The Making of Life of Pi Read online

  “For every location on this movie, every stage, every time we went anyplace, we thanked the gods. And I will tell you something: this is the first water movie in the entire history of filmmaking to come close to its schedule.”

  —DAVID WOMARK, PRODUCER, ON BIG LUCK CEREMONIES

  Eadweard Muybridge. Animal Locomotion, plate 729 (Tigress Walking). University of Pennsylvania Archives.

  Tiger in motion: Eadweard Muybridge. Animal Locomotion, Plate 729. 1887.

  Photograph: Phil Bray.

  Luck of Pi: cast and crew raise incense over a table of symbolic offerings.

  Photograph: Phil Bray.

  Ang Lee strikes the gong to drive away evil spirits, invigorate the crew, and signal the start of production.

  Photograph: Jake Netter.

  A giant gimbal, designed to mimic the motion of the storm, underneath the set of Tsimtsum’s upper deck.

  the tsimtsum sinking sequence: starting with a splash

  Most film productions, when faced with an inexperienced lead actor like Suraj Sharma, might opt to shoot something short and straightforward first—a quiet domestic scene without too much dialogue, perhaps—so that the untested performer can ease into his part. But Life of Pi dove straight off the deep end, with the Tsimtsum sinking sequence instead. “Tsimtsum sinking sequence” makes a good tongue twister, but it’s not the most auspicious way to kick off a long film shoot. This scene, where the freighter disappears into the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean, taking with it Pi’s family and everything he has ever known (with the exception of a certain tiger, that is), was among the most technically demanding and physically challenging.

  Photograph: Jake Netter.

  At full throttle, wind machines can blow at gale force.

  Photograph: Jake Netter.

  Water cannons shoot air-pressurized water to simulate ocean spray.

  Photograph: Phil Bray.

  Suraj Sharma as Pi dances giddily in the storm.

  “That it was shot first up was almost mad,” says first assistant director William Connor, “but we had no other choice,” he explains. “If Sharma was going to lose weight over the course of the production, to match the shipwrecked Pi’s weight loss, then starting the shoot at his peak weight was imperative.”

  So on day two of the shoot—indeed, on day two of his life as an actor—Suraj Sharma found himself standing alone on top of the set of the Tsimtsum’s upper deck, which in turn was mounted on a gigantic gimbal, with an entire arsenal of special FX equipment pointed right at him. There were rain machines, wind machines capable of delivering gale-force gusts, air-pressurized water cannons that could knock you over with a blast of simulated ocean spray, and three 4,000-gallon dump tanks that could wash you overboard with the force of a giant wave. There was another machine pointing at Suraj as well, smaller than all of these, but, if anything, even more formidable and complicated: the 3-D camera.

  The pressure to perform was intense, and Lee, who had taken Sharma practically by the hand through so many months of training, was far below, somewhere on the hangar floor. To give any kind of direction, Lee would have to climb from one platform to another, and even then remain at a considerable distance from Sharma.

  Photograph: Jake Netter.

  As he realizes something is wrong, he breaks into a run.

  Photograph: Phil Bray.

  Now the ship is tilting severely, and Pi watches in horror as a giant wave sweeps over the ship’s lower decks.

  When second assistant director Ben Lanning yelled “action!” the gimbal kicked to life, pitching and rocking the set of the freighter. The rain started falling, the dump tanks unloading, the water cannons blasting, and the wind machines producing roaring, one-hundred-mile-per-hour gales. The entire cavernous hangar was periodically filled with flashes of bright, white light, freezing each artificial raindrop in midair. Sharma took a deep breath and …

  “I didn’t do anything,” he says with a laugh. “I was so overwhelmed with the storm because to me, it was a storm. I was on this big ship and really high up, and it’s moving crazily, and the rain is just hammering down, the wind’s going crazy, and there’s lightning—to me it was real.” Tossed, heaved, pummeled, and thrown, Sharma, as he tells it, simply hung on. “I went through the action, but I didn’t act,” he says. “There were just so many things happening around me.”

  Lee had set the FX dial on high because this scene, after all, depicts the film’s major storm; he was adamant that his actors react to real wind and the actual tilting of the deck. Sharma’s sense of balance kicked in quickly enough and he was able to go through the motions of Pi dancing across the deck through the storm. In addition to these challenges, Sharma also needed to act in the sequence when Pi stops at the railing of the ship, suddenly realizes how steeply the Tsimtsum is tilting, and then sees a huge wave wash a couple of sailors overboard. “The choreography is the easier part for him, because he follows very well,” says Lee. “But there’s one thing, when he sees somebody get washed away, all of a sudden it sinks in he’s in trouble. So that was acting. His face drops.”

  The distance imposed by the technical setup didn’t make things easier. “Sometimes I would try just to let it rain, and scream to him during the shoot, forget about the sound,” says Lee. The director would keep the camera rolling, making Sharma repeat part of the scene without cutting. “He looks, and he runs away. ‘Come back!’ And I give him directions, shouting it loud—‘Blah, blah, blah, try it again. Action!’” Though he had worked a lot with Sharma to lay the groundwork for Pi’s character, Lee’s approach to directing the actor in this situation seemed on the surface to be a lot of small, direct instructions of the “do-more-of-this-less-of-that” variety.

  Photograph: Phil Bray.

  The sailors push Pi into the lifeboat, despite his protests that his family is still aboard.

  Photograph: Jake Netter.

  He may look as if he is praying, but Sharma is just checking his safety line.

  “It’s not like the director says something magical, and then they act,” says Lee. “Most of the time, it’s very technical. It’s like Thierry and his tiger,” he continues, referring to the trainer Le Portier. “Only you and the tiger know that excitement. For everybody else watching you work, it’d be very boring. That’s why I relate to Thierry so much. Except his act with the tiger is very immediate. If you miss by half a second, you’re dead.”

  At the end of the day, Lee got the performance he wanted from his actor. The wind machines were turned off, the sprayers slowed to a dribble, the 75,000-pound Tsimtsum set was in precarious repose on top of the enormous gimbal. It was a wrap and tomorrow would be another day—day three of many, many more. There were no special words or gestures to mark Sharma’s trial by water or a job pretty well done. Lee does not believe in showering young actors with too much praise, preferring just a few words of quiet encouragement: “I don’t make a big deal,” he says. “It’s their job. I always let them know they’re so lucky to be in there. If you tell them don’t screw up, they get nervous and that’s not good either. Just tell them, always give a hundred percent, always be available and be in the best condition.” And though Suraj Sharma still had a lot to learn, he had what would prove to be an unusual receptivity, which for Lee is the fundamental quality that defines a good actor.

  Photograph: Phil Bray.

  First-time actor Sharma finds himself sharing a boat with heavyweight veteran Gérard Depardieu.

  A week later, having more or less gotten his simulated sea legs, Sharma got his first taste of performing his own stunts (which, it turned out, he could do quite well) when he was tossed over the side of the deck and into the lifeboat by the Taiwanese sailor extras. Hanging precariously off the Tsimtsum’s davits, the lifeboat was heavily weighted on one side by Sharma’s fellow passenger, who had more than one hundred films with almost every great director of his time under his plus-size life-jacket, compared to Sharma’s not-even-yet-one.

 
That passenger was Gérard Depardieu, who played the ship’s French chef, a character who looms large in the second, “realistic” shipwreck story that Pi relates to the Japanese investigators at the end of the Martel novel. Since this story is not actually shown in the film version, David Magee wrote a scene that established the chef as an on-screen presence: the Patel family go for their first meal in the Tsimtsum’s dingy cafeteria and are in for a rude and unappetizing surprise from the chef.

  For five days, some of the focus was off Sharma as Depardieu filled the set with a mixture of Rabelaisian high spirits and consummate professionalism that captivated the cast and crew. “It was total fun, a blast,” says Lee of working with Depardieu. “His continuity is all over the place but it’s okay,” the director continues. “Gérard is very easy to direct. He can do anything. ‘Is it like this? Is it like that?’ No method-acting garbage, just like—”: Lee spreads his arms and makes a big, bull-in-a-china-shop crashing sound.

  Photograph: Jake Netter.

  Aug Lee demonstrates the art of brawling for the Tsimtsum’s Taiwanese crew.

  Photograph: Phil Bray.

  Pi’s father, Santosh (Adil Hussain), tries to teach the French chef (Gérard Depardieu) some manners.

  While the sinking of the Tsimtsum was physically demanding for Sharma, it didn’t truly put his acting skills to the test. But that quickly changed, as the next stage in his journey as an actor was to play the teenage Pi at home in Pondicherry. There were no water cannons or hydraulic machinery for Sharma to face here—he needed to draw on some part of his old self, which he had left behind once he had been cast as Pi, and would need to recover, with Lee’s help. Though Sharma had arrived in Taiwan from his home in India only a few months prior, he had matured quickly after undergoing rigorous mental and physical training in pre-production.

  “He had a few scenes [in India], like playing drums, chasing girls,” says Lee. “He had to pretend he was dancing. And be a little goofy. There, it’s a little challenging. Suraj was seventeen and now he looked like nineteen,” Lee continues, “and [in India] he had to play like fifteen in order to look like sixteen.” To accomplish this, the director drew on sense memory exercises that they had done together, for example: “Just remember what it’s like physically when he’s fourteen, fifteen,” Lee says. At first Sharma’s ability to revert would be associated with a specific memory from that period; with practice, it would become automatic. “I would remind him,” says Lee. “Then it would become technical: ‘You see, your eyes used to look that way. Your body’s a little different.’ And he’ll remember those things. So next time he needs to get to that point he doesn’t need to go all through the psychological memories.”

  SMALL PACKAGE, BIG BLAST

  Photograph: Phil Bray.

  Twelve-year-old Ayush Tandon played Pi as a twelve-year-old—and he proved to be almost as formidable a presence on set and on screen as Depardieu. The Mumbai native, winner at age ten of the Indian dance reality TV show Chhota Packet, Bada Dhamaka (which can be translated as “Small Package, Big Blast”) and star of more than fifty TV commercials, commanded the camera, earning the nickname “the one-taker” from costume designer Arjun Bhasin, who says: “He was so good that the other actors were nervous around him. Because they would do like three or four takes, and they’d finish a take and he’d say, ‘Don’t worry, start again.’” Lee agrees: “He was scary. He takes directions like an adult. It’s like you can’t believe he’s twelve and when he plays, he plays like a twelve-year-old. He’s uncanny.”

  Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.

  Lee and Sharma in Pondicherry.

  A DANCER TAKES OFF ON THE RUNWAY

  Photographs: Phil Bray.

  Shravanthi Sainath, a trained Bharatanatyam dancer, came to Taichung for a screen test for the part of Anandi, Pi’s on-screen love interest. Afterward, she demonstrated some combinations of adavus, or dance movements, with hastas— the expressive hand gestures that Pi tries to imitate when he accosts Anandi outside the market—against a backdrop of tetrapods and heavy equipment for still photographer Phil Bray. Two weeks later in Pondicherry, Sainath danced as Anandi to Pi’s faltering, smitten drumbeat.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  Lee and director of photography Claudio Miranda shoot a close-up of Anandi (Shravanthi Sainath) tying a rakhi thread around Pi’s wrist in their farewell scene under the Pondicherry pier.

  india: empty zoos and crowded temples

  While Lee and the Taiwan-based team had been busy testing the various technical waters, a large crew of four hundred plus was just finishing laying the groundwork for the upcoming Indian portion of the production, where locations from Pi’s childhood, boyhood, and teenage years would be shot.

  For many on set, the India shoot was one of the very best experiences in their professional lives. “It was all outside, and it’s India in your face,” says first assistant director (India) Nitya Mehra. “You were just shooting live constantly.” The faded Gallic charm of Pondicherry and stunning natural beauty of Munnar were seductive. “You’re always working out of cities like Mumbai and Delhi, which are anywhere,” says Mehra, speaking for the Indian crew. “So when we were there, we were like, let’s just not bang it in with cars, everything. Everyone got cycles, because the distance is not too much. On that note, it was a lot of fun.”

  Photograph: Tabrez Noorani.

  Lee and associate producer Michael Malone receive blessings on the first day of the India shoot.

  Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.

  Sadhus—wandering holy men who have given up all material attachments (although nothing prevents them from being movie extras).

  Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.

  A mother and her daughters, extras at the Marché Goubert, Pondicherry’s central market.

  Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.

  An extra among marigold garlands at the flower market.

  A genuine enchantment seemed to hover over the shoot, but one that would not have been possible without the long preparation put in by line producer (India) Tabrez Noorani (Slumdog Millionaire; Eat, Pray, Love), Mehra, and their large crew. They set up a filmmaking infrastructure in places there were none, secured the sorts of locations (a mosque, a thousand-year-old temple) where cameras normally never go, negotiated with officials over countless cups of chai, and kept all noise and distractions at arm’s length so that Lee could get his shots done and only hear about what happened afterward, in the form of stories rather than as urgent news bulletins.

  Though the first act of Life of Pi passes by on screen as a series of charming vignettes of coming of age, it was, according to Noorani, “probably the largest set up that India has seen in terms of foreign film. I mean, the infrastructure was larger than the Gandhi infrastructure.” It was an epic preparation for an intimate scale. The main reason for this was that Pondicherry and Munnar were not places that were geared toward filmmaking. “It’s impossible to shoot in Pondicherry with forty people,” says Noorani, “and we were three hundred plus. Moving a hundred cars and fifty trucks in that city, you can’t really do that because the city is tripled. You can’t move anything during the day, which means that you can’t move locations during the day. So you have to set up a second unit that all they did was, they’d move at night. But that was the fun part about it. For me, that’s why I end up on certain projects—I mean, if there’s no challenge, what’s the fun?”

  “We just had to start from scratch,” says Mehra, who worked with a large crew of extras, coordinators, and assistants. Mehra says that second assistant directors Rob Burgess and Ben Lanning made fun of her, saying “Are you making Ben Hur in India, that so you have so many assistants?” But the extras were not professionals; they were mostly people “literally pulled off the streets,” with absolutely no conception of what it meant to be part of a production. Whether it was putting in a few passers-by on the street, ornamenting a tea field in Munnar with four hundred bright
ly dressed tea pickers, or emptying seven villages to get the 1,500 extras needed for the big temple festival sequence, these people needed to be found and trained—a task that required skill, sensitivity, diplomacy, and sometimes a bit of show biz.

  Photograph: David Gropman.

  THE PONDICHERRY ALBUM

  These photos, taken during scouting trips, give a flavor of Pondicherry, the most important remaining French outpost in India after the country’s colonial ambitions on the subcontinent were definitively crushed by the British in the mid-eighteenth century. The older districts of town still have a strong French flavor, with their tidy gridded street layout, French-style villas, street signs, and policemen in kepis.

  Photograph: David Gropman.

  Photograph: David Gropman.

  Photograph: David Gropman.