"I read the script and liked its simplicity, the childlike nature of it, that it wasn't a treatise on Buddhism or a historical epic in the usual sense. It's just too much to know about Tibet and China and their relationship over the past fifteen hundred years. That was all incidental. What you really dealt with was the child and the child becoming a young boy and the boy becoming a young man —his spiritual upbringing, and this incredible responsibility which he inherits and how he deals with it on the basis of nonviolence. And the concept of him escaping and taking Tibetan culture and religion with him to the rest of the world."