Ang Lee’s long journey to a 3-D ‘Life of Pi’
Director Ang Lee read Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning best-seller “Life of Pi” not long after it hit bookstores. The fantastic tale of an Indian teenager, Pi Patel, who learns to coexist with a tiger named Richard Parker as they struggle to survive on a small lifeboat adrift in the middle of the ocean captivated him, but he didn’t think of it as material for a movie.
“It would be too expensive to make, and you don’t even know if you can make it or not,” he says during a recent trip to the Bay Area where his adaptation of “Life of Pi” closed out the Mill Valley Film Festival and captured the event’s Audience Favorite Award. “It was too big a risk for what it is.”
What Lee regarded as possibly impossible is now poised to become one of this holiday season’s big hits and perhaps a classic. “Life of Pi” is a technological marvel, but it is more than that. This story of a boy and a tiger, a tiny vessel and an ocean seeming to stretch into infinity is thrilling and suspenseful, and beneath all of its special effects beats a very big heart.
Certainly, when Martel’s book came out in 2002, a good seven years before James Cameron’s groundbreaking “Avatar,” the technology wasn’t there to make a 3-D movie in which a main character is a very realistic but computergenerated tiger. That did not stop producers from pursuing Lee, who won an Oscar for the intimate romantic drama “Brokeback Mountain,” but who snagged his first Academy Award nomination and proved his mettle for the fantastic with the adventure epic “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”
Eventually, Lee agreed to a two-stage commitment to the movie. As the first stage, he wanted a script and a budget to present to producers to ensure that there would be no last-minute sticker shock as the film grew closer to rolling. Then he made a 70-minute animated pre-visualization of the scenes that would take place on the water so that he would have a reference when he started shooting. In the meantime, technology was catching up to the project.
Intimidating 3-D
“I didn’t know if I could do it,” the 58-year-old Taiwan native says. “It felt feasible, but we weren’t sure. Then 3-D added intimidation, and you don’t know if the blend of real tiger and CG tiger would work or not. You have to ask people to believe, to invest in that, and that was unknown. We knew we could do the tiger pretty well, but in 3-D, we weren’t sure. Whether people buy it or not, we’re not sure.
“And the water was totally unknown in 3-D, whether it would work or not,” he adds. “When I decided to do the movie, it was not recommended to go near water or anything reflective, because it goes through your eyes differently. You get puzzled and you get dizzy. It’s not a good idea. That was before that problem was solved. It was quite risky.”
Adding to Lee’s uncertainty was the fact that he would not even be able to see whether what he was shooting was going to work or not until well into post-production. Video of four Royal Bengal tigers provided reference, and trainers provided insight into the big cats’ behavior, but the artists and the computers were going to have to do their work, and Lee would not know what it would all look like for some time.
“The imagination has to come to work,” Lee says. “It took about a year before we even saw some tigers. Those shots took anywhere from three to six months to do. They’re all necessary. You can’t test what they do. You imagine what kind of character it is, what needs motivate the tiger. The tiger does this or that, and therefore our actor does this or that.
“It took so long, and then it doesn’t all come together until a very long time later,” he says. “That was a very long process, and I wish I could do it all by myself with just two actors, but there are 2,000 people working for you day and night, round-the-clock, seven days a week. There were 2,000 people working with the tiger, spread out in Canada, L.A., India, Malaysia — people assembled
all that information together.”
Lee also gambled with his lead, Suraj Sharma. While actors like Irfan Khan (playing an older version of Pi), Gerard Depardieu and Rafe Spall were cast in supporting roles, it was left up to a 17-year-old neophyte — one of more than 3,000 who auditioned — to command the screen and enthrall an audience for the bulk of the movie.
“We got lucky with Suraj. He’s a wonderful kid, so what could have potentially turned out to be our biggest problem turned out to be a blessing,” Lee says. “We’re shooting him alone in a water tank, he’s the only subject. He’s in every shot. We have to shoot in order, because he has to lose weight and also just parallel to what happens to Pi on the ocean. He’s going through the same journey. He never got sick. He never got injured. He never had a meltdown or threw a tantrum. He never said no.
‘Such a talent’
“He’s such a talent. The way I directed him and taught him was not so much that I was teaching him, it felt like something he knew from a previous life, like Little Buddha or something and I just recollected for him, helped him memorize what he already knew.”
Lee shot in Pondicherry, the former French colony in India, where the first part of the book is set and where Pi’s family has its zoo. (The city’s botanical gardens played the zoo, although most of the animals were filmed in Taiwan.) But he also spent three months shooting in Taiwan on a self-generating wave tank built for the production, the largest of its kind in the world, “Life of Pi’s” very own ocean.
‘Just very difficult’
“You’re so helpless,” he says. “Water is really hard to deal with, especially a large quantity of water. It’s hard digitally when you’re creating an image. It’s hard when you’re shooting. It’s just very difficult. Sometimes, between the 3-D and the water, we could spend 12 hours, all night long, and not get anything done. You just curse and curse and curse, look up at God, ‘Why? I’m trying to make a stupid movie. Why?’
“We sort of became the movie we were making,” he adds. “It always happens that way, and I picked the hardest one, I think, this one. You do look up at God, ‘Why does it have to be this difficult?,’ but eventually God answers, ‘Because it has to be that way, otherwise it doesn’t work.’ You learn from those things, it’s inspiring. Everything goes, your imagination goes. If it’s too easy, it wouldn’t be as provoking and solid as it should be. It just takes that to make a movie.”