Lee and Magee had almost worked together years earlier on a project. They met for the first time three and a half years ago at a Manhattan sushi restaurant. “We had a great conversation,” the writer tells me on the phone. “Ang ended the meal by saying, ‘Okay, then. Let’s do it.’ He can say that. In our first dinner he and I had agreed on one thing immediately: this was a story about storytelling. It’s about religion, how stories get you through life.”
So theater grad/actor-turned-screenwriter Magee took on the challenging adaptation. He credits his work as a voice actor on books-on-tape for turning him into a screenwriter adept at adaptations. He’d often record both the full-length and abridged versions of books, and began to feel he could do abridgements that were better than some of the ones he was reading. So he wound up abridging eighty books over five years. That became training in structure, as he whittled books that were 100,000 to 300,000 words down to 29,500 words so they could be read in a three-hour period. These shortened scripts were stripped of their descriptive passages and heavily reliant on dialogue, and like most screenplays of a similar length they focused on strong action.
The two men would hang out at Lee’s Soho loft and throw around ideas and talk through scenes. The source of the movie’s emotion, Magee admits, is that “the entire second act of a boy on a boat with a tiger is not just dealing with the conflict between them. We had to find a way to express what’s going on with Pi’s inner journey. We used voice-over of him looking at a journal. We tried a number of different things. We wrote the second act silent, with ouches and grunts and groans. But it was apparent that certain things were not coming out—the emotional and physical strain of it. We were not getting his coming of age, the realization that his relationship with the tiger was changing who he was, so we had to find a way to do that.”
Luckily the filmmakers tracked down Maine writer Steven Callahan, who had written Adrift, a book about his true experience of sixty-nine days at sea in a lifeboat. “We learned that he was a sailor,” says Magee. “For him the only way to stay sane was to focus on the details of his journey, even though he couldn’t control where the boat was going: measure speed, latitude, the part of ocean. He kept a meticulous journal in his survival manual, writing with the smallest letters. That became a jumping-off point, the writing notes in the survival manual. Without words to hang onto he was lost, he would lose his mind. Reading aloud became Pi’s secret voice-over.”
Lee brought a sophisticated global cultural sensitivity to the project. “What made him good for this story is his sense of heightened reality and wonder,” says Magee. “It has to be grounded in meticulously believable reality. There’s an incredible amount of detail he thinks about when putting together his films. We had worked with Callahan to figure out the wind speed on any given day, where the sun would be, what the waves would look like where in the Pacific Ocean. The audience doesn’t need to know any of that. The accuracy gives it a believability you’re not going to find when someone is concerned with flash first and reality later.”
Finding the film’s bookend structure was essential, says Magee. “We could potentially have done without the bookends. We debated endlessly leading up to preproduction, shifting things around and trying different ways to see if another way would work better.”
Lee came up with an ingenious method for developing the first and third acts of the screenplay: they literally split the page down the middle, so that everything going on in the apartment as the adult Pi tells the story was on one side, and the other side was everything going on in India years ago. They rearranged both sides of the page in different ways to play the imagery off the narration and went back and forth, says Magee. “In the first act, essential things in the modern story begin the journey.”
The second act on the ocean was largely silent, with little dialogue, while during the first act the film flowed back and forth between the two worlds, returning to that mode in the third. Further into production, certain visuals were deemed unnecessary and dropped, as was the voice-over of less important narration. “It was about trying to pare it down to essentials,” says Magee.
Finding the right balance for the spiritual themes in the story was tricky. “Spiritual things in context were very difficult to lay out simply,” he says. “We didn’t want to turn the film into a lecture about comparative religion. It was important to us, as Martel says in the book, that an atheist has a story he believes in too. We weren’t taking sides on which religion, we were not trying to prove God exists, or what we care about. Everyone uses a different narrative to get through life. The ending is a Rorschach test asking you to respond to the movie. It says more about how you view the world than how Pi does. He is a religious character, but that doesn’t mean you have to accept the story the way the writer does.”
Understanding multiple world religions helped Lee to deal with this complex material, says Magee. “Lee has the perspective of someone who is not quite an outsider but stands at the edge of the crowd. He was raised with the Christian faith in Taiwan, but by the same token he has an understanding of Eastern culture, including Indian culture, relationships between men and women going from religion down through daily custom, the formality in the way people speak to one another.”
For his part, Lee felt like a video game programmer making the movie, he says. “And you gotta play. Because it talks about the strength of storytelling. God is just a red herring, or even faith, for that matter. It’s different than religion. The book didn’t take religion that seriously; it takes God more seriously. So what is God? How is God at work? Is it his fatherness? I think that the book treats God more as this otherness that creates us—then we have a conversation. But I come more from the East, and how we talk about that is different. It could almost be the most introverted, sub-mystery that we look in, that we don’t know what is at work.”
THE PRODUCTION
Preproduction took place in Lee’s home country of Taiwan, where Lee and Magee did scene rewrites up to the start of production. There were a hundred days of shooting; it was a great machine that had to roll forward, and it included many scenes in the wave tank. Most of the film’s ocean vistas were created digitally with specific moods in mind.
For Lee, working hands-on to coach acting novice Suraj Sharma was key. With his longtime casting director Avy Kaufman, Lee went through a long search involving four or five thousand kids in six or seven different cities, including London, Vancouver, Montreal, New York, L.A., and Mumbai. Lee was hoping to find somebody who was born and reared in India.
Sharma didn’t intend to audition. The eighteen-year-old student tagged along on his younger brother’s tryout for the film in Mumbai. He read the survival manual for the casting director, as well as some scenes in which he trains the tiger. Each time, Sharma would make the cut. Lee narrowed it down to ten people.
At the fourth and final audition in Mumbai, Sharma finally met the director. He had to read the four pages in the hospital-bed finale as part of his audition. “He made it extremely real,” Sharma tells me in an interview. “He made me go back and find memories that made me feel real emotions. So the second time, I don’t know what happened but I started crying . . . or anyway, I teared up. They seemed to like it a little bit.” Lee immediately and deeply felt, “He’s the guy.”
Under extraordinary duress, as shipwreck survivor Pi alone on the ocean, Sharma delivers a performance that would have been daunting for any professional actor. He expresses grief, fear, anger, and depression, mostly acting in a giant tank buffeted by wind and water and pretending to fight off a Bengal tiger—who wasn’t there. He had to buff up from 150 pounds to 167, and then drop down to 130; he had to learn how to swim and to hold his breath underwater.
The actor was put through his own tortures, buffeted by the elements, standing there, in the storm, screaming. He got through it with months of training. He became devoted to master director Lee, learning how to work a boat, tie rope, act, do yoga, and speak Mandarin. He also gained a ne
w goal in life: to be a film director. The performance will likely be his last. He has no intention of acting again.
The visual effects were pushing the edge of what was possible. Lee admits that just five years ago he wouldn’t have known what to do, but he also recognized that he learned a lot from shooting the VFX movie Hulk. It gave him experience to build on, to know what was possible. He found the work so intense that it gave him nightmares.
Animation supervisor Erik-Jan de Boer was in charge of animating sixteen to eighteen animal species, of which five were main characters, including the tiger, zebra, and orangutan in the boat. Most of the boat scenes were shot dry in a parking lot in Taiwan against a blue screen. When we see the tiger in the movie, fewer than 10 percent of the shots are live-action. Eighty-four percent of the tiger is digital, 84 percent of the rain is digital, and all of the orangutan is digital. The real tiger was used in some of the shots in the boat, when he’s a fair distance from Pi with an oar between them. Having a real tiger gave L.A.-based visual effects firm Rhythm & Hues an incredible reference; their attention to detail made the difference. The scene where Pi trains the tiger with the stick is about half real and half CG.
”So we would shoot it with the real tigers,” cinematographer Claudio Miranda tells me at a Q&A for various craft guilds in Los Angeles. “And the real tigers did stuff that we never would have anticipated. There’s that shot where the tiger’s sharpening its claws on the bench. That wasn’t scripted—that’s just something the tiger did. I sat with the tiger trainer, and he explained that that’s a nervous tiger saying, ‘See, I’m not nervous.’ That kind of behavior was very interesting, so we shot that first, planned it all, and then, three weeks later, shot it in CG.”
Having a trainer was an advantage. “Our trainer had worked with tigers for thirty years,” adds producer David Womark at the Q&A. “And he had an insight into their thought processes and manners. A lot of details—the tiger trying to prove he’s not scared, for instance—came from him. In the shot when Pi pulls the tiger into his lap, he told us that while tigers are aggressive animals, he had an experience with one that was older and sick, and said that in that moment, on her deathbed, she craved comfort and nuzzling.”
Rather than trace frame-by-frame shots (or rotoscope) of live tigers as they performed for a given camera angle, de Boer chose to use pure hand-to-eye key frame animation—working with an experienced crew of forty-seven animators in four teams under four supervisors in Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Los Angeles. “It was about trying to stay as close as possible to the animal,” he says at the Q&A. “We would go back and look at what the tiger is doing in the surrounding live action shot. We would put that into our animation and the look of our tiger to make sure we had a seamless integration.”
Standing over their shoulders was their demanding leader, Lee. The first thing he said to the visual effects crew in Taiwan: “I want to make art with you.”
“Ang also felt that the entire process of making the film was parallel to Pi’s journey,” says Miranda. “He really thinks like that, and when you have a director that feels that way, it informs everybody.”
But Lee was making a movie that he knew could have an impact on audiences, and he struggled in the editing room with Squyres to find the right balance of emotion and spirituality. For Lee, that’s the key difference between his movie and the book. “The book is not emotional, it’s thought-provoking,” he says. “But for the movie, you have to make emotional connections, and I think religious thought, or your relation to faith, can be emotional. It’s not just a thought process. In the movie that’s how it comes to big images, with human expression. It has to be emotion.
“So my biggest change [from the book] is how the emotional connects to the process. In the beginning, middle, and end, all three parts, I have to make emotional connections . . . For that, I think Pi’s relationship to the tiger is like to God. It’s unrequited. I think that can be really heartbreaking. It’s not like with a beast and a man it goes both ways. It’s unrequited. Because the tiger has tiger’s emotions, he’s not a human being. He has feelings, but it’s not a human view.”
The filmmakers knew that the moment when the tiger leaves Pi was the heart of the movie. “Pi’s journey is about being raised in a zoo in a safe environment where everything is taken care of, and he believes in God, he goes on a journey that tests his will and his strength,” explains Magee. “The beast that was safe and majestic in the zoo becomes frightening. Pi has to come to terms with his relationships. His father taught him that the tiger is not your friend no matter what you see in his eyes. The tiger is your enemy; the tiger is of a different nature. Because you build a relationship with a tiger doesn’t mean the tiger is your pal who hangs around you. That is the journey he has. We’re all different. We’re all creating narratives to come to understand that larger universe we can never know fully. So we come up with imperfect stories to try and express it.”
Lee admits that the third part of the film, the showdown between Pi and Richard Parker, was “the hardest, tough as hell. People talk about water, kids, animals, 3-D, but this movie is totally illusion. How do you examine the illusion within the illusion? In a movie, you can’t take people out, you can’t pull a rug from under them.”
Not bringing in the alternate version of the story—where Pi reluctantly gives investigators the other alternate reality—was off the table. “It doesn’t matter if I consider it or not, it’s not an option,” Lee says. “That’s the book, you have to do it. You get stuck. I struggled and I couldn’t move for a year and a half. It was the most painful experience to make the movie, how to pull that ending off. How do I bring on the second story? And at the end—we try so many ways—I found both stories need to have emotion. You have to treat them equal, so people can make a choice. And I was like, ‘God, it’s so hard to do.’ I make movies for a long time. It doesn’t get easier. You just have to be humble. Five years ago I don’t think I could do this.”
The movie wowed critics, audiences, and award-givers all over the world. It had the right elements: globally popular literary source (7 million copies sold), heartwarming family story from an A-list Oscar-winning director, and epic scale and scope.
In a less competitive year Sharma would have been a shoo-in for a Best Actor nomination. But he faced Daniel Day-Lewis, Hugh Jackman, John Hawkes, Bradley Cooper, Denzel Washington, and Joaquin Phoenix. Life of Pi did become a leading contender for Oscars, and not only for its extraordinary technical accomplishments.
Lincoln
A late entry to the NYFF lineup was the world premiere of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, which had a second premiere at November’s AFI Fest in Los Angeles. Every year AFI, held in the heart of Academy country, adds a few late-breaking Oscar contenders to the mix. I attend an earlier Lincoln screening, and the thing that strikes me on first viewing Spielberg’s historical epic about the last four months in the administration of the sixteenth president of the United States is how unconventional it is. It’s organic, grown from several chapters in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s eight-hundred-page Lincoln tome Team of Rivals, nurtured over five years by Tony- and Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner, and shaped by Steven Spielberg and actor Daniel Day-Lewis into something we’ve never seen before. This alchemy of a torrent of words, well-researched history, and the powerful personality of the world’s most popular American president yields a magical biopic that swiftly moves to the front of the Oscar pack.
The movie plays well both in New York at Lincoln Center and in Hollywood for its Chinese Theatre opening night, which is preceded by a party attended by the cast and crew at the Roosevelt Hotel. A later Academy screening draws rousing applause, enhanced by the presence of Spielberg and Day-Lewis, who do a Q&A, something that is rare for both of them. Some members have to be turned away from the packed 1,000-seat auditorium, and several days later the same thing happens to producers who show up late to the Producers Guild of America (PGA) screening.
“They picked a
story within the story,” Goodwin tells me at the premiere, commenting on the film’s focus on the crucial month of January 1865, when Lincoln maneuvered Congress into passing the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which ended slavery in America. “It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. The important thing is that they got Lincoln: his stooped walk, his high-pitched voice, his humor. All the things that I cared about in eight hundred pages were compressed into two hours. It feels more than right.”
Spielberg, who hasn’t test-screened a movie to get audience reaction since he directed Hook in 1991, tells me at the premiere that on Lincoln he decided he wasn’t going to try to play it safe after obsessing about the film for nine years. “At a certain time in your life you get to where it’s not about risk,” he says. “It’s about trying to stay interested in the entire medium by not going back to the same recipes again and again. It’s about caring so much that if you totally fail at something that is experimental in terms of narrative, I can at least be proud that I tried.”
Spielberg had “always wanted to tell a story about Lincoln,” he tells 60 Minutes anchor Lesley Stahl. “I saw a paternal father figure, someone who was completely, stubbornly committed to his ideals, his vision. I think the film is very relevant for today . . . I think there’s a sense of darkness . . . with him. He was living with two agendas, both of which had to do with healing . . . First, to abolish slavery, end the war. But he also had his personal life, and I think there’s darkness in there.”
The project began life at Universal with Liam Neeson attached. After nine years of sporadic development, Neeson dropped out, feeling he was getting too old for the role. When Universal finally passed as well, Fox and Participant joined Reliance-owned DreamWorks and distributor Disney to back the production. It took a while to line up the financial partners and presales in territories overseas, though, and Spielberg at one point thought he’d have to make it at HBO.
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