The Making of Life of Pi Read online

  Unknown artist. Composite Man and Tiger. c. 1750–1800. Northern India. Opaque watercolor on paper. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. George Hopper Fitch, 1988.51.12. © Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Used by permission.

  Artist unknown. Composite Man and Tiger. Late Mughal period. 1750–1800. India. The man and the tiger share essential elements, with each containing some part of the other.

  Photograph: Tiffanie Hsu.

  PLAYING PI

  The following is an excerpt from the casting notes for the role of sixteen-year-old Pi.

  REQUIREMENTS

  The actor will need to go through some rigorous training in acting, swimming, drumming, movement, and languages. He will be required to speak Indian-accented English and French, Tamil, and short passages of Koranic Arabic and Sanskrit as well. He should be able to assume the identity of someone who is coming of age in the South India of the 1960s and 1970s, without any hint of contemporary pop culture.

  The final stage was harrowing for Sharma. “I went in nervous as hell,” he says about the audition in front of Lee in Mumbai, “but then Ang started talking. You know how he has this aura about him, right? Everything suddenly goes ‘Shhhhhhhhh’”—Sharma moves his hand gently through the air—“you know, peaceful.”

  Says Womark: “From the second Suraj started reading, Ang was blown away.” Sharma read Pi’s monologue about the other story, the one without the animals, and Lee noticed a raw emotion welling up that was hard to fathom coming from a teenage boy who had never acted, or even wanted to act, before. When Lee and Womark showed the tape of Sharma’s reading to the studio executives, it was, says Womark, “one of those weird moments when everybody just said: ‘We get it.’”

  But Sharma’s parents, both professors, were more worried about their son’s education than the fact that some Hollywood film was now riding on his participation. Kaufman spoke to Shailaja Sharma, mother to mother, about the opportunities and risks, but it was aarati—a traditional Indian ceremony of blessing that is performed at important transitional moments in a person’s life—that ultimately sealed the deal.

  guru and disciple: the aarati ceremony

  Shortly before Sharma was to leave for Taiwan, where filming would begin, his mother asked Avy Kaufman, David Womark, and Ang Lee to gather in Lee’s room at the Taj Hotel in Mumbai. There, she set up a little table with incense, a shawl, small yellow plantains, fragrant betel leaves, and other offerings. “Since Suraj was to embark on a very significant journey with Ang,” Shailaja Sharma explains, “we definitely wanted to perform aarati for Ang and demonstrate our commitment, pride in him, respect, love, and devotion.”

  “Shailaja said prayers, and she lit the incense,” recalls Kaufman. “Then she had this beautiful piece of material—she draped it on Ang with a prayer. Then Suraj had to kneel at Ang’s feet—he touched his feet.”

  Explains Mrs. Sharma: “Suraj’s grandmother had instructed that he should prostrate himself before Ang and accept him as his guru as he was going to be trained and educated in a new discipline by Ang.” The shawl that she presented to Lee was guru dakshina, a kind of symbolic fee to compensate Lee for his guidance of her son. “The ceremony was in our minds very important for Suraj as it would instill in him the right attitude toward Ang and the rest of his crew, and establish the right context for the next nine months of his interactions with Ang. The experience of conducting aarati for Ang gave us a tremendous peace of mind and overwhelming joy.”

  For Lee, who comes from a culture that also reveres the master-pupil relationship, the aarati evoked a complex mix of emotions: “I didn’t want to be this guru,” he says. “But with that ceremony, it got to me: I had to take it seriously. To somebody like me, that’s a heavy burden. You don’t just throw someone at someone’s feet—you have to go through a lot of tests before the teacher takes you, once he takes you. Not only the tests on your talent but on your virtue, on who you are. You select each other, it’s not one way.” Referring to Confucian tradition, he continues, “I have to be the righteous man so Suraj can follow me, not just obey me. I have to deserve him.” Lee smiles at the thought.

  casting richard parker

  The casting of Richard Parker was imbued with a kind of spirituality, too. In search of the tiger, Lee sought out trainer Thierry Le Portier, who has supplied and wrangled animals for films such as Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Two Brothers. Lee visited Le Portier at his farmhouse in southwest France, where the trainer houses his large menagerie of big cats, hyenas, and wolves. After a tour of the animal compounds, Lee sat down with Le Portier and surprised him with two questions: Did he believe in God? And why did he work as an animal trainer? And so began a long discussion that ranged from tiger training and filmmaking to life and death and the meaning of it all.

  Chinese calligraphy: Ang Lee.

  The Chinese character for “king.” Calligraphy by Ang Lee.

  Of course, the search for Richard Parker hadn’t begun with the posing of great philosophical questions, but rather, like any casting process, a simple series of head shots that Le Portier had sent to Lee. One of the tigers immediately caught the director’s eye, a cat with a truly regal bearing who seemed fully to live up to his name: King. In fact, on the feline’s massive forehead were bold black stripes that strongly suggested the Chinese character for “king”— “”—a detail that delighted Lee. Le Portier, who does not speak Chinese, had named the tiger King because he had a commanding attitude, even as a young cub. Regardless, King had Lee at “”: the director had found his feline star. “King was the most beautiful one,” Le Portier says.

  Photograph: Thierry Le Portier.

  King’s “head shot.”

  King was used as Richard Parker in two ways. First, as an actor in the film, he, along with three other tigers (two owned by Le Portier, one by another trainer) performed certain scene-specific actions such as jumping into the water, swatting, charging, growling, and so on. These actions were either cut into the film or used as a basis for a digitally animated version of the tiger. Secondly, King’s overall physique and his markings served as the primary physical model for Richard Parker: even if the tiger on screen is entirely digital, it was modeled and animated to look exactly like King.

  The decision to use both digital animation and extensive live-action footage was made very early in the planning of the film. Basing the computer-generated tiger on a real, live one—and, moreover, cutting back and forth between the two—represented an extraordinary technical challenge, one that the production consciously set for itself. Raising the bar in this manner helped to guarantee an extra degree of realism for a story which hinges, after all, on the question of belief. The same process was applied to the digital hyena, also matched with a real, on-screen specimen provided by Le Portier.

  For Lee, the process of casting King and two other Le Portier tigers, Minh and Themis, as well as a hyena, Vlad, extended to hiring their trainer, who would become an important adviser on the film—something of a guru, in fact, when it came to everything having to do with the role of Richard Parker. Hence Lee’s two questions about believing in God and why Le Portier pursued animal training. To the first, Le Portier, a non-practicing Catholic, said that he did not have any answers. The second question was, in his words, “both easier and much more difficult to answer, because I can come up with many reasons why I train animals, but I don’t think I know the real reason. There’s something very deep about working with animals, especially big cats,” Le Portier continued, “there is also always that little something in the background while you’re working, something that makes you think about life and death and—and for some, I suppose, God. I don’t know. There you have it. This feeling grabbed me early on and was like a revelation.” This is perhaps one of the things that Lee was searching for in his conversation with the tiger trainer—a sense of the spiritual dimension of such a relationship between human and animal.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  Tiger dive:
King comes in for a watery landing.

  Despite their very different backgrounds, the trainer was moved by a feeling of kinship with the director: “Ang told me that I worked with animals, with lions and tigers, for the same reason that he made films. He could give a thousand reasons why, but the explanation would never be complete.”

  What was supposed to be a one-day visit to check out Thierry Le Portier’s menagerie extended into more than three days, during which time Lee went through the script beat by beat with the trainer. “Thierry has that same kind of strange magic that is something very basic,” says David Womark. “When you talk to him, the stories come to life.”

  Le Portier later spent time in Taiwan during pre-production, giving further notes on the script and the previs (he did the same with the digital tiger during post-production). His suggestions, both practical and behavioral, helped to shape Richard Parker’s on-screen behavior and the tiger’s interaction with Pi, but overall, the trainer professed a certain admiration from the beginning for the way in which novel and script portrayed the animals he had been working with for most of his life. “I found [the novel] remarkably well-observed,” he says, citing, for example, the way that Richard Parker uses the dark space underneath the tarp as a shelter and place from which he can observe and control his environment.

  Having an expert like Le Portier on board helped Lee to insure accuracy. The essential difference of the tiger is at the heart of the relationship between Pi and Richard Parker in Yann Martel’s novel, and preserving this tiger-human dynamic in the film adaptation was important for Lee. Through identification with Pi’s story and with the help of 3-D, Lee enables the audience to feel in close proximity to one of the most revered animals in the world. This intense, physical nearness is where the two sides of the film, the spectacular and the philosophical, work hand in paw, for in the “dimensionalized” figure of the tiger Richard Parker, Pi is as close to the essential mystery of nature as he or any human being can ever get.

  landing in taichung

  Shortly after Lee’s visit to Le Portier’s compound, most of the core crew that had been assembled for Life of Pi moved to Taichung, Taiwan, to begin pre-production. The production offices, soundstages, and state-of-the-art water facilities were all situated on the grounds of an old, abandoned airport on the edge of the city.

  Shuinan Airport was a strange place to visit during the early location scouts. The roar of air traffic had been replaced by a dead stillness, broken only by the huffing of the occasional jogger running along the weed-choked runways. The terminal building was a melancholy ruin of travel with faded posters and dusty signage, not to mention years’ worth of uncollected canine refuse.

  It was an unlikely facility for a big studio film—not that Taiwan was very high on the list of places to shoot in the first place. Although it had produced masterpieces of independent cinema by directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien (A City of Sadness), the country had not hosted a major studio picture since The Sand Pebbles, a Steve McQueen vehicle, in 1966.

  But Life of Pi faced technical challenges that made a Hollywood-based production unfeasible. Other potential locations, from Spain to Australia, turned out to be no better. Eager to work with its Academy Award–winning native son, Ang Lee, Taiwan—particularly through the government’s General Information Office which, by supporting his first three films, had, in Lee’s words, “started my career”—stepped up to the plate in a way that would prove critical in getting the project off the ground, or in this case, into the water.

  And so with all that, plus a vigorous sweep of the broom, Shuinan Airport proved to be a pretty ideal site. It was centrally located, near big-city amenities yet isolated from traffic. It offered empty hangars galore to accommodate soundstages, workshops, and a menagerie of large striped predators. There was plenty of space for production offices in the terminal building. Best of all, an endless stretch of tarmac right in back provided a perfect place for a brand new state-of-the-art wave tank: a must for a “water movie” of this size and ambition.

  the big dig

  In film industry talk, “water movie” is not so much a description of genre as a diagnosis of disaster: the term refers to the kind of seafaring picture that gets dragged down by bloated budgets and sinking schedules, thanks to the difficult, unpredictable nature of shooting on, in, or under water.

  These pitfalls were of special concern for Life of Pi, where water is the primary story element: 75 percent of the script takes place on a lifeboat or raft in the middle of the ocean. The Pacific being neither pacific nor predictable, shooting Pi’s journey on location was out of the question—the filmmakers needed to set up an absolutely controlled environment for the production. And so the Life of Pi wave tank was conceived.

  Wave tanks weren’t new, of course—a number of specialized ones for film shoots were already in existence. But Lee wasn’t happy with any of them. One of the most common problems, notes Womark, was a kind of “bathtub effect” where waves, supposedly in mid-ocean, appeared as if they were bouncing off the sides of something—as indeed they were in more rudimentary wave tanks. Lee was also intent on avoiding the visual monotony that can occur in water movies, a risk, he knew, that Hitchcock faced in Lifeboat (1944). Hitchcock had worked hard to make each shot different from every other shot, story-boarding the entire film. Says Womark: “One of the things that stayed in Ang’s consciousness as he started developing the previs was to create a strong visual sense so that constantly we’re getting a change of water surfaces, lighting, and weather. He got very detailed about it.”

  Photograph: David Gropman.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  An empty hangar before and after, now a multipurpose facility, with wind machine and lifeboat.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  During a tour, Taiwanese president Ma Ying Jeou operates the controls for the gimbal that moves Pi’s lifeboat. The underwater tank is on the right, while the Montreal interior set is in the background.

  DIGGING IN: A TIME-LAPSE JOURNEY

  Photograph: Josh Smith.

  Photograph: Josh Smith.

  Photograph: Josh Smith.

  Photograph: Josh Smith.

  Photograph: Josh Smith.

  Photograph: Josh Smith.

  Assistant production coordinator Josh Smith installed a camera on the roof of the Taichung air terminal that generated a time-lapse record of the building of the wave tank over the course of three and a half months. The groundbreaking ceremony took place in early October 2010, and the containers surrounding the tank were in place by the end of the year. The wave generators were installed over the first three weeks of January 2011, and the first waves were tested at the end of that time.

  Lee wanted an environment where he could control water and light with precision and ease. He and his crew met with Robert Schiavi, a wave-tank engineer who works with Aquatic Development Group, a company that specializes in water parks, water slides, competition swimming pools—and wave tanks. Schiavi was struck by how much Lee already knew about waves. “Ang kept referring to what he wanted as a ‘swell,’” recalls Schiavi. The generation of swells, the kind of long waves that occur mid-ocean, would require a particular kind of mathematically based wave technology that went considerably beyond current wave-pool technology.

  The result was an enormous pool—246 feet long by 98 feet wide by 10 feet deep—holding about 1,860,000 gallons of water. The waves were generated by a system of blowers stored inside a row of twelve boxes—”caissons,” in tank talk—that had a cumulative 2,000 horsepower (the equivalent, according to Schiavi, of one monster truck, or two NASCAR engines, or thirteen average cars, or as many as 400 lawn mowers). All twelve caissons blasting away at full capacity could produce swells of more than seven feet high, and a hard rock concert noise level of 110 dBA to boot.

  “It’s the biggest self-generating wave tank ever built for a motion picture,” says Womark, referring to the horsepower with not a little paternal pride.

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sp; The raison d’être of the wave tank was not just power but precision: the ability to generate a wide range of water textures, wave sizes, and wave shapes—a vocabulary of movement and mood. Once the tank was in place, Lee worked with technicians and consultants, constantly tinkering with the blowers, tweaking their configurations and levels of force, even as the production was well under way. Eight broad wave types emerged: rollers, split rollers, small diamonds, medium diamonds, big diamonds, long swells, left diagonals, and right diagonals.

  Breaking Down the Waves

  Wave chart: Steven Callahan.

  A diagram of the tank, with patterns penciled in, and various parameters such as size, interval, height, and wind strength, and their effects on the boat.

  Photograph: Robin Miller.

  The wave tank seen from above. The criss-crossing wires support the silks and blacks, wide sheets of fabric regulating the light for the shoot.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  Ang Lee choreographs the movements of Pi’s boat before a shot.