A Lonely Quest High Atop the World

The inquisitive eyes of French photographer and documentarian Eric Valli are the same odd shade of turquoise as the Tibetan amulet that dangles from a yak-hide string on his neck. He arrives on a recent day for an interview in Los Angeles with his wispy blond hair looking windblown and in want of a hat.

Tall and thin, the 48-year-old Valli wears a backpack slung over his charcoal gray vest and his long-sleeved black shirt; he’s a man about to head off somewhere. The pockets of his vest are stuffed with pencils and squares of paper, which he occasionally withdraws to make sketches and notes of ideas that continually come to him.

“I don’t like staying in cities so much,” he says in his French-flavored English, tossing his backpack onto a nearby chair. “I am very much of a nomad, very much of a mountain kind of guy.”

Valli has temporarily left his beloved Tibetan mountains for the hills of Hollywood in order to promote the release Friday of “Himalaya,” his first feature film. Shot for less than $6 million on location high on the plateaus of Nepal, the film features Valli’s spare, Zen-like treatment of action, image and sound. It has been labeled unconventional, a term Valli disdains. He thinks it’s unconventional only when compared with a Hollywood blockbuster.

The film’s special-effects budget was confined to a fiberglass yak and an effect that made a star throb like a beating heart over the Himalayan peaks. The remarkable cast is made up almost entirely of Tibetan yakpas (cowboys) and villagers, most of whom had never seen a movie in their lives. Nevertheless, “Himalaya,” which was inspired by the real-life adventures of two of Valli’s Tibetan friends (who both appear in the movie and are listed as having helped write it), has been compared to the epic adventures of John Ford.

“Himalaya” was an Academy Award nominee this year for best foreign-language film, the first Nepalese film to be so honored (the film was then titled “Caravan,” but that was later changed). It also won two Cesars (the French equivalent of the Oscar), for best cinematography and best original music.

“I was so surprised that a film like mine was nominated for an Academy Award because it’s such an un-Hollywood film,” Valli says. “No recipe ever used by French or Hollywood cinema is in this film, and yet Hollywood recognizes such a film every once in awhile.”

“Himalaya” is Valli’s fictionalized account of the salt caravans, in which the Dolpo-po people of the Tibetan highlands trek great distances on yaks to exchange salt for grain with residents of the lowlands. By almost any standard, the Dolpo-po live tenuous yet spectacular lives, isolated in an epic landscape and poised on the precipice of existence. The perils of their lives allow for no false steps or excess.

“One of the great powers lies in simplicity,” Valli explains. “Everything is much simpler than what we think. Some people say that my film is art, but I consider myself a craftsman, and not an artist, and if I had a model for this film, it is Japanese woodblocks, where there is nothing extra. I want to be sharp and simple and address the important things in life. There are not so many.”

Valli first read about the salt caravans when he was 13, back in his hometown of Paris. “My father offered me a book called ‘Tibetan Caravan.’ It is funny because I found this book last year while I was in my father’s place. And when I was 13 I had made this kind of thing,” he says, miming the folding of a dog-eared page. “I had underlined maybe two big sentences, talking about this caravan going through the mist and the snow of the Himalayas. And now, 35 years later, I make a film about it.

“My life more and more as an adult is to realize the dreams I had as a kid. And my friends keep asking me, ‘Eric, when will you start being reasonable--when will you stop dreaming so much?’ ”

Valli’s adventures began at age 18. “I was searching for the human essences that seemed to give life its texture and meaning. I wanted to explore all human differences, and to see different ways of living life and seeing life. I bought two horses and a gun and crossed Afghanistan on horseback. That’s when I realized I could never go back to a life lived between four little walls. I had discovered life with a capital L.”

After two years in Afghanistan, Valli decided to visit Nepal for a couple of weeks. He stayed for almost 20 years. He learned the language, trained himself as a photographer and began filing stories for Life, Smithsonian and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. Over the years, he produced a series of award-winning documentaries and books, including “The Honey Hunters of Nepal” and “Shadow Hunters.” In 1992 he was awarded the Gurka Dakshin Baho award by the king of Nepal for his service to the people of his adopted nation.

In 1992, while completing a cover story for National Geographic on the Dolpo-po, Valli met Jacques Perrin, the French producer who would set his life on an exhilarating new course. Perrin is the producer of “Z” and “Black and White in Color,” among other films.

After cultivating a friendship with Perrin over a two-year period, Valli suggested that they make a documentary on the salt caravans. Perrin pondered the suggestion and replied, “You are wrong, Eric. It is not a documentary we should make. It’s a feature.” At first, Valli was stunned by the idea. “I had spent my entire life as an ‘image catcher’ and not an ‘image maker,’ but I have always been frustrated as a documentary filmmaker because I could not dive into a person’s face and capture the emotions that I observed there that made me shiver.”

To coach Valli’s troupe of Tibetan amateurs, Perrin hired French actors Maurice Benichou and Alain Maratrat, who had been part of the original cast of Peter Brooke’s epic 1989 play and film “The Mahabharata,” based on the central myths of India.

Composer Bruno Coulais recruited a chorus of lamas (monks) from the Tibetan Opera, including the ethereal voice of lama Tsering Lodoe. Coulais blended the lamas with a Corsican choir, headed by the equally otherworldly presence of Corsican polyphonic singer Jean-Luc Geronimi, to create “Himalaya’s” deeply introspective score.

Valli selected additional members of his European crew according to a simple standard. “I knew we would be working in dreadful conditions, so I choose my crew of 15 not only because they were great technicians and very fit, but because they were good human beings. I knew this was the only way that I could solve problems that I could not even anticipate before the film.

“If I could build up the same sympathy for the Dolpo-po in the crew that I myself had with the Dolpo-po, I knew I could solve all the problems of the cold, the loneliness, the exhaustion, the blues, the avalanches, all of it.”

Indeed, filming conditions were often more harsh that Valli had feared. Valli was almost swept away by an avalanche, and several times he thought he might have to abandon the project. “The first time we were stuck in the snow I called Jacques and I said, ‘I think we are going to fail.’ And Jacques said, ‘You can do it. Don’t worry about the money--that’s my problem. Just bring back your dream.’ How can you betray a man like this?”

Meanwhile, Valli had coaxed his two dearest friends among the Dolpo, Thinlen Lhondup and Tensing Norbu, to play roles closely paralleling their own lives. Lhondup plays the old chief Tinle, a kind of Tibetan King Lear, whose ferocious pride and grief over the death of his son compel him to accept the challenge of the caravan long after it is wise. Norbu, a Buddhist monk and painter, plays a holy man.

“This film is a love story because I live with the Dolpo, we laugh, we get drunk,” Valli says. “These people have touched me and I have this great thing in my heart. But how could I transmit this love that I have for these people to others who belong almost to a different planet?”

Valli honed his spare shooting script over a two-year period, going back and forth between Thinlen and Norbu in Nepal, and reshaping his tale with the Paris-based Olivier Dazat, whom he describes as “a total sedentary, afraid of spiders and things like that, but possessed of a very fine sense of observation and an incredible knowledge of human mechanics.” (Louis Gardel and Jean-Claude Guillebaud also received writing credit.)

“Himalaya” was filmed from September 1997 through July 1998. “Many people tell me it’s going to be tougher to work with professional actors for my next film,” Valli confides with a chuckle, “because we got such incredible performances out of these people. The Dolpo-po totally dove into their roles.

“Thinlen and Norbu said that it is important to make this film before their culture melts like snow in the sun. We were very much in tune from the very beginning, otherwise I would not have been able to do it.”

The transformation of Thinlen from tribesman to thespian became complete on one arduous day of shooting. “I was sketching a storyboard for a scene in the snow, and when I finished the scene in [the Tibetan language] and my technicians are shooting the scene, Thinlen suddenly comes from behind a rock and says, ‘Hey Eric, the relationship between me and [a rival chief] doesn’t work. This line cannot be said like this.’ And right away, we sat down at the last minute and rewrote the scene. That is how Thinlen became nicknamed Marlon Brando.”

The story begins with Coulais’ score reverently intoning a funeral chant over a black screen. Then, filling the screen with sheets of yellow dust, Valli shows a ghostly yak herd lumbering down the Himalayan steps through curtains of dust, amid the mournful whoops of Tibetan cowboys bearing news of tragedy.

“When I was a kid in Afghanistan, I was in search of differences,” Valli recalls. “And now, 20 years later, I make a film about our similarities, a film that says that basically we are all the same. This adventure could have taken place 200 years ago in Japan or the Rocky Mountains. The essence of this film is simple: Whenever two trails are put in front of you, always choose the hardest one, the one which squeezes the best out of you within this life.

“If you don’t follow this way, if you don’t bring out your talents and what they are good for, then life doesn’t have any meaning.”