Some twenty years ago, I was visiting my oldest brother, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, at his monastery in Boudhanath. just outside of Kathmandu. We were sitting together having lunch, laughing and talking, when I noticed a guy sitting at another table staring at me, which made me a little nervous. At one point, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche left the table and the guy who was staring at me approached. He introduced himself as the director Bernardo Bertolucci, who was in the area making the film Little Buddha.
“We’re making a movie,” he said, “and there is one role that I think you would be perfect for, because I like your smile. Can I come tomorrow with the camera and have you act in front of the camera?
I said, “Okay.”
So the next day he arrived with the cameraman and a camera.The cameraman started shooting and the director asked me to say some-thing and smile. But I found it hard to smile.I’d never smiled into the black hole of a camera lens. I’d only smiled at people while chatting with them.
He asked me to try again, saying I had real potential. “But you have to smile,” he said. We tried that a few times, but I didn’t really know how to connect whatever small sense of humor I have to a machine. It’s always arisen from my contact with people.But Bertolucci wasn’t willing to give up. He asked me to come to the set where they were filming to see how movies are made. So I went there for four or five days, and as I watched the whole filming process I became very disillusion. It all seemed so artificial all the time it took for makeup, to set up the lights, rehearse a scene over and over again, watching the actors la rent or cry on cue, and then film the scene again and again from different angles.
Watching all this, I thought, “Wow, I thought movies were more real than this.”
A couple of days later I had to go to Bhutan, and when I came back I found that they had cast someone else in the role – which I didn’t mind so much.I was actually glad not to have to participate in what seemed to me a rather artificial process.
The downside of this experience was that I lost interest in watching movies for four or five years.Every time l watched a scene, I would think, “Oh, they’ve filmed this scene twenty or thirty times.” I couldn’t enjoy watching a movie.
Slowly, though, my attitude changed.
“Why shouldn’t I like watching movies?” I asked myself.” Life itself is in many ways like a movie. There are lots of causes and conditions that contribute to appearances that create such compelling plots. And the effort that goes into making a movie is similar to the combinations of causes and conditions that come together to create the stuff that we experience in daily life. So now I can watch movies with the same appreciation that I watch life. I can appreciate the beauty of the illusion unfolding. I can appreciate the effort. l can appreciate the story. Rut I can also maintain a little distance, so that I don’t become sucked in.
I can also appreciate the fact that an actor or actress who is shot or stabbed in a movie isn’t really dead but is probably sleeping quite comfortably in Los Angeles or working somewhere around the world on another movie.can still be moved by the story on the screen, but at the same time know its a movie and that all sorts of things have contributed to making the movie.
We can apply the same sort of understanding to daily life. We can watch our experiences unfold, we can become emotionally and intellectually involved in them, but at the same time recognize that they’re a kind of movie.
Excerpted from चित्त खुलोस हृदयसँग available here
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