"I told Harrer, 'You are going to be very disappointed in some parts of the screenplay. It is this loss, in part, that compels Harrer to befriend the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama. Harrer is then haunted by the family he has left behind, a family that retaliates by disowning Harrer as both husband and father. In one bit of artistic license, Harrer abandons a pregnant wife when he first sets out on the expedition to India's Nanga Parbat summit. To make that evolution cinematic, the filmmakers invented a life for Harrer that proved oddly prescient. "You have to fill it out with an emotional profile - his character should be changed by what he goes through." He never talks about anything of a personal nature, and it's totally humorless," Johnston says. "When you read the book, it doesn't give you much of a sense of who he is. How, at one time, I was no different from these intolerant Chinese."įor Annaud and Johnston, the lines are emblematic of the entire film - an imagined personal statement from a man who rarely revealed any feelings. Toward the movie's end, when Chinese troops are bearing down in Lhasa, Harrer says in one of the new lines, "I shudder to recall, how once, long ago, I embraced the same beliefs. Several Tibetan support organizations are using the film's debut to galvanize opposition to China's nearly 50-year occupation.Īnnaud and Johnston added two lines of dialogue after filming was completed to reflect Harrer's party affiliations. In fact, Harrer dedicated his life to human rights and Tibetan independence after the war was over. But Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi hunter, said that Harrer was not involved in politics and was innocent of wrongdoing.
#SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET MOVIE#
Most of the talk about "Seven Years in Tibet" has focused on news, published after the movie finished filming, that Harrer joined the Nazi party and was a gym instructor in its elite SS after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938. Harrer wrote his memoir after fleeing Tibet's holy city of Lhasa in the wake of China's invasion.
Once there, he tutored the young Dalai Lama.
Captured and imprisoned by British troops stationed in India, Harrer escaped from the POW camp and trekked to Tibet. One of Europe's most accomplished alpine explorers, Harrer was trying to climb the Himalayan peak Nanga Parbat when World War II began. The movie was adapted by screenwriter Becky Johnston from Harrer's 1953 autobiography of the same name. But the man never talks about his past, he never talks about his roots, he never talks about his family, he never talks about his Germany." "I wanted to invent what Harrer was not saying. "What fascinated me were the secrets," said Annaud. "The film is definitely what is missing in his book," says Jean-Jacques Annaud, who directed Brad Pitt as Harrer in "Seven Years in Tibet." The revelation about his hidden past only mildly surprised the writer and director of "Seven Years in Tibet," who realized from the start that what makes Harrer's life worth knowing is how much of it is unknown. The makers of the new film "Seven Years in Tibet" unearthed most of them - except one.Īn Austrian mountaineer who befriended the young Dalai Lama, Harrer also was a more fervent Nazi than his memoirs suggest. Heinrich Harrer had a lot of deep, dark secrets.
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