Trivia / Kundun

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• Amateur Cast: The film's cast is made up of actual Tibetan Buddhist monks playing the Dalai Lama and other monks.
• Banned in China: The movie is banned in China because of its positive portrayal of the Dalai Lama. By extension, the people involved in its production, including Martin Scorsese, were banned from ever entering the country.^note Scorsese's ban was lifted in 2012.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $28 million. Gross, $8,684,789.
• California Doubling: What with Tibet being annexed to China and everything, most of the film was obviously not shot there, exteriors included locations in Morocco (much like Scorsese's other religious film, The Last Temptation of Christ), India, various sets created for the studio, and for one scene (the scene in the temple where the Dalai Lama notices a rat in the corner), a Buddhist Temple in Greenwich Village, New York!
• Channel Hop: Universal Pictures originally planned to produce the film; however, Seagram bought the studio, and they didn't want to produce the film because of concerns about its impact on their beverage business. This led to Disney acquiring the rights to the film, which received the Touchstone Pictures label due to its mature subject matter.
• Dawson Casting: The age of children playing young Dalai Lama is roughtly what it should be. Except eventually visibly adult Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong takes over for the rest of the movie (even gets credited as "Dalai Lama (Adult)"), starting his role when Dalai Lama was thirteen. To make the transition more jaring, a year passes in-story and a pre-teen boy is suddenly replaced by a grown-up man.
• Fake Nationality: Due to being portrayed in desert gear and googles, the extras playing Chinese troops weren't even Asian. This is most obvious when they are about to enter Lhasa around halfway point of the film, marching right toward the camera.
• One-Book Author: Pretty much everyone in the cast, as they were amateurs.
• Screwed by the Network: In a rather disturbing example, Disney chose to severely limit the availability of the film because it angered the Chinese government, and resulted in the studio being banned from releasing films in the country for five years. Michael Eisner, Disney's CEO at the time, apologized to the Chinese government and reportedly went so far as to say, "The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it." It's been speculated that the reason it isn't available for streaming on Hulu and/or Disney+ is because they don't want to risk offending China; and the film itself wasn't released on Blu-ray until 2018, and even then only in a sub-licensed version through Kino-Lorber.

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