The movie that got Martin Scorsese and Harrison Ford banned from China: “The bad news is that the film was made”
Even though they’ve never worked together, Martin Scorsese and Harrison Ford were both declared persona non grata by the Chinese government for the same movie, which led to the director and actor being banned from entering the country.
Ford wasn’t even in it, but that didn’t prevent the ruling regime from forbidding his presence on Chinese territory. The Star Wars and Indiana Jones icon may have never graced a Scorsese picture with his presence, but at least they created a sense of inadvertent camaraderie by running afoul of the censors and being placed on the same no-entry list.
There was a common denominator between them, though, with Ford married to screenwriter Melissa Mathison for over 20 years. She was well known to the ‘New Hollywood’ wunderkinder, having scripted Steven Spielberg’s ET the Extra-Terrestrial, but it was her activism that brought her into Scorsese’s orbit.
Mathison was one of Hollywood’s most vocal and prominent Tibetan pro-independence campaigners, and her script for Kundun was about as close to a passion project as she could get. Scorsese shared similar beliefs and signed on to direct, only for Ford to end up getting caught up in the backlash when Disney tried to secure the film’s Chinese release.
The story was based on the life and times of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama and exiled spiritual leader. Scorsese had never met him until Kundun was deep into pre-production, but when they spent their first extended period of time together, it just so happened to be at Mathison and Ford’s home.
“I went to visit Melissa and Harrison Ford at their house in Wyoming with Barbara De Fina and other associates of mine,” he told Film Comment. “The Dalai Lama was also there with his retinue, and we talked for two days. Melissa really had the relationship with him, and what she did was question him about certain specifics, and if something was dreadfully wrong, he would say, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that way.’”
Seeking counsel from the Dalai Lama for a film about his life was always going to ruffle feathers in the upper echelons of China’s political hierarchy, something Disney didn’t seem to realise after the corporation was placed into damage limitation mode the closer Kundun got to arriving in cinemas.
The company had developed ties to the ruling Chinese Communist Party in an attempt to make inroads into the country and increase its revenues, only for the Scorsese-directed and Mathison-helmed picture to throw a sizeable spanner in the works.
To appease the regime, Kundun was rolled out to precisely two theatres on Christmas Day in 1997, with Disney effectively sabotaging its own movie so as not to harm its overall relationship with China, which had threatened to pull all of the company’s features and TV shows from circulation in retaliation at Scorsese’s latest.
As then-CEO Michael Eisner famously remarked: “The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it. Here, I want to apologize, and in the future, we should prevent this sort of thing, which insults our friends, from happening.”
Needless to say, those two screens were hardly overflowing with patrons, Kundun bombed globally, and the trio of Scorsese, Mathison, and Ford were barred from crossing China’s borders.
