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The inner Scorsese
Interview, Jan, 1998 by Graham Fuller
GF: There are two thematic strands to the film: One is the unstoppable roll of history; then there's the spiritual track. How did you go about intertwining them?
MS: On the wall over the editing machine, Thelma and I had a whole picture laid out, scene by scene. I would get very angry sometimes because it was like a locomotive coming at me. We started to play around with unlocking the structure by throwing the bits and pieces up in the air and going by the behavior of the actors in the frames - the nonactors, I should say. Something the Tibetans themselves emanated in the frame gave us a clue about how to structure the picture. It was the look on their facts, the way their bodies moved. It just told us bow to juxtapose scenes together. How did we intensify the situation? We moved the less difficult encounters with the Chinese forward and the more confrontational scenes to later. But it was a struggle. There's no doubt that I was extremely unhappy for a few months.
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GF: There's a shoes motif throughout the film - mostly the Dalai Lama noticing how his shoes change as his fortunes change. Why, though, does his gaze linger on the shiny black shoes worn by Mao [Robert Lin]?
MS: The Dalai Lama told us a story about his last evening with Mao in Peking. Mao leaned close to him and said, "Ultimately, you must understand one thing: Religion is poison." He remembers at that point looking down at Mao's shoes and being amazed by how shiny they were. He couldn't take his eyes away. And he knew, as Mao got up, that this was the man who was going to wipe the Tibet he'd known away.
GF: Do you feel you were more objective on Kundun than on The Last Temptation of Christ?
MS: Yes. With The Last Temptation of Christ, my religion got in the way: I could not get past the iconography that I like so much. I had to do Passion Week. If I had been able to, I would have done every Station of the Cross. [Paul] Schrader had written the film short, but I went back and added some scenes, notably the one with Jesus on the mountain, when he expresses his fear and self-loathing and the idea of wanting a woman but not taking her - not because it would be a sin, but because he's afraid to go to her. I thought that was something a lot of people could identify with. But I made the error - though it's a good error, and I think Kazantzakis made it, too - of discussing the whole issue of love versus violence: Judas had to represent one thing, and Jesus had to represent the other. We should have simplified that whole discussion, or avoided it. It's the old story: The more you say the deeper you get in, and there's no way to end it. That's why on Kundun I used the boy's awareness of things around him to take the audience along - I didn't want to get bogged down in Tibetan history. Basically, it's the story of a little boy, and we only see what he sees; that's why it's a perfect Disney movie. [laughs] The point was to stay on the road of Kundun's spiritual development from a boy into a young man, and show how he coped with the Chinese situation.
