The Making of Life of Pi Read online

  We had a wonderful three weeks in Pondicherry and Munnar, working with a terrific Indian crew, and two lovely days in Montreal at the end. But the bulk of the pre-production and production, more than 80 percent, took place in an abandoned airport in Taichung, Taiwan’s third-largest city, along with brief side trips to the Taipei Zoo and the beaches of Kenting.

  There was something truly special about this production. More than a hundred crew members from different countries came to Taiwan, many with their families, and over time adapted to Taiwanese life, even as the large local Taiwanese crew was learning the ropes of big-budget filmmaking and doing an amazing job. Language was no barrier as everyone worked together and shared meals in what used to be the airport check-in area. The set felt like a utopia of filmmakers.

  I cannot overstate the part that Taiwan played in the making of Life of Pi: We received generous support from the General Information Office; Taichung gave us the gift of the Taichung airport and the wave tank; Pintung county—where I was born—gave us locations; the Taipei Zoo and Leofoo Village Theme Park gave us permission to film their animals. From the largest shipbuilders in the country to local industries and neighborhood vendors, people all became excited by the idea of making this impossibly big film in this small country of ours. Such an infusion of positive energy turned our production into a shared dream. The conditions that we created, with Fox’s firm support, were truly special. Life of Pi was an adventurous and enriching experience for all of us, as we got to work in flexible and innovative ways, not bound by business as usual, to create something unique.

  Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.

  The end of the journey: director and actor in Kenting, Taiwan, where Pi’s landing was filmed.

  Storytelling and faith are the two elements that kept this project afloat. Our journey is over. Like Pi with Richard Parker, we finally reached the other shore with our film. Now we come to the moment when we take a last look at our work and then let it leap into the world, hoping that it will generate many more stories in the hearts and minds of those who see it.

  —Ang Lee

  1 charting the course: development

  Conceptual sketch: Alexis Rockman (watercolor and ink on paper).

  Boy with tiger, adrift. To suggest the changeable ocean atmosphere, artist Alexis Rockman, who helped create the vision for the island set, poured pigments onto paper and let them bloom.

  Director Ang Lee and screenwriter David Magee came together over Life of Pi with both a shared sense of excitement about the story and skepticism that it could ever be successfully made into a film.

  When Magee first picked up Yann Martel’s novel, it was just for pleasure, but “by the end,” he says, “I was in love with it.” The screenwriter’s inner adapter, which story-edits even his vacation reading, couldn’t help making notes: “I didn’t see how you could translate this to film. I really didn’t.” On the one hand, the novel grappled with huge ideas: life, death, God, the relationship between man and animal, a boy coming of age, and faith. On the other, the actual imagery was simple: after a colorful beginning in India, the reader is basically left following a tale involving only a boy, a tiger, and a boat.

  How could a story so visually spare capture—and keep—a film audience’s attention for a full two hours?

  For Ang Lee (who, like Magee, first read the book for pleasure), Life of Pi was a great adventure, but at the heart of the novel, the thing that made it so compelling to so many readers, was the possibility of multiple meanings—which is not the kind of thing that big-budget blockbusters are normally made of.

  But as challenging as the material was, it already had a passionate advocate in producer Gil Netter (The Blind Side). “I had never read anything like it,” says Netter. The element of faith resonated for him, but ultimately he was moved by what he describes as “a gut thing—I was the nerdy kid who went to movies, and it’s the feeling you get in a movie theatre that you can’t get anywhere else. It’s something I always look for.” In 2002, Netter brought the book to Elizabeth Gabler, president, Fox 2000 Pictures. The studio acquired the rights, and Life of Pi passed through a number of incarnations before landing on Lee’s desk.

  When Gabler first approached Lee to do Life of Pi in 2008, the director was surprised by the studio’s seeming willingness to respect the novel’s ambiguous ending, which offers the possibility of a second story (the one without the animals that Pi tells at the end). Intrigued, Lee asked Tom Rothman, chairman and CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment, what kind of film the studio saw Life of Pi as. “A family movie,” was Rothman’s reply. When Lee asked Rothman why he thought the story was a family movie, Rothman countered by asking Lee what happened after he read it.

  James Ricalton. Famous “Man Eater” at Calcutta Zoo. Photographic print. 1903. Copyright © The British Library Board, all rights reserved, photo 181/(50).

  The first 3-D tiger? A 1903 stereoscopic print by James Ricalton of the “famous ‘man-eater’ at the Calcutta Zoo—devoured 200 men, women, and children before capture.”

  “The whole family read it,” Lee answered, for he had passed the novel on to his wife and two sons.

  “There you go,” Rothman said.

  With this conversation, the two men touched upon Life of Pi’s unique potential as a movie: a thrilling adventure that could appeal to a wide range of viewers, a story that parents could share with their children, and a film that provoked thought and discussion.

  learning to adapt: david magee’s story

  High up on Lee’s list of writers was David Magee, whose work had impressed Gabler: “He did a fantastic adaptation [for Finding Neverland]. He’s got a really great child’s voice, but he’s got a really good sense of drama.”

  Magee has had an unusual career path for a screenwriter. A graduate of the University of Illinois (where he studied theater around the same time as Lee did), he started out as an actor with, as he puts it, “just enough success to be constantly poor.” To supplement his income, he began narrating audio books. One day, he had enough: “I said, ‘this is a terrible abridgement of this book. It doesn’t make sense. The characters are suddenly appearing in the scene when they weren’t there before. It’s awful. I mean, I could do better than this.’ And the person in charge said, ‘Well, do you want to try?’” Magee did, and a parallel career was born: starving actor by day, ruthless editor by night, wielding his red pencil with surgical precision to get to the essence of the material.

  Five years and more than eighty audio books later, Magee emerged a different person: a writer. Magee’s very first screenplay, Finding Neverland, about the adventures of Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie, was eventually made into the movie starring Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet, which earned him nominations for both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe in 2004.

  me and mr. magee: two storytellers talk about storytelling

  Sometime in early 2009, Magee’s agent said that Lee wanted to make the film, and he wanted Magee to write the screenplay. Magee agreed because he “figured if [Lee] had some insight into it, some way, I was totally in.” Lee and Magee met for a Japanese dinner to discuss their shared view of the novel’s overarching theme: they both felt it was about “the different ways in which stories help us through our lives, whether they’re religious stories or, quite literally, the act of storytelling itself.”

  For Lee, the circumstance of the story’s telling, the fact that Life of Pi was an exchange between two people, was a fundamental part of what drove the story. “It became important to us that we really think about what it was that Pi was trying to relate to the writer,” says Magee, “how he was trying to adapt his story to help this soul, you know? Because the same story might be told differently to a different person.” So the writer grew into an on-screen character. The film would be framed by the writer’s visit to the older Pi.

  In the film, it is the writer, not the Japanese investigators depicted in the novel, who has to make a leap of faith. For Lee and Magee, whose take differs s
lightly from that of author Yann Martel, this leap doesn’t necessarily land the listener in a religious place. Pi’s mamaji, or “honorary uncle,” sends the writer to speak with Pi in his Montreal home, implying that the story he will hear will change his world view. That’s a great claim to make, one that the writer, and the audience, will have to decide for themselves. In fact, the ultimate significance of Pi’s story may be not so much in the content but in the fact that it places the responsibility for its ultimate meaning in the hands of the listener. As far as David Magee is concerned, Life of Pi is really about the possibility of finding meaning through the structure that telling stories imposes upon the chaos of life. It is choosing the better of Pi’s two stories in the end that is life-changing—not just a matter of taste—for the writer. Having come to Pi as a creatively barren and therefore lost soul, a renewed belief in the transformative power of stories may be precisely the kind of faith he needs.

  Storyboards: Haan Lee.

  Sketches from the film’s storyboards illustrate the scene in which Pi’s father hurries to the side of his wife, about to give birth to their son Pi, while an unwary monitor lizard rushes to his doom.

  So Lee and Magee agreed: the idea of storytelling would frame the screenplay and inform the audience’s interpretation of the story. As for the story itself, namely, the long stretches where the only elements on screen would be a boy and a tiger in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Magee admits that at the time of their dinner, they had no idea how to bring that part of the book to life. Somewhat adrift, but at least in the same boat, the writer and director began slowly setting their course.

  lost and found in india: looking for the voice

  During the next few months, between long discussions with Lee and time spent alone in front of his computer, Magee struggled to find the right voice and tone for the screenplay. The book, after all, ranged in content from philosophical musings on religion and zoology to the slapstick silliness of a young schoolboy. How to encompass both in one screenplay? It wasn’t until late June 2009, during a trip to South India that Magee, Lee, and the researcher took to gather ideas and images for shooting locations, that the screenwriter found the answer. He was sitting in the back of a van, bouncing along a dusty road in Tamil Nadu, struggling to keep his laptop from sliding off his sweaty knees, when Lee told him that Life of Pi was like a children’s story. Lee said, “It’s got to have that wonder and adventure and fun. . . .” Hearing that, Magee thought of the novel’s zoo and imagined Pi telling the story to kids about its wonders. “And I immediately got who that character was, who could tell the story. When Ang said that, I came up with that herpetologist line in the script.”

  WRITER

  You were raised in a zoo?

  ADULT PI

  Born and raised—in Pondicherry, in what was the French part of India. My father Santosh Patel owned the zoo, and I was delivered on short notice by a herpetologist who was there to check on the Bengal Monitor Lizard.

  EXT. PONDICHERRY ZOO, INDIA, 1961—DAY

  There’s a flurry of activity in the animal clinic behind the lizard. ZOO WORKERS gather in the doorway, talking excitedly. No one notices the lizard.

  The zoo owner (FATHER—late 20s) hurries down the path as quickly as his heavy leg brace will allow. One of his WORKERS holds a large umbrella over father as he carries a bundle of sheets, towels, a pillow into the animal clinic. A moment later, the workers erupt in cheers and shouts of congratulations.

  ADULT PI (V.O.)

  Mother and I were both healthy,

  The lizard crawls away.

  ADULT PI (V.O.)

  but the poor lizard escaped and was trampled by a frightened cassowary. The way of karma; the way of God.

  Comic book panels: Andrea Dopaso.

  “That all came out in that moment,” Magee continues, talking about how he quickly sketched the scene out right then and there, while the van wove in and out of the slower rural traffic of cows, carts, and pedestrians. “That’s when I finally understood what the tone should be,” Magee recalls: “charming and light, like an old-fashioned fable, while carrying a deeper, more serious message that would come out as the story progressed.” This approach “would allow you to get philosophical without sounding too heavy.”

  This tone of lighthearted awe continues throughout the account of Pi’s childhood as five-year-old Pi (Gautam Belur) listens to the Hindu myths told by his mother, Gita Patel (played by the actress Tabassum Hasmi, known as Tabu, of The Namesake). Pi is captivated by his mother’s bedtime story of how Yashoda, the nursemaid of baby Krishna, forced the infant’s mouth open, thinking he had eaten dirt, and instead, saw “the whole complete entire universe stretching out before her.”

  Comic book panels: Andrea Dopaso.

  Nursemaid Yashoda glimpses the entire universe in baby Krishna’s mouth, in artwork created for the film by Andrea Dopaso, in the style of popular Hindu comic books of the 1970s.

  The all-embracing spirituality of this idealized childhood Hinduism is the soil in which the seeds of curiosity about other religions (Christianity, Islam) take root and grow in Pi, who is very much his mother’s child at the beginning of the film. However, the paternal asserts its presence in Life of Pi, as it often does in Ang Lee’s films, which have grappled with father figures on and off since his beginnings as a filmmaker.

  Photograph: Phil Bray.

  Twelve-year-old Pi (Ayush Tandon) makes an offering to Richard Parker while his brother, Ravi (Abbas Khaleeli), looks on.

  Photograph: Phil Bray.

  Pi’s mother (Tabu) comforts Pi as his father reveals Richard Parker’s true nature.

  In a crucial scene at the zoo, the twelve-year-old Pi (Ayush Tandon) goes into the forbidden feeding cage area and tries to make friends with a newly arrived tiger named Richard Parker by reaching out with an offering of food in his hands. Pi’s father, the rationalist businessman Santosh Patel (Adil Hussain) reacts with a brutal lesson.

  PI

  Animals have souls. I’ve seen it in their eyes.

  FATHER

  Animals don’t think like we do; people who forget that get themselves killed. THAT TIGER IS NOT YOUR FRIEND. When you look into his eyes, you are seeing your own emotions reflected back at you, nothing more.

  This is a pivotal scene: “Ang constantly referred to the moment when Pi first meets Richard Parker and finds out that this beautiful tiger is actually a meat-eating killer as Pi’s ‘Bar Mitzvah’ moment: the moment where Pi loses his innocence and suddenly sees the harsh side of the jungle,” says Magee. Or as the adult Pi puts it, “things changed after the day of Appa’s [father’s] lesson. The world lost some of its enchantment.”

  Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.

  School’s out: a heavy rain rolls off the back of an alienated teen Pi (Suraj Sharma).

  “On the surface Life of Pi is about philosophy, which story you believe in, what’s the premise of religion. That’s like the text. But somehow, the subtext came to me very clearly as being about growth. That became kind of the number one thing for me.”

  —ANG LEE

  What in the book was simply a lesson in the dangers of getting too close to zoo animals marks in the film a passage into full-blown adolescence: the screenplay concocts for sixteen-year-old Pi (Suraj Sharma) a fresh masala of existential questioning (reading Dostoevsky and Camus) and hormonal agitation (with a new character created for the film—his love interest, the dancer Anandi). This shift from Martel’s emphasis on religion and zoology to the universal experience of growing up marks perhaps the most significant departure from Martel’s original novel. As Magee explains, “The foundations of Pi’s faith begin a period of adolescent testing just before they leave India behind, so that when he embarks on the journey he has a fundamental reason to choose between alternate narratives himself. His mother’s narrative of faith and his father’s fact and reason-based atheism become the foundation for the two stories.”

  THE SPLIT-PAGE SCRIPT

  Fas
cinated with the theme of storytelling and fearing that it might get lost among all the other plot points of the narrative, Lee decided early on to impose a peculiar format on the script: he decided to split many of the pages down the middle, with the present-time telling of the story running down the left side of the page and the adult Pi’s retelling of the story running down the right. It was a formatting nightmare for Magee, but the strategy paid off. Says Magee: “You start becoming more creative in what’s happening on the two different sides rather than just throwing in an insert shot and saying, ‘Oh, there he is at the zoo now.’”

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  Reading Camus’s The Stranger, Pi ponders the meaning of existence.

  ideas, images, and inspirations

  Unknown artist. Untitled (Shiva’s family). 1730. India. Ink, gouache, and gold on paper, 11 7/8 x 8 5/16 inches. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; gift of Jean and Francis Marshall. Photographed by Benjamin Blackwell.