Tibet is beautifully filmed, with sweeping Fordian shots of him and his retinue moving across the skyline. But what gives that entire episode meaning is his interior monologue, with its prayers and invocations of enlightenment, and also the Images of the sand painting, the mandala, being wiped away. It's as if in refusing to fight and In parting with his physical reality - his day-to-day life in Lhasa, and Tibet itself - he has to travel inwards.
MS: Yes, he's living what he believes. It comes back to the idea that everything changes. What he's going through at that moment - his suffering and the suffering of his people - is ultimately the shape of all things. It's a reminder that we all have to overcome the moment of truth in the moment of death, which is the ultimate reality; it gives us an awareness of where we fit in in the universe. Life is just straggling toward that. That, at least, was one thought I had about that part of the film. Originally, we cut it together with him just leaving, and it didn't have any emotional impact. But Thelma [Schoonmaker, Scorsese's editor] had the idea of intercutting the journey with the Kalachakra ceremony. The physical journey is actually less important than that ceremony, which is a very important expression of world peace in Buddhist culture. It used to be performed only once every ten years; now it's performed every year in different parts of the word. The wiping away of the mandala, of course, represents the wiping away of temporal things. It's those ceremonial scenes that give the sequence its real power. But it's difficult to verbalize - if I could verbalize it properly, I wouldn't have made the film. Emotionally, it all fit together.
