The Making of Life of Pi Read online

  The configurations of how the blowers were firing determined which type of wave was being generated: rollers came from all of the blowers going at the same time, producing a succession of even, rolling waves. With their relatively gentle up-and-down motion, rollers were good for representing rising winds. Going into storm mode meant summoning forth the big diamond: for this, the twelve caissons were divided into a three-six-three configuration, meaning strong alternating pressure and vacuum from the six center and six side blowers. This made the water move in a kind of “V” or diamond pattern, producing very choppy, rough waves.

  Within each category, the waves could be made to vary in size, interval, and height—all of which affected Pi’s boat in different and specific ways, and all of which were painstakingly noted as the tank was studied and adjusted with choreographic precision. For example, a long swell would initially cause Pi’s boat to pitch up and down in a seesaw motion, then surge forward, drop back into the water, pitch up and down again slightly three times, then rise again with a small rolling motion.

  As much as everyone wanted to show it off, few outsiders actually got to see the wave tank during production because it was surrounded by more than 180 cargo containers from Evergreen, a Taiwanese shipping company. Stacked five high, the containers formed a wall that could withstand both typhoon-force winds and the prying eyes of paparazzi.

  Boat movement chart: Tiffanie Hsu.

  Seasickness times four: a vocabulary of lifeboat motions, to facilitate the description of wave effects.

  MAKING WAVES: STORMS OF MAN AND GOD

  These stills from the wave tank illustrate how different kinds of water surfaces were used in filming. The waves in each scene have both a practical, objective purpose in driving or supporting a specific on-screen action, and at the same time a subjective quality, reflecting an emotion. The big diamond waves in the example below simultaneously represent the “Storm of God”— the second cataclysmic storm in Pi’s journey that throws the boy onto a new course—and his internal “storm,” with his emotions reaching a breaking point.

  ROLLERS

  Number one rollers, medium pressure, were used here, with rounded top and gentle swell—perfect conditions for Pi to establish a rhythm alternating between side-to-side rocking and stability. The rounded bounce of the water matches Pi’s punchy self-confidence as he recovers from the first great storm and begins to master his environment.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  BIG DIAMOND

  Number three big diamonds were used to emulate the rough, choppy seas full of pitches (seesawing), rolls (side-to-side motions), and winds building up from fifteen to thirty miles an hour. Pi’s boat and raft were placed close to the caissons for maximum effect, the pressure of the blowers increasing (with assistance from wind and rain machines as well) for each stage of the storm. Impressive as they are, the storm waves in the film were used primarily as movement reference and—except for some of the chop immediately around the boat—replaced by bigger, digital versions even the Life of Pi wave tank couldn’t generate.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  MIRROR STILLNESS

  In a contemplative mood, Pi floats on a reflective sea, writing a note on a page of the lifeboat’s survival manual. Paradoxically, the mirror-smooth stillness that can sometimes be found in the middle of the ocean can be hard to achieve. “When there’s surface waves in there, it’s broken up enough that you don’t see the silks [above the tank], or you don’t see the blue screen,” says visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer. “Once you get to mirror, it’s a complete reflection of this incorrect world.” As with its opposite extreme, huge ocean waves, mirror-smooth stillness is one of those shots in Life of Pi where the ocean surface is a digital creation.

  Photograph: Jake Netter.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  “The Love Shack”: as the weeks and months inside the tank went by, crew members tried to make themselves at home.

  Select visitors, including the president of Taiwan, Ma Ying Jeou, and the mayor of Taichung, Jason Hu, stopped by for a visit and demonstration. The containers also doubled as storage and command posts for each of the film’s departments, and in the latter part of the film’s production, with long periods of shooting almost exclusively in the wave tank, weeks went by when crew members barely set foot outside of their containers. The various departments tried to make themselves at home—but sound mixer Drew Kunin and his colleagues went a little further, building a full-sized patio deck in the back, which was dubbed “the Love Shack” by producer Gil Netter, who bought barbecues for the crew. To keep morale high during the long weeks filming in the Taichung tank, Netter also made trips to Costco for favorite snacks, while associate producer Michael Malone arranged for an espresso cart, and co-producer David Lee and supervising production accountant Joyce Hsieh brought local vendors of Taiwanese delicacies such as dumplings and shaved ice with fresh mango onto the set.

  The fourth wall of the water tank faced west, and could be opened to admit both large equipment and the glow of a real sunset. But for the most part, the light that came in through the top of the tank was as strictly modulated as the water inside it: vast sheets of white or dark fabric—silks and blacks—were layered to mimic various shades of day and night.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  Ang Lee, Mayor Jason Hu of Taichung, and President Ma Ying Jeou of Taiwan get splashed during an official visit.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  Under sudden shifts of weather, the crew had to work quickly to roll up the silks—a single millimeter of rainwater on the fabric would weigh 3,788 pounds.

  Photograph: Jake Netter.

  TETRAPODS: PI’S OTHER FOUR-LEGGED FRIENDS

  Clustered at the western end of the wave tank, opposite the caissons, were dozens of four-legged concrete objects, thrown together in a seemingly random jumble. Any marine engineer or resident of coastal Japan, where the beaches and shallow waters are littered with them, would immediately recognize these as tetrapods, designed in the 1950s to protect shorelines from incoming waves. Inside the wave tank, they served to dissipate the energy of the waves so they wouldn’t bounce back and create the dreaded “bathtub effect.” Life of Pi happened to have a fairly large surplus of the objects—which were nicknamed “Smurfs” by the crew because of their stumpy, blue demeanor—so a handful were put to work outside of the wave tank, their concrete weight used to anchor the western wall, while the rest were eventually retired to a weed-filled lot next to the water tank, looking for all the world as if they had been put out to pasture.

  The top of the tank was threaded with a series of crisscrossing wires, along which moved a rig called a Spydercam, which could position the bulky 3-D camera anywhere within the rectangle of the pool, much as video cameras move above a football field to capture the action. Combined with the use of cranes, the system of wires enabled the crew to cut down on the amount of time and manpower needed to set up the shots. Below the water, marine coordinator Rick Hicks set up a web of lines (low-tech, “Fred and Barney stuff” in his gruff description), which were used to help control the boat’s position and movements.

  Finally, every surface on the inside of the tank was painted a vibrant chroma blue, a background that would provide the screen for an infinite variety of special effects in post-production: glowering storm clouds over huge swells, the cold scattering of stars reflected in a glassy calm, a school of flying fish surging wildly from the watery depths, and always the sea, stretching to the horizon in every direction. For all the effort that went into it, the tank was in the end a technological vanishing act, something that the audience would never see.

  designing pi

  A first-time traveler to India, production designer David Gropman drew upon the country’s interior design style and architecture for the zoo and the Patel house, the interior of which was closely modeled on an actual house in Pondicherry, which had been in the family of filmmaker Samir Sarkar, who had helped to gu
ide Lee around his native city.

  Interestingly, it was Gropman’s old-school training as a theater designer that enabled him to interact fruitfully with the 3-D side of the production. “The most significant aspect of 3-D has been what Ang said to me early on—about thinking of it as theater,” Gropman says. This was an idea Lee had been discussing with stereographer Brian Gardner: how when watching a 3-D film, the viewer’s eye tends to linger, to choose between details or events, rather than automatically be directed to a single point of view, as on a flat screen. Like a theatrical stage with its different flats, the 3-D space can be divided into a series of receding planes, where different events might take place simultaneously or single objects or settings may be seen. “I really tried to keep that concept in mind,” says Gropman. “You know, having a proscenium, having wings, having a backdrop.”

  the zoo

  The most theatrical of the designs for Life of Pi is Richard Parker’s exhibit, which is almost literally a stage set, flanked by pillars with Hindu figures, with a painted backdrop that borrows from an eighteenth-century English printed landscape of India, featuring the film’s iconic banyan tree in the foreground.

  Behind the arcadian mural with its idealized temple (echoing Pi’s statement about his childhood, that “a zoo is a paradise”) lies a more sinister reality: the row of barred windows that pierce the bottom of the landscape and open into the feeding cage area in the back of the exhibit. As in every zoo, the feeding cage is where predators are separated and controlled during the bloody business of mealtime, a place of rusted bars and stained concrete gutters. Based on a number of examples from Taiwanese and Indian zoos, the set for the feeding cage—where twelve-year-old Pi has his first moment of disillusionment—is, in Gropman’s words, structured as “one portal into the next,” with the 3-D effect pulling Pi, and the viewer, forward into the shadows.

  Thomas Daniell. Hindoo Temple at Agouree, on the River Soane, Bahar. Colored aquatint. 1796. Copyright © The British Library Board, all rights reserved, P929.

  Thomas Daniell. Hindoo Temples at Agouree, on the River Soane. 1795. Bahar, India. The image was used as a backdrop for Richard Parker’s exhibit (see photograph at the beginning of this chapter).

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  The model of the Richard Parker exhibit.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  Life of Pi on a tabletop (from front to back): Piscine Molitor, the Tsimtsum, feeding cage, lifeboats, and two versions of the Richard Parker exhibit.

  Photograph: Susan MacLeod.

  Production designer David Gropman with Ang Lee in Pi’s classroom.

  Because of Indian government regulations and prohibitions against using tigers for any kind of production whatsoever, Richard Parker’s exhibit—which had to accommodate King and the other tigers at various points—was built at the Taichung airport, next to the wave tank. So in the end, most of the other animals—particularly for the credit sequence—were filmed in Taiwanese zoos, with just a few simple exhibits constructed on location in the Pondicherry Botanical Gardens (where Martel places the Patel’s zoo, although there has never been any such zoo there in reality). The visual centerpiece of the Pondicherry Botanical Gardens set was the front gate, which Gropman transformed into a proscenium of sorts, using a zoo entrance he had seen in Jaipur as a model and adding a series of arch-shaped flowered trellises. The art department created an assortment of suitably humorous, hand-painted warning signs, inspired by the many quirky examples that had been collected in the first scouting trip to India.

  Photograph: David Gropman.

  Ang Lee channeling twelve-year-old Pi at the feeding cage in a Taiwanese zoo.

  the island

  David Gropman says, “I always felt what worked so brilliantly in the novel was Yann Martel’s ability to make you absolutely believe everything that he told you,” he says. “And so I thought, if the island wasn’t based on something real, and something real that we could film, that it was going to be really, really hard.”

  Gropman’s designs for the island followed the novel’s original description of its structure, with its geometrical arrangement of ponds, while adding a look that was borrowed from the bizarrely twisted, infinitely extendable roots of banyan trees. Because of the tree’s importance in the real and mythological landscape of India—the banyan serves as a visual link between Pi’s lost past (he courted Anandi near a banyan tree) and the enigmatic, penultimate place of his journey (the island).

  Gropman had met with artist Alexis Rockman and had seen his sketches of the island, but the designer’s vision of the place finally clicked when Lee took him down to Kenting, in the south of Taiwan, on a location scout to visit an enormous, beautifully preserved banyan tree.

  Photograph: David Gropman.

  The gate: the visual centerpiece of the Pondicherry Botanical Gardens set.

  Photograph: David Gropman.

  The original gate, prior to its transformation.

  Photograph: Tiffanie Hsu.

  Ang Lee on top of the tree that was selected for Pi to spend the night in.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  The entire banyan was optically scanned with lasers, then an exact reproduction of Pi’s perch was cast in foam for shooting back in Taichung.

  Drawing: Sarah Contant.

  A blueprint of the island landing, which would be placed in the wave tank.

  Photograph: David Gropman.

  The set of the island pool.

  Photograph: David Gropman.

  A lifeboat dangling from a cross-section of the Tsimtsum set.

  “When I saw it, I thought, this is really perfect,” he says. The massive tree became one of the main sets. All the art department had to do was to drape some blue screen around the edges and cover the forest floor with an extended carpeting of roots (which, ironically, were cast from some banyan trees that happened to be growing on the grounds of Taichung airport). There would be a fair amount of background manipulation in post-production—not to mention the addition of thousands of digital meerkats. Other portions of the island were constructed and shot in the studio. But, says Gropman, “Using location for part of the basis of the island gives us a real responsibility to make the sets as real and believable as the tiger.”

  the tsimtsum

  For the Tsimtsum, the art department studied a number of vessels, using one in particular, the SS Lane Victory (a military cargo ship from 1945, now a museum in San Pedro, California) for a lot of the details and textures. Once filming on the Tsimtsum’s deck was complete, a section of the deck was put on the tarmac behind the wave tank, where it was possible to admire the meticulous craftsmanship of the set decorators, working under Anna Pinnock. Even in bright sunlight, it was nearly impossible to tell that the deck was actually painted plywood, and not the gunmetal gray steel of a World War II–era freighter corroded by years of salt spray.

  Drawing: Jim Hewitt.

  A blueprint detail of the crank for a davit, which lowers the lifeboats into the water.

  Tsimtsum poster: illustration by Chen Hui; layout by Joanna Bush.

  A poster of the Tsimtsum. The action takes place on the upper decks.

  Lifeboat charts: Life of Pi art department.

  A lifeboat tracking chart. Eight different lifeboats were used in the filming of Life of Pi, each with a specific technical function.

  Lifeboat models: Scot Erb.

  Lifeboat models. The four phases show the aging of the vessel.

  the lifeboat

  Although the Tsimtsum makes a mighty splash in the film, Pi’s lifeboat and his raft are the most important sets. Not only are they on screen the longest, they also evolve over time—especially the raft which, like Pi, changes and grows in a way that makes it almost into a character in its own right.

  The design of the lifeboat was fairly straightforward. It was based on archival drawings of steel lifeboats from the 1920s through the 1950s. Two boats were built out of steel by the biggest shipbuilders in Taiwan.
A total of six more were made out of fiberglass from molds of the original steel versions. The steel lifeboats became the “tiger boats” because they could accommodate specially designed cages hidden underneath the tarp, while the fiberglass knockoffs became the “hero boats,” that is, the ones manned by Suraj Sharma. Half of the “hero boats” were used in the water tank; the remainder were designated for use on gimbal—“dry for wet” shots—that is, scenes (usually close-ups) filmed on a soundstage, with the boat on a mechanism designed to mimic the motion of the waves. (“Dry for wet” seems kind of like a joke, however, given the number of water sprayers and dump tanks aimed at Sharma during the production.)

  All the boats had to appear visually identical in every way at any given moment in the story, which brought into play another dimension of the art department’s work—that of time, and the effect of its passing on the film’s environment. Gropman’s team assembled a portfolio of the rust, barnacles, algae, and slime that accumulate over an ocean voyage. The progressive aging of the boat’s interior, under the effects of sun and salt and the gouging of the tiger’s claws is, in Lee’s words, “so art-directed, it’s just beautiful.” On the outside of the boat, the course of Pi’s journey is most visibly marked in Pi’s own hand, as he carves the number of his days at sea on the hull.