Acting was far from Tenzin Lodoe’s mind while he was growing up in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala. His parents had fled there from Tibet in 1954, when they were children. Lodoe’s father, Tenzin Choegyal, who is the Dalai Lama’s youngest brother, became the Tibetan leader’s assistant, and Rinchen Khando, Lodoe’s mother, served as the government-in-exile’s minister of education. One of the settlement’s proud achievements was continuing the Tibetan way of life. “Our culture is that of compassion,” Lodoe says. “We concentrate on the development of the human heart.” Lodoe learned English at Dharamsala’s Tibetan Children’s Village, a school closely patterned after the British system that trained earlier generations of Tibet’s elite.
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English was an asset when a casting director showed up in Dharamsala in June 1996 looking for Tibetans to act in Kundun, Martin Scorsese’s movie about the Dalai Lama. “We had known about the project for some time,” Lodoe says. “[Screenwriter] Melissa Mathison had visited our settlement several times to consult with those who knew the Dalai Lama well.” A practicing Buddhist, Mathison wrote the screenplays for E.T. and The Black Stallion. Her desire to popularize the story of the 14th Dalai Lama was met with hearty approval, and Scorsese’s later participation added prestige to the venture. “It meant a lot to us Tibetans,” Lodoe says. “We began to regard the movie as a way of showing our freedom struggle to the world.”
Before moving to the U.S. to study journalism at Northwestern in the fall of 1996, Lodoe joined the cast and crew of Kundun in Morocco, where much of the film was shot. Lodoe spent what he calls an exhilarating seven weeks in a valley in the Atlas Mountains, closely observing Scorsese at work. “Marty didn’t give too much direction or tell me about motivations. He’d say, ‘Here’s the situation, do it your way.’ That was such a pleasure.” Lodoe saw the finished film at its New York premiere last month. “It’s a masterpiece,” he declares, “as close to a prayer as a movie can be. One thing that struck me about Scorsese is how he managed to transcend cultures yet keep the emotions real and immediate. In terms of history, I think it’s 98 percent accurate. As a Tibetan born in exile, I’ve never seen the motherland. Now the movie has given the Tibetans of my generation images of a Tibet we can relate to.”
