Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph With the Hidden Power of Story by Peter Guber

Author:Peter Guber
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Performing Arts, Management, Storytelling, Success in Business, Motivational, Business Communication, General, Leadership, Creative Ability in Business, Entrepreneurship, Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780307587954
Publisher: Crown Business
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

LISTENER AS HERO

“I am not your hero.” This was news to me. I was talking to the Dalai Lama, the highest and most holy of all Tibetan Buddhist leaders and the greatest of all political heroes to hundreds of thousands of Tibetans, both inside Tibet and in exile. But what the Dalai Lama meant was that he was not the hero of the particular story I needed to tell.

The problem we faced back in 1996 was the Chinese government’s condemnation of our film-in-development Seven Years in Tibet. One of the first co-ventures between my company Mandalay and Sony, this film paid tribute to the courage and humanity of the Tibetan people through the true story of Heinrich Harrer, who met His Holiness as a young boy during World War II and served as his teacher up through the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950. Even before we started principal photography, Chinese officialdom had gotten wind of our plan to show the brutality of China’s invasion while paying homage to their enemy, His Holiness, and they were hopping mad.

The Chinese government had no direct leverage over us. Our director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, who previously had made Quest for Fire and The Name of the Rose, had already made a stealth mission into Tibet to capture the documentary footage he needed. We were planning to shoot the rest of the film in India, where the Dalai Lama lived and headed his government in exile and where we had access to plenty of Tibetan actors and extras. We had already spent millions of dollars on our sets there and had Brad Pitt committed to star as Harrer. The Chinese waited till the last minute before we started photography to pressure the Indian government to shut us down, thinking that would prevent the picture from ever getting made.

Despite our best lobbying efforts, the Indian government buckled, first refusing to license the film for production, then insisting we leave the country. To make matters worse, Martin Scorsese was hard on our heels with his film Kundun, a biopic about His Holiness. In fifty years there had never been a film about the Dalai Lama, and suddenly there were two. Knowing that Scorsese would be safe shooting his picture in Morocco, we decided to find a similar location—well away from China’s sphere of influence. We doubled down our bet and moved our production of the film to Argentina.

But although we were still several months ahead of Scorsese, we couldn’t seem to shake the Chinese. Buoyed by their ability to pummel India into submission, they now took aim at Sony Entertainment’s parent company, the electronics giant Sony Corporation. China threatened that, regardless of where we made the film, they would pull the plug on Sony’s electronics business in China if Sony distributed Seven Years in Tibet. This was when I asked the Dalai Lama to be our hero.

I’d had the good fortune to be with His Holiness on a number of occasions, and I thought that if he

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