The Making of Life of Pi Read online

  Lifeboat charts: Life of Pi art department.

  A reference guide for Pi’s calendar.

  Photograph: Haan Lee.

  Haan Lee floats his design in a swimming pool.

  the raft

  The lifeboat design and construction for Life of Pi were part of a planned process, but the raft ended up being the very opposite—a kind of happy accident, a spur-of-the-moment intuition that evolved organically. Haan Lee, Ang Lee’s son, was fiddling around with the design, and hit upon the idea of changing it from a square shape of four oars lashed together to a much sturdier and economical triangle of three interlocking oars. The director became very excited by this configuration, which had a simple yet iconic quality. In the words of prop master Robin Miller, “it’s absolutely brilliant—I mean it’s structurally solid, it’s aesthetically gorgeous.”

  And so Haan Lee was put in charge of Pi’s raft. He didn’t know how to tie a proper knot, let alone survive at sea—nor did he do much research into these matters—which made him ideal for the job. Very much as Pi improvises with what he has on hand in the story, Haan Lee used available materials and stumbled onto a solution. He paddled his triangular contraption awkwardly but successfully around a Taichung swimming pool, then marine coordinator Rick Hicks took it out to sea. “It worked perfectly,” says Hicks.

  Working in Taichung with ropes, oars, and other material that could be scavenged from a lifeboat, Lee came up with a series of increasingly elaborate versions of the raft—each one keyed to a particular episode of Pi’s journey. “As a result of figuring out the stages of the raft, I kind of became Pi, almost,” Lee says. Pi’s raft evolves beyond a way of staying afloat and out of the tiger’s range, and into an extension of himself, a kind of narrative record of his journey improvised out of flotsam and jetsam. It is his world.

  Life raft chart: Life of Pi art department.

  A chart showing the progressive buildup of Pi’s raft.

  Photograph: Haan Lee.

  The raft prototype.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  One stage of Pi’s aquatic home in action.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  Another stage.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  Another stage.

  keeping it real with steven callahan

  As Pi’s journey across the Pacific Ocean progresses, he conquers his initial fear, organizes his immediate environment, trains Richard Parker, and becomes, for a while at least, master of his own little world: in Ang Lee’s vision, Pi re-creates the zoo in the space of the lifeboat with Richard Parker, and a domestic environment of sorts on the raft. The latter becomes festooned with all sorts of stuff the survivor has fashioned with his own hands—fishing lures made out of twisted bits of aluminum water cans and frayed nylon rope, bandannas from strips of a torn shirt, a fish spear made of a lifeboat floor slat and hyena rib bones, and so on. A sea turtle shell serves as a good shield against the whack of a tiger’s paw in one scene, a pestle for grinding fish bones into powder in another, and a surprisingly elegant platter for sashimi, Pi’s dietary staple once the survival biscuits run out, in yet another. The centerpiece of the raft is the combination canopy and hammock, which protect Pi from the sun, a hard-won comfort that signifies the fragile equilibrium that Pi has achieved, completely alone, against the vast forces of nature.

  These additions to the raft were designed and built by Steven Callahan, who worked with the prop department to fashion them out of materials that would have been available on the lifeboat and among the emergency supplies. Callahan came to Taichung as a consultant, but his role soon morphed into a cross between guru and jack-of-all-trades, advising the production not only about survival, but about lifeboat wear and tear, marine life, wave types (helping to develop a menu of waves for the wave tank and giving advice on what waves to use for each scene), and everything having to do with the sea.

  As a seaman, survivor, and inventor, Callahan was able to expand the utility of Haan Lee’s raft. “I always aim for multipurpose inventions that might logically evolve from the simplest solution,” says Callahan of the canopy-cum-storage-cum-water-collection unit, which he designed during preproduction. “I made a working model (how it would furl, etc.) out of chop sticks from the mess hall and a bit of cloth from a bandage in props. We had some ideas about how this fairly sophisticated device would evolve, but it wasn’t until shooting that it was worked out.”

  Photomontage of chart by Steven Callahan: Jean-Christophe Castelli.

  THE DRIFT CHART

  Callahan calculated that with existing ocean currents, a real-life Pi could never drift from the western Pacific to Mexico, even along the equatorial countercurrent envisioned by Yann Martel. Callahan shifted the spot where the Tsimtsum sinks to the northern Marianas Trench and found that with some exceptionally favorable conditions, the survivor just might make it to the “magical island”; beyond that, however, he would be going against the wind and currents no matter where he was, never making it to Mexico at all.

  That would probably not be the better story in the end, but it became the pretext for a “drift chart” on the wall of script supervisor Mary Cybulski’s office, a map pasted with Callahan’s delicate pencil sketches and using sacred rakhi thread to mark the line of the journey for good measure.

  Photograph: Jake Netter.

  Steven Callahan, the man behind the canopy, watches as Suraj Sharma practices his knots.

  “Part of the essence of the survivor’s world is to adapt, and beyond that the making of the tools, the attention to detail is integral to the understanding of the real world. And so for me detailing of stuff is almost, can be almost like a spiritual thing in itself, that you’re tied into, that this makes a difference that you wrap it this way or tie it that way, and whether you tie a decent knot or a crappy knot, that that’s an expression of something. It’s a very Zen-like experience.”

  —STEVEN CALLAHAN

  “Steve kept us honest in terms of the whole survival thing,” says Womark. Of course, honesty is a relative term, even when it comes to a film as thoroughly researched as Life of Pi. Living reality and cinematic realism are two different things—what works in life might not appear quite right on screen, a principle which Callahan sometimes found a bit frustrating: “A lot of times I’d come up and I’d go, ‘Well, I would just do this, and this is the most logical solution to me,’” he says. “David Womark would come up and go, ‘No, no, that looks too neat, it looks too planned, it looks too this.’ So we kind of dumbed it down a bit to make it look clumsy.”

  “Well, Steven started off, because he was a newbie here, just outraged at how inauthentic all this was,” says prop master Robin Miller, who gently steered the seaman around the shoals of fiction filmmaking. “And we’re all going, ‘Steven, you’ll get used to it.’ I mean, you have life over here, and film over there. But he got it. You have to hold both ideas in your own mind at the same time.” Callahan eventually did, with a dose of irony: “Ang would say to me, ‘Remember, Pi’s not you, Pi’s not you,’” he says. “So it occurred to me that what Pi is in terms of the story is that he’s kind of like Spiderman at sea, really. . . . All of a sudden, he’s thrown into this survival world and he doesn’t know what’s going on, and he may bang into a few buildings at first—but within minutes he’s flying down the streets attached to these tall buildings with a thread, with no problem.”

  Drawing: Steven Callahan.

  Steven Callahan’s sketches for Pi’s shade tarp.

  Drawing: Steven Callahan.

  Don’t mess with Pi: an improvised spear designed by Callahan.

  preparing pi

  Suraj Sharma, whose main job description after “acting” might as well have been “getting dunked repeatedly,” came to Taiwan not knowing how to swim. But that changed quickly: not only did Sharma learn how to swim in a short period of time, but he learned how to perform all of his own aquatic stunts, too. Was the bespectacled, teenage Suraj Sharma who arrived in T
aichung really some kind of Peter Parker with latent Spiderman tendencies?

  Well, not quite. The kid had an uncanny talent for sure, but just as important, he had stunt coordinator Charlie Croughwell and his stuntman son Cameron, who gave him a splash course in staying afloat. After a period of pool training, Croughwell and son took Sharma five hundred yards off shore. “It was important that he learn what it would be like to be out in the middle of the ocean,” Croughwell says. “And he learned quickly, in one fell swoop.”

  In fact, the stunt coordinator and his son became a surrogate family of sorts for Sharma during the course of the shoot, even as they whipped him into shape both in and out of the water. In other films in which actors have had to undergo a physical transformation of this sort, the entire production would often go on hiatus (in the case of Cast Away, director Robert Zemeckis took a long break to film What Lies Beneath with the same crew, to give Tom Hanks time to lose the necessary weight). Life of Pi could not afford to do this, and so Sharma, an untested member of the most undisciplined age group, was going to lose weight in real time. The 5-foot-9½-inch Sharma arrived in Taiwan weighing 130 pounds (59 kilograms). Over the next two months, up until the start of photography in January 2010, he had to put on weight, and then lose all of it (and then some).

  Suraj Sharma’s days were tightly packed, for even when he was sweating and swimming, he was busy growing his inner Pi. Even without the aarati ceremony that officially anointed Ang Lee as Sharma’s guru, the director had always taken his role as mentor and teacher very seriously. “Teaching and learning complement each other,” Lee says. “I always feel that, when I teach those young actors, I’m learning about my own skill.” Lee did most of the acting coaching himself, with the help of David Magee, who was in Taichung at that time. They did scenes from selected plays—Zoo Story by Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie—but most of the work that Lee had Sharma do involved immersing himself into his character. “We were drawing Pi in my head,” says Sharma, “Ang used to make me do all these exercises, he used to make me drop my mental age from eighteen or seventeen to fourteen or twelve. I’d just keep walking around the room and he’d make me do that, and slowly he’d say, ‘now stop.’ Then he’d make me start doing things as Pi, and the way he made me do it, I started automatically developing habits and certain thinking processes which are different in Pi and me. Now it’s become kind of like the switch for me, so then I don’t have to act, really, I just do it.”

  PI’S SURVIVAL MANUAL

  When Steven Callahan came to Taichung, he brought along a collection of sea survival manuals. He, art director David Gropman, prop master Robin Miller, and illustrator Joanna Bush worked together to invent a survival manual for Pi. With more than fifty pages of text and charts, their Survival at Sea: Lifeboat Manual and Navigation Guide is more than just a prop, it is almost a veritable manual in its own right. Like all true survivors, Pi doesn’t follow the guide literally, but improvises his own tools and techniques culled from it. The book’s physical pages also provide a convenient surface on which Pi can write down his thoughts, to motivate the use of voice-over in the film.

  Survival at Sea might not actually get a stranded soul on a raft across the Pacific Ocean, but some of the beautifully rendered diagrams and charts, few of which are seen on screen, provide an elegant inventory of Pi’s world.

  Survival manual illustrations: Joanna Bush.

  MARY’S PI CHART

  “He’s all about detail,” says Mary Cybulski about Ang Lee. As script supervisor on a number of Lee’s films going back to The Ice Storm, “detail” has been Cybulski’s job, if not her middle name.

  Before production began, Cybulski made a chart of Pi’s journey—the chart to beat all the other charts in a working environment surrounded by inspiration walls, mood boards, calendars, and timelines. Her small, windowless office was covered floor-to-ceiling with the through-lines of Pi’s journey: action, theme, Pi’s physical health, his skin and hair, his clothes, his mental state, his spiritual state, his acquisition of skills, his “becoming a tiger” (Richard Parker also got his own line), the state of the lifeboat, the stage of the raft constructions, and which props were needed. Finally, the last three lines of the chart covered the waves, wind, and sky associated with each scene.

  Overall, Pi’s emotions are the starting point of every scene, and the chart made it clear how much the work of each department—costumes, hair and makeup, and so on followed Pi’s trajectory. All the film’s details are grounded in physical reality and at the same time heightened to become an expression of “how healthy he is, how close to God he is, how close he is to being Richard Parker—all those things kind of braid together,” says Cybulski. “It was an idea that Ang had, because it was like he wanted to see it all,” she adds. “That’s his idea—to see it all.”

  Photograph: Jean-Christophe Castelli.

  The first time Lee had met Sharma—at the final audition which won the sixteen-year-old boy the part of Pi—he found in him a quality of extraordinary responsiveness that he had encountered very rarely in his career. “I gave him just one direction, to just describe the scene vividly, like he has seen it and experienced it, that’s all,” says Lee. “Suraj just took directions. To me that’s the biggest talent in acting, that the actors believe in the situation given, they don’t have to perform it. They totally transform themselves into what they’re playing.”

  For Lee, the director’s job also involves a responsibility toward actors, particularly the younger, less experienced ones: “Sometimes you have to watch out,” he says. “A situation can really hurt an actor, and you have to bring them out of it.” Even when outside trainers were brought in, Lee remained close to and often part of the process. When Elias Alouf, a former oil-rig diver from Lebanon who was now a Taichung–based yoga teacher, came to help Sharma find his spiritual inner tiger—”that focus, that clarity, that determination,” in Alouf’s words—Lee joined the sessions, which lasted up to four hours a day. “He sacrificed a lot of his time and energy to be part of that,” says Alouf (who was cast in the brief role of Mamaji, Pi’s swimming pool–obsessed uncle).

  It was Lee’s shared participation in the training that played such a fundamental role in preparing and transforming Sharma—and Lee as well. “I would say there’s a very deep emotional connection between Ang and Suraj,” says David Womark. “And a level of trust for both of them. That came from the training. Suraj did yoga. Ang did yoga. Suraj had to go in the ocean. Ang went in the ocean with him. You know Ang as a filmmaker—he goes through the journey himself.”

  Photograph: Jake Netter.

  Life of pushups: Sharma in training.

  Photograph: Jean-Christophe Castelli.

  The Suraj Sharma before-and-after wall in stunt coordinator Charlie Croughwell’s office.

  Photograph: Tiffanie Hsu.

  Suraj Sharma paddles behind one of the raft prototypes while Ang Lee takes a break.

  3 the journey: production

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  The float festival scene, staged at an ancient Hindu temple near Pondicherry. A statue of Vishnu, reclining on his bed of snakes, is ferried across the lantern-filled waters of the temple tank, accompanied by a group of Brahmin priests and musicians, while thousands of worshippers, among them five-year-old Pi, look on.

  ALL CAST SHOOTING AND NONSHOOTING CREW TO ASSEMBLE OUTSIDE THE BIG DOOR OF T12 FOR BLESSING CEREMONY TO BEGIN AT 8:00 A.M.

  —LIFE OF PI CALL SHEET 1, JANUARY 3, 2010

  On January 3, 2010, a table with various offerings, including tea, oranges, mineral water, flowers, and a centerpiece of Taiwan’s exceptionally sweet pineapples, all laid out over a cloth of bright red (the color of happiness in Chinese culture), was set up facing south on the tarmac outside one of the old Taichung Airport hangars, now transformed into a soundstage. The cast and crew of Life of Pi gathered with sticks of incense in their hands, director Ang Lee said a prayer and, following his lead, e
veryone bowed to the four cardinal directions—south, east, west, and north. Then, a resounding stroke of the gong—to scare away evil spirits—sliced through the sandalwood-scented air, Lee yelled “Action,” the camera rolled for a few seconds, and day one of production on Life of Pi officially began.

  This ritual is known as the big luck ceremony, which has marked the beginning of shooting of every Ang Lee film since his very first, Pushing Hands. An adaptation of an old Chinese tradition, where offerings are made to the gods and spirits to help ensure a successful production, a traditional big luck ceremony calls for “whole fish, suckling pig, and chicken,” says co-producer David Lee, who has participated in these rituals with Lee since Sense and Sensibility (1995). “But after The Ice Storm, Ang didn’t want to kill anything, so now we use vegetables, flowers, and fruits only.”

  Countless sticks of incense were burned over the course of Life of Pi’s production, as the table of offerings was brought out for every move from one set or one location to another. As for the spiritual content of the ceremonies, Lee kept them deliberately vague and open: “I don’t tell anyone who to pray to. It’s a moment of quiet. You never ask for good luck,” he says, “just the important small things, like safety and smoothness. It’s like you don’t pray to God to win the lottery, you say ‘give me strength.’ It’s the same principle.”