The Making of Life of Pi: A Film, a Journey

preface

two storms

I first started working with Ang Lee in 1995. At the time, I was the story editor at Good Machine, the New York–based independent production company for all of his films, from Pushing Hands to Hulk. We were developing The Ice Storm, and I ended up doing period research for the film, which was set in 1975. I was of a similar age and social background as the younger kids in the movie, so the project was somewhat Proustian for me—the stale Twinkies of 1970s pop culture turned out to be my madeleines, every bite bringing back entire after-school afternoons. As pre-production drew near, I was even inspired to haul the dusty contents of my childhood bedroom up from my father’s basement and donate them to the set decorators. The Earth Day’70 poster in Christina Ricci’s room? That’s my brief on-screen cameo.

I had come into the project thinking I was just going to be filling in Ang about the aspects of American life that would be unfamiliar to someone who hadn’t grown up in the United States. A busy director would want just a few clear facts, and I worried that in my enthusiasm I had gotten a bit carried away, with binders crammed full of everything from overviews of 1970s feminism to the TV Guide schedule for the exact night when most of the film’s action takes place. I was surprised by how intensely engaged Ang became with the research for The Ice Storm—the mix of big ideas (his) and lots of minutiae (mine) turned out to suit him just fine. An intense curiosity about things that lay outside his experience as well as a need to make intellectual connections between the film and its context were an integral part of his creative process.

At the same time, the research was really a kind of scaffolding behind which The Ice Storm’s emotional core took shape. When that process was finished, Ang put the 1970s stuff aside and went on to make an intimate, melancholy film about human desire, disappointment, loss, and at the end, perhaps, redemption. The Ice Storm is still full of period details, of course, from multicolored toe socks to key parties; but, for all that, it feels surprisingly free of irony and nostalgia, thanks to Ang’s combination of focused empathy and detachment, mirrored by the chilly, gamelan-inflected score from composer Mychael Danna, who came back to do the music for Life of Pi.

Speaking of The Ice Storm brings me, through fifteen-odd years of working with Ang, to Life of Pi. One day in 2009, Ang called and said he had just decided to do the adaptation of Yann Martel’s book, and would I be interested in working on development and research? Soon after, I was immersed in Hindu lore, sea survival, and everything in between. Unlike the experience of working on The Ice Storm, the dominant feeling in working on Life of Pi came from the intense and delightful unfamiliarity of the film’s world for me—this was a journey, not a trip, one which took me through a kaleidoscopic variety of topics, all the way to India on a scouting trip with Ang and writer David Magee.

But when everything started coming together, I found myself with mixed feelings (as was always my experience when working in development): thrilled that the film was really happening, but a bit frustrated to find myself once more standing on the dock waving au revoir while the ship sailed on into production without me. This time, however, I decided that I wanted to see the adventure through to the end, so I decided to write this book. Doing so would be both my ticket to Taichung, the city in Taiwan where most of the production was taking place, and also a way of getting some perspective on Ang and his work. In the process, I found myself making the peculiar transition from insider to outsider vis-à-vis the film: I had been one of the first people Ang had called to work on Life of Pi, and now, two years later, I found myself feeling like a bit of a stranger, wandering around the production facilities, which were located in an abandoned airport with the terminal as the main office. The whole thing was like some postapocalyptic playground out of a novel by J. G. Ballard. For the first few days, I watched with bemusement the elaborate machinery at work—the 3-D camera that looked like a two-headed monster; the high-tech, glorified dunk tank surrounded by horizonless blue-screen walls; and the endless repetition. As I watched, I wondered what all of this could possibly have to do with the intensely personal and spiritual coming-of-age adventure that I knew as Life of Pi?

Unknown artist. Vishnu and Lakshmi on the Great Snake. Opaque watercolor on paper. Pahari style. c. 1870. Kangra, India. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Artist unknown. Vishnu and Lakshmi on the Great Snake. Late nineteenth century. India.

Everything, it turned out, as I learned over months of observing Ang and his crew at work in production and post-production. From the howling, gale-force winds that take down the Tsimtsum to the faintest breeze ruffling the fur of the computer-generated tiger, Life of Pi is, among other things, a triumph of technology. But the nature of this triumph lies in its discretion.

In the end, we are left with Pi and his story, or stories—which is Ang Lee’s story. For in the course of writing this book, I suddenly felt the seemingly enormous distance between Ang’s films collapsing. Seeing Suraj Sharma dancing giddily along the storm-lashed deck of the Tsimtsum evoked Elijah Wood jumping on the edge of the iced-over diving board and sliding down the icy pavements of suburban Connecticut in The Ice Storm: they are both exhilarated innocents, wide-eyed and briefly at one with something larger than themselves, even as they are poised on the edge of the abyss.

Like most prefaces, this is written last. I have already gone through the process of doing a search-and-replace in the rest of the book, substituting the more formal Lee for the Ang that I used while writing. I’ve allowed myself to retain my familiarity with the film’s director here, and even after I leave the stage as an actor at the end of chapter one, the book cannot help but have traces of personal observation and opinion throughout. As an associate producer, Life of Pi was my life too, for a long while. My hope is that this fact adds an extra dimension to the book, a second story to the square foundations of the making of genre.

—Jean-Christophe Castelli

introduction

another dimension:

some thoughts on life of pi

Photograph: Phil Bray.

Pi’s irrational nickname, courtesy of the Life of Pi art department.

The constant π—the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter—is an irrational number, one that goes on forever, never repeating and never concluding. In his novel Life of Pi, it seems as if Yann Martel uses π as a metaphor for the unknown, irrational nature of life. But for me, the idea of π has come to be closely related to the making of Life of Pi.

Rationality is like a zoo, and we humans are that unique breed of animal who have constructed our own cages—society, family, school, organized religion—and have chosen to live inside them, deliberately imposing limits as a way of protecting ourselves from the unknown, which is frightening and alluring at the same time.

Art, especially storytelling, takes a different approach to infinity than rationality. Art turns the infinite into a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end; at the same time, it allows a glimpse of the irrational and the unknown through devices such as images and metaphors. In doing so, storytelling provides reassurance, filling an emotional need that rationality denies us. But storytelling is not enough: even as we go about our rational lives, a deep part of us continues to yearn for some direct access to the unknown—we want to belong to it, to surrender to it, and to become the vessels of some power greater than ourselves.

That’s where faith comes in: it is neither as limited as rationality, nor is it as messy as superstition. Faith is the way to get from the circumscribed viewpoint of the human to the irrational and the unknown. There is no bridge between the two, only a gap. To cross such a gap involves nothing less than a leap—and this leap takes place through another dimension.

Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.

Ang Lee directing Suraj Sharma in Pondicherry, India.

When I first read Life of Pi—around 2001—I found it fascinating and mind-boggling, but I remember thinking that nobody in his right mind would make this into a movie: rationally, it would be too expensive. But on the irrational side, the book haunted me. Seven years passed, then Elizabeth Gabler, president, Fox 2000 Pictures, approached me to direct. I hesitated for a long time. Then Tom Rothman, chairman and CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment, came in as reinforcement. He was persuasive. I was intrigued and challenged by the project. I accepted, even as I continued to have my doubts.

My first instincts were right: it was a real struggle to get Life of Pi made. The rational process of budgeting such a particular project was getting us nowhere. It seemed impossible, like trying to square the circle (to use another mathematical metaphor), and on more than one occasion, I was on the verge of losing faith and dropping the whole thing. Then one day (this must have been somewhere in the middle of 2009) I came to the realization that something else was needed, some other dimension, to bring Pi to life, to cross the huge gap between the artistic potential of the project and the actuality of getting it made.

A whole range of alternatives suggested themselves in rapid succession:

Another dimension—literally: What if we made the film in 3-D? This was long before Avatar had hit the theaters, and I had only the vaguest idea of what it might mean.

Another structure: What if we made storytelling part of the story itself, putting the older Pi and the writer on-screen in a framing narrative?

Another actor: What if we cast a completely unknown sixteen-year-old to play Pi—even though he would have to carry almost the entire movie on his shoulders?

Another tiger: What if we used live tigers to blend with the digitally generated Richard Parker to set the bar of realism as high as possible?

Another location: What if we shot the Indian sequences in Pondicherry and Munnar, the actual locations where Life of Pi takes place, even though there is absolutely no production infrastructure there?

Another wave: What if we designed and built our own wave tank, one that would go much further than any existing ones in imitating the swelling, temperamental open ocean?

And finally, another country: But which one? Where could we base the main part of the production? The United States, and many of the other countries we looked at, just didn’t have the right elements.

Perhaps it was the novel itself that provided a clue, or a map, for this part of the journey. The freighter Tsimtsum sinks just north of the Mariana Trench, setting Pi adrift across the Pacific, toward the North American continent, along the Tropic of Cancer. The land closest to Pi’s journey happens to be Taiwan, the floating island, the zoo where I grew up. And that’s when everything finally clicked. Life of Pi would become a film. We would make it in Taiwan, even though no big studio production had been shot there since 1966. More than anything else, making a film there called for a tremendous leap of faith. And we took it. Call it fate, or the accident of adventure, but what had been around came around again: I returned home after a very long absence, and a circle was closed.

We had a wonderful three weeks in Pondicherry and Munnar, working with a terrific Indian crew, and two lovely days in Montreal at the end. But the bulk of the pre-production and production, more than 80 percent, took place in an abandoned airport in Taichung, Taiwan’s third-largest city, along with brief side trips to the Taipei Zoo and the beaches of Kenting.

There was something truly special about this production. More than a hundred crew members from different countries came to Taiwan, many with their families, and over time adapted to Taiwanese life, even as the large local Taiwanese crew was learning the ropes of big-budget filmmaking and doing an amazing job. Language was no barrier as everyone worked together