Word: script
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Then there are celebrities whose exact commitment to the faith is a guessing game. Oliver Stone publicly conscripts Tibetan "wrathful deities" to fend off his detractors; Courtney Love is said to be a practitioner, while Harrison Ford simply supports Tibetan freedom (his wife Melissa Mathison wrote Kundun's script). Composer Philip Glass, yes. REM singer Michael Stipe, maybe. And in one of the more peculiar occurrences along the Hollywood-Lhasa axis, action-film star and all-around surly guy Steven Seagal was recognized by the head of the venerable Nyingma Tibetan lineage as the reincarnation of a 15th century lama...
...Screenwriter Becky Johnston (The Prince of Tides) was drawn to the subject because "like most baby boomers, I went through a period of spiritual crisis, examining other faiths. I was always interested in studying Buddhism because it's more than a religion, it's a philosophy." Her script is torn neatly in two, between the notion of conflict, which drives Hollywood movies, and the Buddhist sense of reconciliation and liberation. It is a Western film that goes East for answers. Its aim is to give the viewer, in images of rhapsodic beauty, a radical message: not fight...
...complains. "You shouldn't speak until you know what you're talking about. That's why I get uncomfortable with interviews. Reporters ask me what I feel China should do about Tibet. Who cares what I think China should do? I'm a f______ actor! They hand me a script. I act. I'm here for entertainment, basically, when you whittle everything away. I'm a grown man who puts on makeup...
...freer in some way when I'm doing my own script," she says, "because I can change it constantly without asking anybody. With somebody else's work, especially a classic novel, I feel a responsibility to respect the material...
...that this "responsibility" demands a complete fidelity to the source novel. Holland's characteristic quirks and odd-ball sense of humor--in Europa Europa, she made a character's foreskin a consistent source of laughs--resist any firm allegiance to an inherited script. "For me it is more playful to make somebody else's material," she affirms; it allows her to "concentrate on the interpretation more [than] having to create everything from scratch...