The High Price of Redemption : ‘Tibet’ was a welcome challenge for director Jean-Jacques Annaud.

There must be easier ways to make a movie about spiritual awakening.

In bringing “Seven Years in Tibet” to the screen, French director Jean-Jacques Annaud and his staff spent six months and about $1 million researching Tibet and scouting locations, only to have the Chinese government, unhappy that the film is critical of its occupation of Tibet, apply muscle to the government of India to prevent him from shooting there.

Annaud acquired surreptitiously shot footage of Tibet from a documentarian he declines to name, but the global chess match continued, he says--the Chinese also tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade officials in Argentina to ban his production there. Using a computer, he composed images from footage photographed on three continents.

And, for good measure, he named and photographed yaks (right profile, left profile and a muzzle print) for their passports to gain entry into heretofore yak-free Argentina.

“It’s so bizarre that I have to do those things in order to make the movie I want about personal redemption,” Annaud, 54, says bemusedly but, really, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

After all, this is the guy who had an entire primitive language created for his caveman tone-poem, “Quest for Fire,” and survived an angry attack by his ursine star while making “The Bear.” He pored through 300 books of Roman art for “The Name of the Rose” and battled (and only sort of lost) the ratings board over an initial NC-17 rating for his cross-cultural under-age romance “The Lover.” Annaud would be surprised if making one of his films wasn’t a daunting task.

And in case “Seven Years in Tibet” needed more controversy and international intrigue, it was provided by the recent report that former Austrian mountain climber Heinrich Harrer, the film’s protagonist, now 86, had been a member of the Nazi Party.

“Seven Years in Tibet,” which opened last week, is, typically for Annaud, a visually spectacular epic concerning Harrer’s ill-fated attempt to ascend the Himalayas, his internment in a British prison camp during World War II and his escape into Tibet, where, as a rare Westerner allowed in the sacred village of Lhasa, he became a most unlikely friend and confidant to the young Dalai Lama.

It’s based on Harrer’s best-selling memoir, which somehow neglected to mention his Nazi ties.

But Annaud says he saw through Harrer from the beginning.

“I knew he was lying. I knew something didn’t fit together in Harrer’s account,” Annaud says in his office on the Sony lot, where the bookcases are filled with books and videotapes about and Annaud’s own photos of Tibet.

To prove his point, Annaud--whose shock of unruly white hair and ebullient manner don’t quite mask his more ruminative side--pulls out early storyboards for the film depicting the character swathed in swastikas.

“It was strange that I was bringing in something that might confuse the issue,” Annaud points out. “I’m French; my childhood was all French resistance against Nazis, so I have a sort of nose for people who had been connected with this. I had to use swastikas [in the film]; for me, there was no doubt. I just couldn’t say it [outright] because there was no proof.

“The man had to have a connection that he was not talking about,” he continues.

“I felt there was a great secret in this book, and when I read it, I said, ‘How can you write 500 pages about seven years of your life and never, ever give a hint of what goes through your heart?’ He didn’t say a thing about anyone in his family, never mentioned anything about the war, didn’t say anything about his ideology. So I thought, ‘If he doesn’t mention it, it’s because there’s a problem.’ ”

Annaud met Harrer briefly after the script had been written but before a German magazine unearthed the evidence of his Nazi past. Annaud confessed that the movie would not be a flattering portrait initially, because it was about how Harrer changed.

“And he said, ‘Ah, that’s fine, because Tibet transformed me, and I even wrote it in my book,’ ” Annaud recalls. “He said, ‘There is one line--”Tibet transformed me.” ’ And I said, ‘That one line in your book is two hours of my movie.’ ”

(A couple of lines of dialogue were added to the finished film referring to Harrer’s past.)

Annaud’s films are noteworthy,

in addition to their visual splendor, for their obsessive attention to detail.

“I always warn my financiers that I am expensive in pre-production but less expensive in production because I know what I want,” he says.

Prowling the narrow roads of Lhasa as it was being turned into a tourist trap by the Chinese government--Annaud disgustedly produces a photo he took of a MIG fighter sitting in a plaza outside the Potala, the majestic temple that once housed the Dalai Lama--the director took meticulous note of what he encountered.

The cracked facades of the aging edifices, the panoply of colors, the severe hum of the spinning prayer wheels, the thick, harsh fabrics, the weary, sallow faces of the visiting pilgrims, the musty scent of the ubiquitous yak dung and heady aroma of Buddhist incense were all then painstakingly re-created in the Argentina sets.

“I really love looking at each costume, looking at the brocade that has been used. I have a sort of appetite for texture, for faces, for texture of the skin. It’s a sort of personal pleasure. That helps me to put my characters in a world that appears to be more real, or has a better feeling of reality.

“It’s almost like an anthropological personal taste, that I like to re-create those details. It’s very tactile, very primitive. It may not be essential, but I would feel embarrassed to put my characters in a surrounding that did not confer the right elements for the right psychology.”

Robert Fraisse, Annaud’s cinematographer on his last three films (and an Oscar nominee for “The Lover”), says of Annaud: “He has a very good eye; he’s much more visual than other directors I’ve worked with. He’s so concerned with the final result. He goes much deeper than other directors. I’ve never met a director so involved with the final look of a movie.”

Fraisse says his collaborator’s perfectionist streak is all-encompassing. “He’s incredibly demanding, you can’t imagine,” Fraisse says by phone from his Paris home. “He’s really, really stubborn. Even he says, ‘I’m stubborn as a donkey.’

“Producers will say, ‘Ah, he’s incorrigible.’ But when he wants something, he gets it, no matter how difficult it is. He will do anything necessary to put the camera in the best position. Sometimes that’s very, very difficult. He’s demanding and makes you demanding as well, but he’s also demanding of himself.

“But he always gets what he wants with charm. I’ve never seen him nervous, I never saw him angry. He’s always smiling. If something goes wrong, he just jokes.”

All of Annaud’s films are in some way about the inevitable clash between nature and civilization. This fascination stems from the profound experience he had visiting Africa in the mid-’60s, while making educational films during his mandatory stint in the French military.

“I was the typical, arrogant little Frenchman. You know the caricature of the Frenchman? I was that one,” Annaud admits.

“I wanted to see myself as an intellectual. And then when I opened the door on this DC-3, and I saw where I was going to spend a year of my life, instead of hating it, I just adored it. Something was right in Africa. You know, the presence of nature. Man was not controlling things, and the brain was not controlling life. That was such a shock, and I became very, very grateful to Africa because it opened my heart, it transformed me. I came back a different person.” Annaud visits Africa almost annually to this day.

Like many young directors today, Annaud started out shooting commercials; unlike many young directors today, he’s not proud of the fact.

“It got to the point that I had a horrible nervous breakdown for two years,” he recalls, his face still reflecting the pain of the memory. “I felt sick, I couldn’t stand up anymore. But I knew I was not old enough to have control of a movie. So I started doing humble commercials because it was a way for me to learn. I had nothing to do with those yogurts, nothing to do with those tires or cars or cigarettes. I was a whore.”

He returned to Africa for his first film, “Black and White in Color,” which satirized French colonialists on the Ivory Coast and won the best foreign film Oscar. That film, which Annaud made in a willfully anti-slick style as a reaction to his commercial work, seems positively primitive today, nothing like his more recent work, which is polished to a fine sheen.

But Annaud warns that style and technology go only so far. Even when responsible for the contents of 273 trucks loaded with equipment, props and costumes in a remote territory, as he was on this shoot, a filmmaker must never lose sight of his story.

“Never, never forget why you’re here, what it is you want to say, what the movie’s about; if you get too bogged down in the details, you’re not a good director,” says one of the world’s most detail-oriented directors. “Every detail has to be put in the right order toward the same goal; twist the details to help tell your story. If you’re just interested for the sake of details, you’re lost; you’re not the director anymore, you’re directed by the details.”