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From the beginning of this project, director Scorsese and producer De
Fina decided to cast the film with Tibetans. Ellen Lewis, who has worked
as the casting director on many of Scorsese's films, combed Tibetan communities
in India and the United States with a video camera. Her biggest challenge
was to find Tibetans who not only had the right physical characteristics,
but also whose English was good enough to convey the emotions of the story.
"In choosing the actors we were looking for believability and the ability
to express emotion; people who could be in the moment," director Scorsese
says. "If they then looked like the character, that was terrific,
but it wasn't our primary goal."
A chance introduction led Lewis to the nephew of Namgyal L. Taklha, widow
of His Holiness's brother Lobsang and one of the production's consultants.
As a result Lewis found the young man who would play the adult Dalai Lama.
"I was looking for an 18-year-old who was confident enough to handle
the script material, and who also had a sense of humor," Lewis says.
"That was essential. When I found Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong, I was excited.
He has depth and a light spirit to him."
Some cast members are related to the characters they play. Tencho Gyalpo
(the Dalai Lama's mother) plays her own grandmother. Tenzin Lodoe (Takster,
the Dalai Lama's brother) plays his uncle and Gawa Youngdung (the old village
woman) plays her older sister.
Lewis cast Tenzin Trinley as the Dalai Lama's tutor, Ling Rinpoche, without
knowing that Trinley had been a student of Ling Rinpoche himself. Geshi
Yeshi Gyatso, who plays the Lama of Sera, is also a monk from the re-established
Sera monastery.
Three cast members, Sonam Phuntsok, (Reting) Tashi Dhondup (the adult Lobsang)
and Jampa Lungtok, (the Nechung Oracle), are members of TIPA, the Tibetan
Institute of Performing Arts.
The TIPA company itself performed A Hunter's Dance, The Good Luck Dance
and a satirical sketch, which satirizes the oracle for scenes of the opera
festival in the film.
The extras casting involved international coordination on a grand scale.
Hundreds of exiled Tibetans traveled to Morocco. Over a hundred Tibetan
monks came from monasteries in India and Nepal, including the Namgyal Monastery,
which is closely associated with the Dalai Lama. Moroccan and Berber extras
occasionally increased the numbers to a thousand.
On set the atmosphere resembled the United Nations. The majority of the
crew came from Italy, the United States, Britain and Morocco, but there
were individuals from many other countries. There were three working languages:
English, Italian and French, and many crew members were tri-lingual. Some
also doubled as interpreters from Tibetan and Arabic. Buddhism and Islam
were practiced side by side.
With supervising art director, Alan R. Tomkins, art directors Franco
Ceraolo and Massimo Razzi, set decorator, Francesca Lo Schiavo, fifteen
Italians, including a construction supervisor, master sculptors, plasterers,
carpenters and painters who had worked with him on Fellini's films and hundreds
of Moroccan laborers, production designer Dante Ferretti recreated Tibet
in the desert.
Ferretti first worked in Morocco thirty years ago on Pasolini's "Oedipus
Rex." "The Moroccan landscape is fantastic," he says. "It
looks like Tibet, and Morocco now has a good tradition of filmmaking. There
are many craftspeople here who use the same methods as five hundred years
ago. They don't use modern technology. They build in their own way and
everything looks old, just right for the look of Tibet."
In fact almost everything had to be built: the streets of the Tibetan capital,
Lhasa, the exteriors of the Dalai Lama's residences, the Potala Palace and
the Norbulingka and the palace interiors, including the massive enthronement
room. All the furniture, all the jewelry and all the costumes, more than
one thousand five hundred of them, were made in Ouarzazate. It was a massive
undertaking demanding vision, energy and determination.
The art department compiled its own photographic library on Tibet and this
research was augmented by the Dalai Lama himself. "In spring 1996,
we visited Dharamsala," says producer De Fina. "His Holiness
sat with us and went over the plans for the set with Dante Ferretti. We
had to piece together the geography of the Potala from photographs in different
books. He redrew the floor plan for us and put it all into perspective.
When he was a little boy, he told us, he slept in one room and when he
was older, he slept in another. He offered information that no one else
could possibly know."
Anyone stepping on to the set of the Potala Palace for the first time was
invariably reduced to a stunned silence. The assembly room, in particular,
where prayers were held before the first morning's filming, had the stillness
of a temple.
For the Tibetans it was an especially moving experience. "The first
day when we were taken to the sets, something in me was stirred," says
Tenzin Lodoe, who plays Takster and grew up in India. "I felt the
interior of the Potala was so beautifully recreated. Then I walked along
the corridor and saw the face of the Buddha, which I had only seen in photographs.
This will probably be the closest thing I'm ever going to see to the Tibet
that my parents knew. It could be the closest thing to Tibet that I'll
ever see in my life. As I left the set on my last day, I wondered when
I would walk on the real steps of the Potala."
The exteriors of the Potala and Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama's winter and
summer residences, were built at the Atlas studios, for the most part using
real materials, predominantly stone. The result was that everything felt
real. The paved forecourt of the Norbulingka, took on a life of its own.
When the opera scenes filmed there were over, the players changed and came
back, to stroll and chat, as if it were a town square on a summer night.
It was also there the Tibetans, both actors and monks, gave a concert for
the crew.
The streets of Lhasa were built close to Ouarzazate and production designer
Ferretti was able to take advantage of a street of unfinished houses, using
the concrete shells as a solid base for his Tibetan exteriors.
Hundreds of Moroccans were involved in building the entrance to the summer
palace and its walled gardens on the shore of a large reservoir. It was
a forty-minute drive from Ouarzazate, through villages, along dusty tracks,
past women gathering sparse shrubs to feed their animals. On the far shore
the Atlas mountains stood capped with snow.
Massive lion sculptures made the journey in an open flatbed truck, sitting
in a row one behind the other. Perch traveled from Italy for the ornamental
fish pond and trees were carefully watered for months. It was a very peaceful
setting. "This would be a wonderful place to meditate," said Gawa
Youngdung, who had been adopted by the family of His Holiness, and had played
in the real Norbulingka gardens as a child.
Scenes in the village where the Dalai Lama was born were filmed at Timlougite,
in the mountains between Ouarzazate and Marrakech. The production hired
a small road building company to create basic access to remote locations
such as this.
After fifteen weeks in Ouarzazate, "Kundun" moved briefly to Casablanca,
where an existing building provided Mao Zedong's headquarters and on to
the village of Imlil, in the High Atlas mountains, a ninety minute drive
from Marrakech, where a field study center, La Kasbah de Toubkal, was converted
into the Dungkhar monastery.
To reach Imlil was difficult and required traveling several kilometers over
a rutted and pot-holed track through the mountains. Then, getting to La
Kasbah de Toubkal involved climbing a steep, narrow path on foot or by donkey,
occasionally passing herds of goats on the way.
All the elements of the set were built at Ouarzazate and transported to
Imlil. Then sixty people, mostly locals and forty donkeys worked for four
weeks to prepare the location. All the equipment, camera cases, wardrobe
baskets, catering, everything, was carried up by donkey. The villagers
themselves have never seen a film.
"We have so many different costumes and different kinds of jewelry
in Tibet," says Namgyal L. Taklha. "We wanted to be as accurate
as possible and it's been difficult. There is very little documentation
about the life of old Tibet. We had no museums at all. We didn't preserve
our art or our culture. Every home was a museum piece. A family would
have things dating back centuries, which had been preserved with care.
It was a way of life."
Bona Nasalli-Rocca, the wardrobe supervisor and a costume designer in her
own right, managed an output of incredible proportions.
Working in a small warehouse, twelve seamstresses and tailors, four from
Italy and eight from Morocco and a team responsible for aging the fabrics,
made over one thousand five hundred costumes.
"Bona has been my right arm," says Dante Ferretti, who doubled
as costume designer. She is really exceptional."
Twenty-five large metal trunks, full of silks and brocades, chosen by Ferretti
arrived from Varanasi, a textile town in India, which serves the Tibetan
community.
Miles of off-white wool and cotton were bought in Italy and dyed at the
studio in tin bathtubs and bins, a rush roof the only barrier to the ferocious
heat. Elaborate silk brocade was bleached, or put in mixed colors to change
the shade and then aged either with a blow torch, or yak grease and dust.
"Namgyal L. Taklha explained the different costumes to me," Ferretti
says. "She explained which are used for ceremonies and how they reflect
the hierarchy of Tibet. It's very complicated. There are different costumes
for the Dalai Lama, the lay officials, the monk officials, the monks, the
middle class, the people, and the nomads. The least detail changes the
social position and importance of an individual.
"I researched in the library in Dharamsala. I was in touch with the
Dalai Lama's tailor. I bought twenty-five period costumes, a sample of
everything to see how it had been cut and put together. Then one day there
we were with all this fabric-about 30,000 meters-and a blank page. We had
to start somewhere, so we began with the jackets, because they were the
easiest to create."
With the exception of one diplomat's costume and a few hats, everything
was made in Morocco.
The hairdressing department led by Mirella Ginnoto, who began her career
on "Ben Hur," had a similarly demanding task.
Fifty-five wigs were made in Rome, but as the number of extras grew, Mirella
created her own lab at the Atlas Studios and made one hundred twenty-three
more.
"Scorsese wanted everything to look real, everything a little worn,"
she says. "The people from Amdo, where the Dalai Lama was born, had
hair down to their feet. Nomads wore their hair in as many as a hundred
and eight braids, so they could hide their jewelry in it. It was their
equivalent to a bank account. The lay officials looked really beautiful.
They loved decoration, but they didn't go for anything simple."
There are five or six movements involved in creating the lay official's
topknot and the teams of hairdressers spent two weeks trying wigs on each
other. At first it took them an hour and a quarter. By the time filming
began they were able to deal with hundreds of people in a single morning.
"Working on 'Kundun' has been a once in a lifetime opportunity to participate
in the history of Tibet," says Tenzin Trinley. "Tibetan culture
is on the verge of extinction. It's been very exciting to see this process
of revival, of costumes and beautiful sets, to see it recorded for the younger
generation and all those people who don't know anything about Tibet, even
if it's only for two hours."
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