Buddha: the Movie

From The Hollywood Reporter:

What's the next Hollywood epic? If the producers at M Films have their way, it will be a biopic on the life of Buddha. In an effort to promote the project, the production company hosted a luncheon at the Peninsula Hotel on Beverly Hills Monday featuring the Dalai Lama, who offered his endorsement of the project. "From Buddha's life story, maybe you'll get inspiration," the Dalai Lama said, with some help from a translator. "Our intention is not the propagation of Buddhism but helping the world." Hollywood has the power.

It's not clear from the above article whether this is the same film planned by Indian industrialist B. K. Modi (IMDb entry here) and announced at the Cannes film festival earlier this year, which is going to be based on the book "Old Path White Clouds" by Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh. Modi had previously proposed a film based on the life of the Buddha, but that project failed for a variety of reasons, one of which was the objection of Buddhists to the filmmakers' alleged intention to portray the Buddha as an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu.

Personally, I don't think that a single movie can possibly do justice to the amount of material that's in the Buddhist canon on the life of the Buddha. A series may do the trick (the Hindu epic Mahabharata comes to mind), but I doubt that any movie or television studio is up to the task. The "basics" of the story of the Buddha have been done on film before (for example, in Bernardo Bertolucci's "Little Buddha" and the animated "The Legend of Buddha"), and there's no real need to go through the same material again, unless it's part of something much grander.

On the other hand, just because it's been done before doesn't mean that it can't be done again. Other religious figures have inspired multiple films, so why not the Buddha? Films about Jesus Christ have been evangelical, banal, controversial, epic, as well as sadistic. And despite Islam's prohibition against depictions of its founder, a movie has been made about the life of Muhammad, filmed in such a way that neither he nor his closest relatives appeared on screen. The movie starred Anthony Quinn in the role of Muhammad's uncle Hamza, and became notorious before it was even completed. More recently, the story was told in a Disneyfied form.

I don't have very high hopes that Hollywood (or Bollywood) will get it right, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

南無阿彌陀佛