The Making of Life of Pi Read online

  Artist unknown. Untitled. (Shiva’s family). 1730. India.

  For Magee, the part of the story that occurs in India was “by far the hardest in the film” to write due to the sheer amount of religious and cultural references that were unfamiliar to him.

  And so came the process of research: what Lee wanted at this early stage of the film’s development were background facts and ideas, of course, but also, perhaps most of all, connections. The research for Life of Pi grew out of the book and script, and discussions with Lee and Magee; at this early stage, the process was free-associative and intuitive. Resources included books on storytelling, comparative religious studies into the nature of faith, accounts of the three major religions mentioned in the novel, Indian folktales, temple design and iconography, rituals, South Indian classical music and dance, the history of Pondicherry and French India, comic book versions of Hindu epics, Indian painting (particularly composite paintings of elephants made up of other animals, another visual motif that made its way into the film), photo essays on devotional practices and domestic ritual art such as kolams, and so on. Perhaps the greatest discovery of the research period was Louis Malle’s Phantom India, an intensely personal, seven-part documentary that the director shot over the course of four months in 1968, which provided a particularly rich mine of images and impressions.

  Composite elephant design: Joanna Bush.

  A pastiche of a traditional Indian composite elephant painting in the form of a mural for Pi’s father’s zoo.

  Photograph: David Magee.

  Students of Bharatanatyam practice at the Kalakshetra Foundation in Chennai.

  Some of the research left a visual trace on Life of Pi’s surface, some of it became part of the film’s subconscious, and a lot of it was simply read, duly noted, and put aside—which is how it should be, for there was a screenplay to finish and a film to make.

  lee’s maiden voyage: a passage to south india

  In June 2009, the director, writer, and researcher flew to India for a three-week scouting trip. The itinerary included the two main Life of Pi locations, Pondicherry and Munnar, as well as a number of zoos, temples, schools, and other locations that were mentioned in the novel. Though Lee would go on three more trips to India before shooting the actual India portion of the film, he found many of the main locations in the course of his first visit, and the film essentially began to take a concrete shape in his mind, right down to specific shots.

  the rakhi thread

  In Mumbai, small details popped up almost immediately that would later find their places in the film’s visual texture. A day after their arrival, the travelers were accosted outside the first temple that they visited by a smiling sadhu, a wandering holy man who, for a few rupees, tied a rakhi, a sacred red thread, around their wrists. Worn over a long period of time, the threads became increasingly frayed and faded—an effect that would later be replicated in the rakhi on Pi’s wrist as an image of time passing and his ever more tenuous connection to the past.

  the dancers

  After Mumbai, Lee headed down to Chennai (Madras) in the southern state of Tamil Nadu to visit the Kalakshetra Foundation, an academy where the traditional Bharatanatyam style of dance and South Indian classical music are taught. Though dance is not an element in the novel, Lee had been struck by a dance-class sequence from Kalakshetra in Louis Malle’s documentary Phantom India and wondered if there was a place for performing arts in the film.

  Wading through stifling 105-degree heat, one caught glimpses of different classes being taught in small, open-air bungalows. Beginners sweated through basic steps while more advanced students moved fluidly through long pieces using facial expressions and hastas, or hand gestures, to evoke emotions and to tell stories. The dry stamping of bare feet on tile and the sharp rap of the dance teacher marking out rhythm on a wooden block gave way to a swell of voices farther along: a singing teacher leading his students, his hands going up and down with the rise and fall of the vocal line. The vibrating drone of the tanpura, a long-necked lute, was the thread that seemed to connect the different classes on some deeper spiritual level, a reminder that the original purpose of Bharatanatyam dancing and Indian classical music was to pay homage to the gods.

  Photograph: David Magee.

  Vishnu sleeping on a bed of snakes between cycles of creation. This is a fragment of a statue on the grounds of the Kalakshetra Foundation.

  Statues were scattered here and there among the buildings and trees, including a small statue of Ananta Vishnu, the great god asleep on a canopy of snakes floating on the cosmic ocean between the end of one cycle of creation and the beginning of the next. This deity would appear as the idol at the center of the temple tank ceremony sequence, the great set-piece of the film’s first act.

  In the end, Lee found a place for traditional dance and South Indian music in the film: the teenage Pi falls in love with a Bharatanatyam dancer, Anandi (Shravanthi Sainath). Though this love interest does not occur in the novel, Lee found it important to include it to more strongly emphasize how much Pi loses when he and his family set off to sea: not just the past of his childhood, but his future as well.

  hari the hyena

  Chennai was also the site of the Arignar Anna Zoological Park, the first of several zoos that were visited to look for material for the scenes set in the zoo where Pi grows up. There were hand-painted signs everywhere, displaying information about the animals and delivering warnings against teasing them.

  Of all the Chennai zoo’s denizens, an intelligent-looking hyena named Hari was the animal that most appealed to Lee, who watched closely as the creature loped around his enclosure, looking intensely restless and aware.

  Photograph: David Magee.

  Hari, a spotted hyena at the Chennai zoo, bristles with curiosity at a visiting film director.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  DO NOT FEED ME, DO NOT SHOUT AT ME: INDIAN ZOO SIGNS

  One of the most charming features of many Indian zoos is the profusion of signs delivering stern, even hectoring, warnings atop hand-drawn illustrations of visitors teasing animals, then being led away, injured, by grinning zookeepers. Inspired by the dozens of signs collected during various scouting trips, the film’s art department created a cheerful, crude, fictional version for Santosh Patel’s zoo.

  Photograph: Jean-Christophe Castelli.

  Photograph: Jean-Christophe Castelli.

  Photograph: Jean-Christophe Castelli.

  Photograph: Jean-Christophe Castelli.

  Photograph: Jean-Christophe Castelli.

  Screenwriter David Magee, associate producer Jean-Christophe Castelli, director Ang Lee, and scout Rakesh Mehra with the towering gates of Madurai’s Meenakshi Sundareswarar Temple in the background.

  At one point he suddenly stopped, the fur on his back bristling into a kind of a Mohawk, then slunk into a wading pool to cool off. For Lee, these movements—the loping, the slinking—brought to life the hyena that shares Pi’s boat for a time, and that, in the movie, is named Hari, in honor of his distant cousin at the Chennai zoo.

  It was also there, in the back of the tiger and hyena exhibits, that Lee first saw the zookeepers’ modest quarters, hard by the feeding cages with their stark iron bars and concrete gutters. Drawn from a number of different zoos, these spaces would be reproduced by the art department for the film.

  the great temple

  In keeping with Life of Pi’s dual emphasis on zoology and religion, the group also visited a number of temples. This is where Lee was able to soak up some of the rich, heady atmosphere, at once sensual and spiritual, that made the young Pi so receptive to all things religious. Among the most spectacular of the temples visited was the Meenakshi Sundareswarar Temple in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, with its enormous gopuram, or gate towers, covered with countless carvings of gods, goddesses, and demons, in dozens of poses, all painted in garish Technicolor.

  Panorama: Jean-Christophe Castelli.

  Tea plant, Munnar.

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nbsp; Every surface of the temple told a story, from the guardian gods of the outside summits to the dark hall of one thousand carved pillars, which extended in every direction, giving a visitor the sense of being in the midst of an endless narrative that had neither a beginning nor an end. The Hindu temple seemed to embrace it all, from the deepest mystery to the simplest good luck rituals. Moving toward the latter end of the spectrum, the party bought coconuts and smashed them against the slick, sticky floor of the temple: a ritual that paid homage to Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god of beginnings and the remover of obstacles. For a few more rupees, David Magee received a blessing from the temple elephant, the animal’s trunk touching his forehead.

  the tea plants

  Although the main sights had been clearly mapped out, the scouting trip also yielded a trove of small, unexpected discoveries. Lee visited the tea estates of Munnar, Kerala, because they are a major setting in the film—the backdrop for the church where young Pi discovers Christianity. The lush, green hillsides offered view after spectacular view, but as he walked along a road winding through the Madupatty Estate, the director noticed something else: the undersides of the tea plants, with their beautiful, gnarled, white trunks and roots. Fascinated, Lee asked Magee to take photo after photo, getting closer and closer until the underside of the small shrubs took on a microcosmic quality—this imagery influenced Lee’s vision of the design of the mysterious, dreamlike island in the middle of the sea where Pi lands toward the end of his journey.

  the great banyan

  Even more important for the island sequence were the banyan trees, which Lee was already acquainted with, having grown up in tropical Taiwan. A member of the fig family, banyans start off as epiphytes, growing up around a host, and then laterally outward, sending down roots from their branches and repeating the process over and over until a single specimen transmutes into a tangled forest. The importance of the banyan in Indian culture and mythology, not to mention the tree’s strange and marvelous appearance, struck Lee, and a number of banyans were put on the itinerary.

  Photograph: David Magee.

  Big Banyan Tree, Ramohalli, near Bangalore, is a park unto itself.

  The most spectacular tree was in Ramohalli, near Bangalore, a particularly elaborate specimen dubbed (for obvious but good reasons) “Big Banyan Tree” by the locals. More than four hundred years old and spreading across four acres, the venerable tree covers so much ground that it is impossible to tell where it originally sprouted. Though its bark is thoroughly gouged with graffiti (of the “Rajiv ♥ Priya” sort), there remains something particularly uncanny about the tree, which seems like a living metaphor for eternal life, continuously renewing itself even as everything else around it flickers and vanishes.

  Anonymous. Landscape with Huge Banyan Tree Beside a River. Watercolor. 1825. Copyright © The British Library Board, all rights reserved, Add.Or.2525.

  Artist unknown. Landscape with Huge Banyan Tree Beside a River. Circa 1825. India.

  THE BANYAN TAKES ROOT

  The banyan tree is one of the most sacred trees in a culture full of sacred trees and rich in mythology. In the Mahabharata, for example, an immortal sage named Markandeya tells how he survived the great fire and flood of universal destruction and found himself adrift, terrified, in a dark and boundless cosmic ocean. Then one day, he saw an enormous banyan tree emerging from the waters; on the spreading branch of the tree sat a radiant child—the great god Vishnu in infant form—who offered a safe haven to the weary old man. The child opened his mouth, which contained the entire universe and every creature in it that had perished from the previous cycle and would arise again in the creation to come, and Markandeya was transported inside his body.

  In somewhat the same fashion as the real-life tree, the image of the banyan branched out and took root across the film, from the one outside the marketplace where the adolescent Pi awkwardly approaches Anandi after the dance lesson in the beginning of the film to the mysterious island in the end, whose appearance and symbolic overtones evoke Vishnu’s resting place in the cosmic ocean. (And part of the island sequence would be filmed on an actual banyan tree in Taiwan.)

  Unknown artist. Vision of the Sage Markandeya. India. c. 1775–1800. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 11 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches. Mat: 11 3/8 x 9 3/16 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: purchased with the John T. Morris Fund, 1955.

  Artist unknown. The Vision of the Sage Markandeya. 1775–1800. Himachal Pradesh, India.

  Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.

  Suraj Sharma, surrounded by the banyan tree that served as a set for the island.

  3-D sketches: Brian Gardner.

  Sketches comparing 2-D and 3-D close-ups by stereographer Brian Gardner.

  an extra dimension: the revelation of 3-d

  Another aspect of the film’s development that Lee needed to contend with was the fact that it would be shot in 3-D—a first for the director. Lee had decided to shoot in 3-D long before realizing all the implications of the new technology, and the process was a continual learning curve that would carry him on a long journey all the way through production and post-production. “We’re all trained to be 2-D filmmakers,” says Lee. “It’s very hard to get rid of 2-D thinking.” And 3-D thinking proved to be an elusive goal as well.

  Discussions of 3-D can get very technical, but in considering audience perception, there are two main effects that can be manipulated by the filmmakers. The first effect is depth, which depends on the distance between the left and right cameras. In live-action film, this is determined in the course of shooting: the wider the distance between the cameras, the deeper the image appears. “You can have sort of a higher setting for 3-D,” cinematographer Claudio Miranda (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) explains. “It can give you a little bit more of a charged sense, a bit more energy. Or you could play it subdued”—that is, reducing the separation between the cameras, which leads to a flatter image. In the years surrounding the making of Life of Pi, Lee noticed a general shift in 3-D films from a more conservative use of depth toward going “way big”—that is, deep shots, with plenty of in-front-of-the screen convergence.

  Convergence, the second main effect, has to do with where the eyes locate something in space. In real life, this helps to determine how close or distant something feels; in 3-D space, it has to do with where an object is perceived to be in relation to the screen. In fact, as a viewer, it’s easy to forget that something kind of remarkable happens every time the lights go down and you slip on those chunky plastic glasses: suddenly, a big gaping hole in the wall of the theater opens up, and instead of a screen, it feels as if you are facing a window. Things that are “behind” the window tend to draw the viewer out, while things in front of the window feel as if they are in the viewer’s personal space. The latter is traditionally considered a more “intense” mode, though it need not be, in Lee’s opinion.

  3-D sketches: Brian Gardner.

  Exploring multi-imagery: theoretical sketches by Gardner.

  Lee brought in stereographer Brian Gardner, whose track record overseeing 3-D on the animated Coraline, combined with his quirky, hyper-articulate views on the subject, engaged the director and helped to spur his thinking about the unfamiliar medium. Talking about 3-D in development, Lee sounds almost like an artist who is trying to grasp the physical essence of a material he has not worked with before. “I went through stages,” he says, “like, is it like sculpture? Not quite.” For a while, 3-D as theater was the dominant model in the director’s mind: the cinematic space as a kind of proscenium, with a discrete series of planes, corresponding to stage flats in which different things could be taking place and offering multiple visual possibilities for each audience member depending on where his or her attention was focused.

  Ultimately, the key lay not in adapting any one approach to 3-D but rather in tailoring it to specific moments in the film. In Life of Pi, Lee tried to use 3-D for expressive and dramatic purposes, rather than simply as a way of heightenin
g the experience or making it more immersive. “I think 3-D should be manipulated, like any other aspect of film language,” he says. If the dial is on eleven all the time, you lose the 3-D effect to the general tendency for the eye to become habituated—not to mention losing a powerful dramatic tool, which involves keeping the effect minimal for a while and then simply cranking it back up at the right moment, “so that when that moment hits, it will be twice as big. You will have adapted for the shallow and forgotten about the 3-D, and all of a sudden—Bam!—there it is,” stereographer Gardner says.

  Two different examples of how 3-D can be modulated come in quick succession at the beginning of the Tsimtsum sequence. The first is the opening long shot of the Tsimtsum plowing through the stormy waters (entirely computer-generated), which is very deep, because when things like landscapes are seen from a distance, even in person with your own eyes, the sense of depth tends to be lost. “Just to get any depth at all in a shot like this, you have to go really wide,” says Lee’s longtime editor Tim Squyres. Cut to the next shot: a close-up of the face of Pi asleep fills the screen. An ominous rumble wakes him up, and “that’s a very deep shot,” the editor continues—almost unnaturally deep for a close-up of a face in a tight space, where the expectation would be to go relatively shallow. By going against expectations and making the shot of Pi’s sleeping face feel, if anything, deeper than the previous long shot of the Tsimtsum, Lee establishes a link between the fate of the ship and of the boy: “It shows a bad omen,” he says. “It’s to kick-start the story.”