Word: annaud
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Annaud's version of the Harrer memoir, Seven Years in Tibet, is true to the compulsions and contradictions in each man. It has exciting, boy's-life-perils footage of men risking their necks (and breaking a leg) for the suicidal glory of getting to the top of something they can only come down from--the high before the depression. It documents the stubborn spirit of a fellow contemptuous of compromise, almost of humanity, and his rebirth in a land where each desolation dissolves in beatific smiles. It is about a solitary star, trussed in celebrity, who learns...
There were battles aplenty, though, to get the thing made. Annaud insisted that the film would not be hostile to China. But the Maoist bureaucrats must have noticed that he had his fingers crossed; they opposed his efforts to film in several nearby Himalayan nations. He set his location sites on India, but the government there dawdled endlessly. "I could see something was terribly wrong," he says. "They kept telling us we'd get permission, yet nothing was happening...
...went to the diagonally opposite side of the world, Argentina, where the Andes would stunt-double for the Himalayas. This time, says Annaud, the Chinese tried pressuring the governor of the Argentine province of Mendoza. When he refused to cave, Annaud says, China put pressure on the Argentine government, which said thanks, but we can make our own policy on lucrative location shoots. The film was finally shot in Argentina, Chile, England, Austria and British Columbia. But the ruckus made Annaud a semiofficial Enemy of the People's Republic. "I am supposedly banned from China," he notes. Friends have seen...
...Annaud film, remember, must be an adventure. "We had to helicopter the entire crew and gear up every day," says Pitt of the mountain scenes. "It was a limited crew because it was so precarious; we could have been snowed in for 30 days. If the safety guys told us we had to evacuate, we'd do it like that." But like the last U.S. officer in Saigon, Annaud would be the last to leave. "He would assemble the crew," Pitt says, "and it was women and children first. He'd get the entire crew off and then take...
Pitt brushes off the controversy about Harrer's recently discovered SS past and the resulting news stories that suggested Pitt and director Jean-Jacques Annaud were making some kind of glam hero out of a Nazi scuzzbag. "That's a slant people took before they knew all the information," Pitt 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...