The French and eventual English version of the "Mahabharata" took several years for Brook and Carrière to write and bring to the stage. Three years before the film version was made, Peter Brook staged their adaptation in French at a quarry in Avignon, France. This and the eventual filmed version were the first time that the entire (albeit abridged) story of the "Mahabharata" was brought to the stage and made into a feature film. In his book "In Search of the Mahabharata: Notes of Travels in India with Peter Brook 1982-1985", Carrière speaks about the difficulty of adapting the Sanskrit into the European languages, particularly in regards to choosing the right words for certain terms. An example of this is atman, which is translated in the adaptation as "depth of one’s being".