It Must Be Karma

French director Jean-Jacques Annaud has made his name braving the elements in remote locations to make offbeat films like “Quest for Fire,” “The Bear” and “The Lover,” but nothing compares to his undertaking here, “Seven Years in Tibet.”

The film, based on a true story, stars Brad Pitt as the legendary Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer, who set out to scale a peak in India, wound up interned in a British prisoner of war camp during World War II, then escaped by climbing over the Himalayas into Tibet. There he became an advisor to the young Dalai Lama and discovered Buddhism.

The story is set mostly in Tibet in the 1940s, which was then still a feudal kingdom, rooted in Buddhism, lit by butter lamps and closed to Western eyes. So the logical place to film would be Tibet--except that it has been occupied by the Communist Chinese since 1951. They forced the Dalai Lama--the spiritual and political leader of Tibet--to flee in 1959 to India, and have since waged a vicious repression of Buddhist culture, killing monks and nuns, destroying monasteries and desecrating sacred books and art.

As a result, Annaud knew full well the Chinese would not be first in line to see his movie, let alone allow him to film it in Tibet. So he set his sights on northern India and spent six months scouting locales, preparing sets and investing close to $1 million, only to have the Indian prime minister’s office--reportedly in response to pressure from China--call off the shooting last spring.

Undeterred, Annaud moved cast and crew--which includes some 150 Tibetans, mostly from exile settlements in India--halfway around the globe to the Andes, an area that looks remarkably like Tibet.

Then the Chinese began reportedly pressuring the governor of the Mendoza province, and the Argentine government in Buenos Aires, to shut down the film. But the Argentines not only welcomed the project, they issued the travel visas that allowed the Tibetans to leave India and work on the film.

That seemed to settle the issue--until Annaud a few weeks ago heard that he, along with Pitt and other members of the production, have been blacklisted by the Chinese-run Tibetan Tourism Office. They may no longer visit Tibet.

“It has been very amusing,” Annaud says with a smile. “The Red Chinese have been trying to disrupt us by scaring our Tibetans, but the Tibetans have not been surprised at all. This has been their life. . . . They know the Chinese.”

The Chinese, as it turns out, are just a small part of what could be called “Jean-Jacques Annaud and the Quest for Tibet . . . in Argentina.” To tell the story of the self-centered, overachieving Harrer, the 54-year-old director has rounded up an international cast--including English actor David Thewlis, who plays Peter Aufschnaiter, the climber who accompanied Harrer on his journey, and Jetsun Pema, the Dalai Lama’s sister. (She plays her and her brother’s mother.)

He’s rebuilt ancient Tibet in elaborate sets from the Andes near Uspallata to the suburbs of Mendoza, a beautiful European-style city of 700,000. The sets include a mind-boggling re-creation of a winding street some 220 yards long from the capital city of Lhasa, and whole rooms of the Potala, the legendary 1,000-room palace of the Dalai Lamas.

Annaud secured a Tibetan advisor, Tenzin Tethong, a former Buddhist monk and former prime minister of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile, whom he consults on everything from prayer banners to palace protocol; and a group of young Tibetan monks who spend four to eight hours a day creating everything from intricate, 8-foot-wide sand designs to hundreds of small “butter” sculptures--intricate lotus flowers and other designs made from Tibetan butter and wax. He’s even imported a herd of yaks, known for their long hair and prickly natures. (They bite.)

‘Seven Years,” of course, is one of two films being made that involve Tibet and the Dalai Lama. The other is “Kundun,” which focuses exclusively on the young Dalai Lama growing up. It is directed by Martin Scorsese, just finished shooting in Morocco and will be released by the Walt Disney Co.

Last fall, Chinese officials reportedly threatened Disney with unspecified business reprisals in mainland China if the company continued with “Kundun.” But when Disney refused to back down on the film, the issue died, and Chinese officials have since grown quiet.

To date, the Chinese officials have said nothing publicly about “Seven Years in Tibet.” (A person answering the phone at China’s embassy in Washington said he knew nothing about the film.)

Moving the production halfway around the globe, however, has left a few more gray hairs in the head of Richard Goodwin, the executive producer of “Seven Years in Tibet,” who numbers among his credits David Lean’s “A Passage to India.”

“This has been the most political film I have ever been involved with,” Goodwin said. “The Chinese do not want to be criticized. What they did in Tibet, they feel, is an internal problem of theirs and shouldn’t be discussed with anyone.”

Equally challenging have been hordes of teenage girls and paparazzi who have descended to this area in western Argentina, near the Chilean border, just to glimpse Pitt.

Indeed, the frenzy has reached rock-star proportions, as girls will wait for hours at the studio gates, often with their fathers as chaperons (this is Argentina), just to see Pitt’s four-wheel-drive vehicle motor past. They scream and swoon even though they can’t see a thing through the tinted windshield.

All the attention has rendered Pitt a prisoner of his house outside Mendoza, which had to be equipped with a fence--built on top of the existing wall that rings the grounds--to keep fans from prying. (Though even with the hubbub, Pitt managed to keep some time for his personal life; he and Gwyneth Paltrow became engaged during the filming.) It’s also earned him a lot of respect among the cast and crew: He rarely talks about the frenzy, let alone complain; he just does his work.

Despite the hassles, the $60-million production, planned for an October release from TriStar, is virtually on budget and schedule, and should wrap in early March. And the major reason, as virtually anyone from caterers to the executive producers will tell you, is Annaud.

The Paris-based director puts in 12- to 14-hour days on the set. His sense of adventure is infectious--and he invariably manages to surprise even those who have known him well for years. He may have the mind and look (a white mane of Harpo Marx hair and metal-rimmed glasses) of a French intellectual, but he holds the spirit of an American cowboy.

“What I’ve known in this business is a complacency among people, especially as you go down the road and become more successful, but not Jean-Jacques,” Pitt says. “Here’s a guy who still gets thrilled and excited--every day. The worse the weather gets, the happier he is. Wind, rain, dust in the eyes--people can’t see, people are getting blown over, lights getting blown over. He’s thrilled--’Yes, yes! I want to go now, this is natural. We must go now!’

“And we don’t even have to talk about his eye,” Pitt says. “Any time he comes up to me on the set and says, ‘You know, this thing, it is not right . . . , ‘ he doesn’t even have to put it into words. The man knows.”

Annaud’s touch was evident the other day in the studios outside Mendoza, as he orchestrated the coronation of the young Dalai Lama, a massive scene involving nearly 400 extras, all packed into a stunning re-creation of the Potala’s coronation room, which Tibetans call the Hall of Good Deeds.

Indeed, the set seems more like it has been flown in from Lhasa than built by hand in Argentina inside an old garlic warehouse; it rises three stories and covers some 9,000 square feet, most of which is filled with row upon row of monks, all facing forward to the throne of golden silk pillows, 4 feet high, where the young Dalai Lama sits, awaiting his crown.

Lording over all is a towering golden statue of Sakyamuni, the historical Buddha, sitting cross-legged on his lotus throne, decorated with 14 intricate butter sculptures in shades of pink, blue and cream.

Adding to the aura are banks of Tibetan butter lamps ringing the room, casting a haunting glow illuminating countless Buddhas staring out from the walls.

Annaud, dressed all in white, stands out as he darts around the rows of extras, attired in traditional Tibetan ceremonial silk robes, trimmed in brocade. He beamed enthusiasm, whether joking with the young Dalai Lama (14-year-old Jamyang Wangchuck, from Bhutan), who sits on a throne of pillows adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses, or discussing camera placement with his cinematographer, Robert Fraisse.

Annaud takes particular joy in attending to little things--like the timing between the Tibetan ceremonial band and the chanting of the monks in the first row.

“First the music starts, then after a few bars we want those monks to start with their chants,” Annaud says, pointing to the row of monks. “Then they can start bowing.”

It is eerie, in fact, how all the seemingly random elements build to make an emotional point. As each row bows, a wave of human flesh recedes from the Dalai Lama’s throne and eventually focuses attention on the only white face in the crowd: Harrer (Pitt). He is near the last row, dressed in a wine-dark silk robe. He is bowing, too--and that is the point.

The entire scene--the building, people, costumes, lighting, music, smoke--has been orchestrated to dramatize an emotional transformation. The world-class mountaineer has exchanged his climbing spikes and awards for a robe and a sense of compassion. He is now a part of Buddhist culture.

As that awareness dawns, the smell of incense suddenly becomes evident. It is everywhere, wafting from behind the Dalai Lama’s throne of pillows. The source of the cloud: Annaud, hidden behind the throne, happily waving sticks of Tibetan incense.

“I wanted to smell it,” Annaud says later. “And I wanted my Tibetan friends to smell it, too. It is the perfume of their country and when they smell it, they are there.”

That attitude has characterized Annaud’s career. At times, he seems more like an anthropologist bent on preserving lost cultures than a film director, dependent for his life on the box office.

He’s obsessed with what happens when one culture meets another and how that clash gives rise to emotional transformations. That theme--the quest for humanity in a world that has lost all sense of what being human is--is a recurrent one for him, whether the story involves a group of French and German colonials and Africans in West Africa during World War I, as it did in “Black and White in Color,” which earned an Oscar for best foreign-language film in 1977; or a bear cub, a bear and two white hunters in “The Bear.”

To bring these conflicts to life, Annaud loves to create his own worlds. In “Quest for Fire,” his epic drama about primitive man’s discovery of fire, Annaud invented four primitive tribes. Then, with the help of the late Anthony Burgess and renowned anthropologist Desmond Morris, he created a culture--from body language to dress to implements--for each tribe.

For “The Bear,” which told the story of a cub’s coming of age from the cub’s point of view, Annaud spent nearly six years finding the right animals, training a variety of them--including a 2,000-pound Kodiak bear named Bart--for “roles” in the film, and scouting locations from northern Canada to Europe.

“I don’t want my movies to be ‘just a movie,’ ” Annaud says. “Movies are becoming the most important vehicle of culture, of knowledge.

“Our efforts here have two levels. One is to make a very good, entertaining movie. The other is to make a movie that is going to be one of the very few to witness the culture of Tibet as it was.”

“Seven Years in Tibet” was challenging, even for Annaud, because for centuries Tibet lay hidden, accessible only by yak caravans and virtually forbidden to Westerners.

In fact, Harrer and Aufschnaiter--who spent nearly two years climbing from India into Tibet, through mountain passes at 15,000 to 30,000 feet--were among the first Westerners allowed to live in the Forbidden City of Lhasa for an extended time since the early 18th century.

The Chinese crackdown hasn’t helped the spread of knowledge. A good deal of the country was off-limits to foreigners for nearly three decades. And many remote parts--which human-rights groups say are being used for prison camps and nuclear waste dumps--still are.

As a result, there are only a handful of accurate accounts written by Westerners on Tibetan life, and fewer still on the intricacies of ceremonial life that governed the Tibetan Buddhist world, which is centered on the Dalai Lama, believed to be a living reincarnation of Buddha.

To solve that problem, screenwriter Becky Johnston, who also wrote “The Prince of Tides,” spent nearly a year researching the script. She studied Tibetan Buddhism for eight months with a lama--a Tibetan Buddhist monk-teacher--in Los Angeles, toured Tibet for a month with a small group led by noted Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor, then lived in Dharamsala, India (headquarters of the Tibetan government in exile), for a month. There, she interviewed the Dalai Lama as well as members of his family and government.

The result was a script that had a strong dramatic line from a Buddhist point of view: A Westerner overcomes his ego to learn compassion and gain wisdom. It was also heavily laced with descriptions of Buddhist practices and ceremonies--and the emotional pull of Tibet.

“When you go there, you say, ‘My God, you would have to be a member of the living dead not to have this place affect you,’ ” Johnston says. “The whole orientation of the culture is to break the ego down.”

Annaud spent months traveling in 1994 and 1995 with his wife-assistant-companion and second set of eyes, Laurence, or in small groups with members of his production team photographing Tibet and Tibetan settlements in Bhutan, Nepal and India. He then had those photographs compiled into book-like tomes and passed out to his art and costume departments.

But the ultimate goal, Annaud says, was emotion rather than physical realities.

“What I wanted most of all was to see the country and feel the spirit myself--with the lamas and the monks, smell this very unique olfactory experience of rancid yak butter, and the soot of the butter lamps, mixed with the smell of incense,” he says. “It becomes a very specific, wonderful, nostril experience.”

Among the Tibetan cast are about 75 monks, many of whom were born and raised in Tibet, live now in monasteries in India and experienced many of the events portrayed in the film--such as the Chinese invasion in 1951. Their serene faces have earned them celebrity status in Mendoza. They walk the streets dressed in maroon and gold robes and Converse low-cut sneakers (in maroon, of course) and are often asked to pose for photographs.

In addition to Tibetans, Annaud has assembled a corps of experienced actors, including Danny Denzongpa, one of India’s most famous stars; B.D. Wong, the Chinese American actor who won a Tony for his work in “M. Butterfly”; and numerous Bolivians, who bear an uncanny similarity to Tibetan monks.

For most of the Tibetans, this film is more than a movie; it is part of their lives as practicing Buddhists. Jetsun Pema, for example, normally works in Dharamsala, supervising the education of about 10,000 Tibetan children. But for her, this movie is just as important.

“You see, whatever we Tibetans are doing, we are doing for a purpose. The hope of every Tibetan is to go back and free Tibet some day,” Pema says.

“So whether you are looking after Tibetan children, or acting in a movie that is giving more awareness about Tibet to the general public, it’s the same thing.”

*

Rumors circulated on the set that Annaud had pulled a remarkable coup, somehow managing to send a second unit into Tibet to shoot pickups that will eventually be spliced into the finished film--scenes even said to include doubles dressed as Pitt’s and Thewlis’ characters.

Annaud supposedly directed the scenes--by fax and phone from Argentina, via satellite--re-shoots and all.

“The footage is incredible,” says one member of the production who claims to have seen the material shot in Tibet spliced into footage shot in Argentina. “You can’t tell the difference.”

But this is one topic the usually talkative Annaud is silent on. He won’t give it more than a wry smile, neither confirming nor denying.

“I really don’t have anything to say right now,” he says politely. “Except that I think some people will find some parts of my movie very interesting.”