The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (77 page)

The film is not intended to convert people to Tibetan Buddhism. Rather, it will provide virgin territory that is not adulterated by conventional or institutionalized spirituality for anyone with curiosity or a question in mind. I hope that awake people who question their own basic sanity will find another way of looking into their neuroses without necessarily getting just another “answer to their problems.”

Milarepa’s life as Tibet’s great poet-yogi was very colorful and dramatic. It is either black or white; there is no intermediate quality needed. Starting as an ordinary person, Milerepa just sat in meditation and practiced and attained enlightenment in one lifetime.

The visual effect of Milarepa’s life is basically very austere, very spacious, with dots of richness here and there relating to his experiences. The richness is there only to emphasize the austerity around it. The visuals should be very definite, black and white, space and speed at the same time.

For example, the opening sequence of “The Tale of the Red Rock Jewel Valley” picks up at the point Milarepa is longing for Marpa, his guru. There is a sense of desolation. It might be called his adolescent stage because of the feeling that Milarepa misses his “Daddy” and is still looking for reassurance from him. It is a question of something undeveloped but still having some activity. Visually we might work with desert, something completely open, and find one human footprint or maybe the footprint of an animal, a horse, and maybe horseshit.
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There could be a snowstorm and at the same time sand is blowing.

The cameramen as well as the director should develop an absolute relationship with sand and storm, not just try to entertain. Just shoot the whole flow of a storm with a wide-angle lens and shoot the sand grains with close-up lenses. In other words, make a thorough study of all the little things that happen. There are lots of things about sand in a storm that we don’t know. There is the overall power and the overall vacuum of the storm and there are little details of how each grain of sand gets blown by wind.

Q:
Aren’t you shooting the sand and storm specifically with regard to the theme of this chapter, not just to see all the different aspects of sand and storm?

Rinpoche:
You don’t have to. You are not preaching to anybody. We’re not trying to con anybody.

Q:
I was thinking more of explaining than conning.

R:
You don’t have to. Explaining is conning. We just take a good look at each grain of sand and each flake of snow and each stone. We don’t have to be overcrowded with materials. That’s always the problem.

Q:
So we just approach it with complete openness, forgetting about Milarepa, forgetting about “The Tale of the Red Rock Jewel Valley”?

R:
Yes, we get carried away by ourselves.

Q:
Have it in the back of our minds?

R:
Possibly you’d better not. If you really want to be with the sand and storm properly you should forget all your philosophical, all your educational obligations. You should get really fascinated by sand and storm.

In the next sequence, “The Song of the Snow Ranges,” Milarepa is for the first time making friends with himself and with the experiences of silence and desolation. Visually it will be based on working with the different aspects of snow. Whereas a snowstorm is very temperamental, the snow ranges are very sedate, related to the crystal qualities of snow, snow falling down and settling on the ground. We have tremendous possibilities here. I thought we could shoot snow in five different colors, using laboratory techniques. We need highly sensitive closeup lenses to work with snow falling and settling down and melting; how snow relates with stone; how snow relates with wood or leaves; how a snowflake lands on a pine tree or grass or water. Quite possibly we could have snow falling on lenses. Also we can watch the way it melts. There’s endless exploration of the snow cult to be made. There’s a marvelous section in this Song where Milarepa describes the different types of snow falling down:

In the mist, snow fell for nine days and nights.

Then more and more for a further eighteen nights and days.

The snow fell, big as bags of wool

Fell like birds flying in the sky

Fell like a whirling swarm of bees.

Flakes fell small as a spindle’s wheel

Fell as tiny as bean seed

Fell like tufts of cotton.

The snowfall was beyond all measure.

Snow covered all the mountain and even touched the sky

Falling through the bushes and weighing down the trees.

Black mountains became white,

All the lakes were frozen.

Clear water congealed beneath the rocks;

The world became a flat, white plain;

Hills and valleys were leveled.

The snow was such that even evildoers could not venture out.

Wild beasts starved and farmyard creatures, too,

Abandoned by the people in the mountains,

Pitiful, hungry, and enfeebled.

In the tree mists famine struck the birds,

While rats and mice hid underground.

In this great disaster I remained in utter solitude.

The falling snow in the year’s end blizzard

Fought me, the cotton-clad, high on Snow Mountain.

I fought it as it fell upon me.

Until it turned to drizzle.
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Q:
How about something different—like in the song, snow falling like bags of wool—actually throw down bags of wool?

R:
You must be joking. No, you just wait for it and find out what it looks like and shoot it really close so that it looks huge. It is important to relate snowfall to the overall scene. Snow has composure, dignity, unlike rain which is transparent once it drops.

Q:
I think we have a tendency to get complicated. We want to be clever; we want to make something very brilliant so everybody will see how clever we are.

R:
That’s a problem that usually is embarrassing. The audience knows that you’re trying to be clever. They also know that we know that they know. You don’t have to do tricks. Just show what you think very simply.

Q:
In the first chapter we talked about, it sounded as if people were going to photograph sand and let sand tell them what was happening. Do you want some sort of message for this chapter?

R:
The message will be there automatically. The whole philosophy of art is that you don’t try to be artistic but you just approach the objects as they are and then the message comes automatically. You do the same thing in Japanese flower arrangements. You don’t try to be artistic, you just chop off certain twigs and certain branches which seem to be out of line with the flow. You just cut them off and then you put the twigs there and you put the flowers underneath and it automatically becomes a whole landscape.

When you look at a painting by a great artist it doesn’t look like someone actually painted it, but it just seemed to happen by itself. There’s no gap, no cracks at all; it’s one unit, complete.

The film will continue with Milarepa’s various stages of development: becoming an individual, no longer dependent on someone else. Then he begins to speak out. No longer yearning for something, no longer searching, he begins to accept himself as a teacher. His sense of humor begins to develop, reaching the level of “crazy wisdom.” He can afford to be crazy and wise at the same time. Finally, we’ll reach the “old dog” stage, Milarepa’s highest attainment. People can now tread on him, use him as a road, as earth. He is always there in the sense of universality in contrast to mere individuality.

I would like to create this film in such a way that the audience has to take part in it. This means that we need to provide lots of space and lots of speed as well as lots of richness. These three principles, properly interrelated, seem to work together so that the audience begins to take part in the presentation. In other words, they feel they are giving birth to each vision as they watch the screen, rather than passively absorbing some ready-made creation.

Q:
Do you mean that when the next image comes on the screen they expect it, that it seems quite natural?

R:
No. That’s too easy. That’s like watching a cops-and-robbers movie where you know that the good guys get saved and the bad guys get killed.

Q:
Do you mean a certain amount of tension? Like spaciousness creates the need for speed?

R:
Yes, that’s the whole point. There should be room to question, not have the whole thing presented to you as though by a machine gun. The audience should take part in it. Space is the most important thing—space and silence. Then you begin to value objects much more.

Q:
There is something about being gripped like that. Your breathing changes. It affects you directly and fundamentally.

R:
Definitely. It has been said with relation to the maha ati
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practice that the eyes are one of the most important exits. In fact, they have been called the door of jnana, the highest wisdom. Visual effects are the most important in their effect on the mind.

Q:
When you speak of space and silence it sounds a bit like a Chinese or Japanese scroll painting, a landscape where there is all that space and the few objects become very prominent. It seems the principal device to get that feeling is the difference in scale between something very vast and something very small.

R:
You have to put that scale into a time situation in a movie, rather than use only a visual effect. Generally an audience comes to see a film with some expectations. When they begin to feel they’re not going to see what they expect, it is somewhat strangling.

Q:
Do you mean giving the audience pain in a sense? When the tension becomes so painful you can’t stand it any more, then you switch, and not until?

R:
Well, you can’t overplay it. But at the brink of nothing ever happening, something happens—but something quite different from what you expected to see.

Q:
As if giving the audience time to make the decision of what will happen next? And with richness you could reward their tension?

R:
Exactly. Maybe we’d go very fast then.

Q:
Do you see a modern parable in this—for instance, Milarepa’s deprivation in his youth as compared to the draft?

R:
Once you try to be literal you have no choices. This limits you and you end up having to use psychedelic effects or acting or something like that. We are trying to avoid culture. You might say it is Tibetan culture we are presenting, but we could present it as cultureless culture, new ground, no-man’s-land. Audiences find it difficult to relate to anything except human beings. So if we can create a tension without using human beings visually, that would be an incredible challenge. Once you become involved with the stages of human civilization, it has to be labeled twentieth century or nineteenth century or whatever. But if we limit ourselves to animals or objects or nature or thangkas, there are no stages of civilization to relate to.

It should also not be just a documentary with that “educational film” quality, although it should make suggestions. In fact, not giving information is one of the best things we can do to help the audience take part in the film. Once they have been fed, they have nothing else to do but walk out. But if not enough information is given, although indications are there, then they have to work and think about what has been presented.

Q:
Could you go into the soundtrack?

R:
Here again we have a tremendous problem of culture. We are going to include the monkey chant or flute or Japanese Kabuki sound. And we need some kind of familiar sound that people can relate to, like an umbilical cord. The narration will be read in English and that will provide a sort of umbilical cord. We’ll also have some contemporary singing of Milarepa’s songs. That will finally have to dissolve into abstract, cultureless sounds.

Q:
When you criticize a film you often say, “It is too aware of the audience.” But when people make films, especially in the West, the point is to entertain people.

R:
If you are completely confident in yourself you don’t have to think about the audience at all. You just do your thing, you just do it properly. This means you become the audience. What you make
is
the entertainment, but that needs a certain amount of wisdom.

When an artist does a painting for commission there is a good likelihood that his painting will be one-sided because he is aware of the audience and he has to relate to the educational standards of the audience. If he presents his own style without reference to the audience, they will begin to react and automatically their sophistication will develop and eventually will reach the level of the artist.