The inner Scorsese

Graham Fuller

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

GF: He's more of an observer than a participant. The film opens with shots of the mandala sand paintings end his eye opening.

MS: Exactly. The sand painters are inside his bead in a way. Then, as his eye opens, the camera turns, like it turns on the shot of Janet Leigh's dead body in Psycho [1960].

GF: You repeat that images of him emerging from sleep a couple of times.

MS: I think that sort of shot, although sometimes self-conscious, creates the feeling of being closer to the main character's perception, so that you're really seeing the story through his eyes. I did it in Taxi Driver too. I always think of that shot in Rebel Without a Cause [1955] where you're placed in the position of James Dean on the couch seeing his father come in wearing an apron, and Dean tells him to take it off. I really felt for Dean at that point.

GF: You said earlier that you don't necessarily embrace Buddhism. Did it rub off on you at all when you were making the film?

MS: I think some of it did. That doesn't mean I didn't get frustrated or angry while shooting, but I think I was able to handle it better. Only once or twice did I became hysterical over production problems, and then it took me an hour or two to calm down. But I think I can deal with anger a little better so that it doesn't kill me, I hope. There were some personal things going on in my life when I made the film: My mother was passing away. I'm just at that time of life. I'm in middle age, and the old generation goes, and you become the older generation. And the world turns. I don't fight it anymore - it is what it is.

GF: Do you think Buddhism is catching on in America because of the spiritual void that opened up in the '80s?

MS: Sure. Take my last picture, Casino: I hate to admit it, but I put the Rolling Stones song "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" - as played by Devo - in there as a kind of in-joke. What represents excess most? Vegas. Vegas gangsters. Money. Greed, greed, greed. A reflection of Hollywood, too: budgets of films mushrooming until explosions occur. Casino shows where we're going to end up with that kind of thinking: in a hole in the ground, beaten to death with bats. Societies do spin off the edge for a while, and, as you say, it happened here and all around the world in the '80s. But the spiritual part of humanity has to be addressed. I actually think Western religions are in trouble, especially here in America. I'm concerned about Catholicism because there aren't enough priests, and some of those we do have are going through moral crises having to do with drinking and sexuality. Parishes are being closed down. The rites of the Church have changed, which is something I can't get over. I'm used to the Latin mass.

GF: Do you still worship?

MS: From time to time. When my parents died, I found comfort in the Church. But I question it. The interesting thing about Buddhism is, as the Dalai Lama says, you can take what you want from it and still be Christian. Utilize what gets you through the night, what gets you through the day. But you've got to cut right to the core of it. By which I mean greed and pride. You also have to recognize that, again, as the Dalai Lama says in the film, long and short lifetimes do not matter. We're all part of a whole thing that just keeps turning and turning and turning. Recently, I've been listening to [physicist] Stephen Hawking talk about the beginning of time and the cosmos, and there's something comforting about being reminded that we're part of something infinitely grander than ourselves. That doesn't mean I have no ego - it's enormous - but it's good to realize that you just have to fit in, rather than fight and kill to get - what? An extra million dollars? What would I do with an extra million? My kids are taken care of. My parents are gone now - I did the best I could with them. My brother's OK. So I'll spend it. [laughs]

GF: What personal challenges remain for you?

MS: I would love to be able to - and this is ego speaking - grow as a filmmaker. Which means I have to assume I had something as a filmmaker to start with, and I'm not sure about that anymore. Some of my films are very strong, I think. I'll sign them any day. But I wonder if there's anyplace left to go - I really do. I wonder if I had anyplace to go to begin with. I know I had it with Mean Streets, I'll tell you that. I honestly don't think I had enough money or time to execute it the way I wanted to, but the force of the actors blasted through it. The other stuff? I don't know. Raging Bull came mostly from Bob [De Niro]; I just found my own way in it. I survived a damaging life experience in order to make that picture. To qualify as what? Part of a hierarchy of filmmakers? Someone who has resonance for filmmakers in the future? Even that, ultimately, is not enough.

Oliver Stone once asked me - this was about seven years ago - "What do you want to do in movies?" We were teasing each other, and he was provoking me. And I had the audacity to say, "I make pictures that I hope will last." And he laughed at me and said, "You make pictures to last?" What he meant was, "Your ego is out of control." [laughs] But I would like my pictures to speak to people in the future, and to mean something to them. And I'm trying like hell, but it's very hard in this marketplace.

GF: Could you make a Cape Fear again?

MS: I don't think so. The fun there was De Niro, you see. He had this idea of playing this guy a certain way, and I knew if he had fun with that we would enjoy making the picture. Casino was a hybrid between American marketing and my own kind of film, but I don't know if I want to make more hybrids. The project I'm working on now with Nick Pileggi, which is about Dean Martin and American show business, has an element of hybrid about it, as does the George Gershwin project I'm doing with John Guare. But if I wasn't able to incorporate my own interests, I wonder if I could still direct. In a way, I admire hardworking journeymen directors who actually go out there and do a job. I think they have a certain humility that I lack. Because of my asthma, I've been kind of pampered all my life: I've never really had a job. I've never waited on tables. I mean, I'll he working on Kundun till late tonight, but that's something I want to do.

GF: As someone who's always made very personal films, it's surely impossible to keep your personal preoccupations at bay. And as an artist, It's not even desirable.

MS: No, I think that's important. As a filmmaker, you're naturally competitive. But you have to realize that it doesn't matter how your films are going to stack up against other people's. You have to stop whining about it and just get to work. Just do it. Because in the work is your existence. That's what you're here for.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.
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