The Kundun script was shot chronologically, since the film's "actors" were, in fact, Tibetans with no professional acting experience. To help ease them into the filmmaking process, Scorsese told Wilson not to shoot the opening scene. He didn't want the inexperienced actors to be overwhelmed by two cameras, and he wanted them to learn to relate to his crew and camera.
By the time Wilson and his hastily hired Moroccan crew arrived, the shoot had moved outdoors, to a courtyard at the farmhouse setting where much of the early scenes take place. Wilson reports that everyone on Scorsese's team was in good spirits. "Marty had been nervous about how non-professional actors would handle the shoot, but by the time we arrived, he and and his crew had realized that the Tibetans would be wonderful collaborators," he remembers. "Marty was having a great time."
By the end of the first shoot, something else had occurred that would completely change the direction of the film. "At first, I thought we would mainly be documenting Marty's personal experiences," observes Wilson. "But four or five days into our shoot, Marty and I had a discussion. He said, 'Go and ask the Tibetans to tell you their stories. We need to capture that.' Marty himself was extremely touched by the Tibetans, and it played a major role in his creative process. It was amazing to see how open he was to their feelings and their input. After that first week, I realized that there was a Tibetan drama I could not ignore. It couldn't be just a portrait of the artist at work. The Tibetan stories needed to be heard."
Wilson began focusing on that part of the documentary during the second shoot, which took place three weeks after the first, when the Kundun crew was scheduled to photograph the Tibetan opera. Stieber says that he and his team had anticipated a Western, proscenium-style performance, and were surprised by the nature of a Tibetan opera — wild dancing and satirical clowning over a large, outdoor space surrounded by spectators. For the 300 Tibetans who were part of the film, the minutely detailed re-creation of the opera was a poignant reminder of their lost homeland and a deeply emotional event.
The opera — which went on for many days — was also a prime opportunity for Wilson to capture the Tibetans' stories, in interviews that eventually became the emotional core of the documentary. "I was interested in having them relate to the culture in the scene in which they were being filmed — not as actors but as Tibetans," he says. "During practically every interview I did, the interviewee, at one point or another, would start crying and we'd stop filming. It's hard for us to comprehend what it's like to come from a country where the culture has been systematically destroyed.
"I kept going back to the [Tibetan] advisors, because they were such a great resource," Wilson continues. "Lobsang Lhalungpa, for example, talked about your enemies being your No. 1 teacher, and about us being keepers of the earth, not its owners. He made some of the documentary's most important statements."
The documentarians' third trip was to Casablanca, where the scenes of the Dalai Lama's Beijing meeting with Mao Tse-tung were filmed. The fourth and final shoot took place on rough terrain in a village high in the Atlas Mountains, from which the Dalai Lama escapes to India. In this primitive place, the locals had never seen a film crew, the roads were all dirt, and transportation of everything and everyone was accomplished by mule, including all of the camera and lighting equipment.
An unexpected opportunity arose after Wilson's last trip to Morocco, when he got permission to photograph an audience with the Dalai Lama at his headquarters-in-exile in Dharamsala, India. There, the Sony DVX-1000 camera played another crucial role. "That scene wasn't originally part of the plan, so I had to add it in for very little money, which meant bringing only the DV camera and not the French crew or [producer] Dale [Stieber]," relates Wilson.
Because the small DV-format camera looked just like a non- professional tourist camera, Wilson was able to bypass onerous and time-consuming Indian customs inspections. The fact that he would be interviewing the Dalai Lama for a documentary about Tibet would have set off the same alarms that had prevented Kundun from shooting in that country, so Wilson knew that playing things low-key was the best way to go.
While in India, production coordinator/historical consultant Vanessa Hedwig Smith hooked Wilson up with cameraman Devlin Bose (who had worked with celebrated Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray) and sound man Manu Goyal. After being led into the audience room, the crew had 30 minutes to set up the shoot. Wilson had scripted questions that related to the scenes shot in Morocco, but all of the planning didn't prepare him for meeting the Dalai Lama in person. "When you're face to face with him, you see that he has all of these facets," reveals Wilson. "He's something of a Churchill, because he's a political leader, but he's also a 10-year-old child, constantly laughing, very physical. At the same time, he's totally transparent. He's a very complex person."
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