The Making of Life of Pi

by Jean-Christophe Castelli

  The second example occurs a very short while later, when Pi, having unsuccessfully attempted to awaken his brother, leaves the room by himself to go outside. As he walks down the corridor, the convergence is on the surface of the screen and the image is relatively flat, almost 2-D. Then Pi opens the door, and “whoosh,” says Squyres. “Now you see the walls are way out in front of the screen.” In the middle of the shot, the depth has been cranked way up, which involved physically moving the lenses apart as they were shooting the scene; and then in post-production, where it could be easily manipulated, the convergence was taken “all the way out to infinity,” says Squyres. “So Pi’s in front of the screen, everything’s in front of the screen.” The effect is vertiginous, almost physical: you can practically feel the gale-force winds blowing and, perhaps subconsciously, anticipate the breaking of the vessel. This is, or should be, a prime example of the moment being “twice as big.”

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  During a crucial moment, Ang Lee watches Suraj Sharma’s performance up close.

  But after working with the medium for a while, Lee and his editor found that even these seemingly big 3-D moments were not always predictable in their effect: “What’s remarkable with something like this,” says Tim Squyres, “you watch it out of context and you go, ‘whoa.’ And then you actually watch it in the flow of the movie—it just goes right by. You go, ‘okay.’ Any time somebody tells you, when you do this in 3-D it means this psychologically, be wary of that,” Squyres continues. “It’s all a matter of context and what the audience feels.”

  With its lack of horizontal motion and enclosed spaces, the post-Tsimtsum ocean scenes of Life of Pi don’t readily lend themselves to traditional 3-D spectacle, which brings up the question: Why bother going to the considerable extra trouble and expense of shooting a story like Life of Pi in 3-D? The answer, ultimately, was found in water. Early on, Lee and Claudio Miranda, whose previous experience with 3-D was shooting Tron: Legacy, conducted a test shot in 3-D of a boat with a stuffed tiger bobbing in the water off of Venice Pier in California. Miranda says, “When I showed Ang he said, ‘Wow, this is the way we shoot this movie. You really feel the water’s out there.’”

  Photograph: Phil Bray.

  Calibrating the 3-D camera to insure that the left and right eye are in proper alignment—part of the lengthy setup for this sensitive equipment.

  Miranda’s pronouncement is amplified by producer David Womark: “It looks like no other water you’ve seen, because it has real volume to it,” he says. “And that was a big revelation: you’re more engaged and take the journey with the character because you’re in the water.”

  “You don’t have to do unrealistic, big waves to impress anybody,” says Lee. “Normal-size waves can really impress you. And because they’re realistic and smaller, you feel so hopelessly there, drifting up and down. With a huge, two-hundred-foot wave, you don’t feel you’re there. You’re watching a movie.”

  As Lee and his crew conducted more tests they found it wasn’t just water that dazzled in 3-D. “In 3-D you see more details, more nuances,” Lee explains. “You see depth; the image is more worthy of staring at.” A case in point was another early “3-D moment,” as Womark dubs them, which happened during previsualization, or previs, a kind of computer animation widely used in the making of effects-laden films these days that allows sequences to be sketched out quickly, but with a high degree of precision and detail, incorporating lighting effects, different camera lenses, movements, angles, and so on: there was a shot of Pi looking from his raft toward the lifeboat, ordinarily a simple over-the-shoulder shot. Says Womark: “In 3-D, Ang realized that by pulling Pi a little further out of the screen”—toward the audience, that is—“it now becomes two shots in one: an over-the-shoulder and a POV. Your eyes get to choose.” In other words, with 3-D, a single shot could express, simultaneously, an objective and a subjective viewpoint. To give viewers a chance to soak in these visual details, Lee shifted his shooting style away from movement and toward longer shots.

  This quality of 3-D affected, in turn, Lee’s approach to performance in Life of Pi. “The acting should be more subtle most of the time, because you see more,” he says. During production, the director would sometimes go with a regular 2-D monitor to be close to the actor for a particular scene. But then, when he watched the scene again on the 3-D monitor, he would sometimes have to go back and “reduce the performance. I think it’s the proof, for me, that you pick up more details. I think more and more people will use 3-D for dramatic purposes,” he adds.

  finding the right currents: moving pi’s journey along

  Lee and Magee had found the storytelling framework for the film early on in their collaboration, and the Indian first act—Pi’s childhood and adolescence—took shape through an accumulation of research, details, and impressions that gave the story visual texture and dramatic depth. This left the central and main drama to address—the long journey of the boy, the boat, and the tiger—which had to be developed in a different manner. With very few elements and no opportunity for dialogue at his disposal, Lee had to tell the story in primarily visual terms. Here, Magee’s main task was to give Pi’s journey a greater narrative structure for the film. “We concentrated on emphasizing three or four major developments in Pi’s relation to his ordeal and to Richard Parker so that the film would carry more narrative strength without excessive voice-over.”

  Magee also needed to find out what it’s really like to be shipwrecked: the feeling, for example, of being on a five-foot inflatable raft with nothing but a thin layer of rubber separating your bottom from the ominous bump of hungry sharks surging up from the chilly depths; of being some 450 miles from the nearest land and only days away from death by dehydration; of being alone, utterly lost in the middle of the ocean. . . .

  Photograph: Jean-Christophe Castelli.

  Storyboards of Pi’s landing on a Mexican beach. The actual location was Kenting, Taiwan.

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  Steven Callahan on set with Ang Lee.

  That wasn’t the Life of Pi. It was the life—and nearly the death—of Steven Callahan, who wrote about the experience in his vivid memoir, Adrift: 76 Days at Sea. On February 4, 1982, Callahan, a naval architect, inventor, and experienced sailor, was sailing solo in a twenty-one-foot sloop of his own design—from the Canary Islands to Antigua—when it sank as a result of damage incurred during a night storm and, according to Callahan, possibly being bumped by a whale. The boat went down, along with almost all of Callahan’s supplies, leaving him to spend the next two and a half months in a tiny rubber raft on the Atlantic Ocean, improvising strategies to stay alive and sane, before finally washing up on a beach in the French West Indies.

  The two sides of Callahan’s experience—the knots-and-bolts of survival at sea and the accompanying spiritual transformation—became invaluable resources for the film from the very start of development. Callahan was one of the first people David Magee contacted when he and Lee were starting on the screenplay. “Ang said ideally, what he’d like is to have Steven take us out in a life raft and leave us there for a few hours. Just the two of us,” says Magee with maybe just a hint of irony.

  Callahan ended up arranging a somewhat more sensible day trip in a twenty-two-foot sloop off of the coast of Maine. Still, there were enough swells and “really crappy” weather to make an impression: “It inspired me to write about the horrors of being lost at sea,” says Magee.

  “These guys were absolutely soaked but it didn’t seem to faze them, and it kind of won me over,” says Callahan. For the Maine sailor, the afternoon with a famous director seemed like an enjoyable lark, a one-off encounter. “They pumped me for information,” he says, and then “I thought, that was that.”

  Far from it. When Life of Pi finally left the dock many months later, Callahan would end up signing on to the project—twice, through pre-production and then production. Callahan brought not only a knowledge of the detail
s of sailing and survival, but also a lived experience of the ocean, a deep acquaintance with its personality and shifting moods. This proved equally important in defining a broader vision for the film, for as Life of Pi took shape, the ocean would become something like a third character in the story.

  The development of the ocean as a character was partly a function of the visual nature of the film medium—if Pi could not articulate his thoughts and feelings as he does in the book, the surrounding seascape could fulfill some of that function, as an adjunct expression of his spiritual and emotional states. This was also in some ways an outgrowth of the technical requirements of a water-based film, since every step of the shoot had to be mapped out thoroughly—a way of working that went very much against Lee’s usual habits at first, but became indispensable in bringing the ocean to life.

  Lee has never felt comfortable with storyboards. Even on a movie as complicated as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, his method was “We’ll see what happens on set.” Lee explains that unlike, say, Alfred Hitchcock, who mapped out every shot before filming it, “I decide how to cut it, what’s the best thing, on the editing table.” If he used storyboards at all in the past, it was mostly as a point of reference for the art and special effects departments to begin their work.

  The scenes in Life of Pi that were less effects-dependent were sketched out this way—if at all. Lee felt no need to previsualize much of the story that takes place in India. “That’s pretty traditional filmmaking,” he says, “and because I was so prepared, I already had the movie made in my head.” Indeed, months after returning from his first visit to India, the director was able to describe with uncanny accuracy which view he wanted from the thousands of snapshots of tea estates that had been taken during the scouting trip in Munnar.

  Even so, Lee’s approach to filmmaking had already become more open to technology with his 2003 movie Hulk, where the technical demands forced him to, as he puts it, “previsualize it in my head.” Says Lee, “I’m a dramatically trained person so I don’t like that, but it was a great exercise for me. It really expanded my visual sense.” Lee’s experience with previs, which at that time was slow and cumbersome, had left him unimpressed, though.

  But more than six years had passed since Hulk. The technology had become far quicker, so Lee came around. “He just started swimming and he never left,” says producer David Womark, using one of many water metaphors that often seem to pop up when discussing Life of Pi. Working with a small team of artists from Halon, a company that had done similar work for the movie Avatar, Lee created a seventy-five minute animation that covered every shot of Pi’s entire ocean journey, from the sinking of the Tsimtsum through his departure from the island. Certain key segments were even rendered in 3-D, to test things out.

  Stills from previsualizion by Halon Entertainment.

  Even in sketchy previs form, here’s one of those 3-D “gotcha” moments: Pi threatens the hyena when suddenly, Richard Parker springs out from underneath the tarp.

  The process of previs also allowed Lee to map out the journey on a scene-by-scene basis in terms of water, waves, wind, and weather. When production time came around, the individual shots in each sequence were printed out, and the previs returned to its non-animated storyboard roots as a reference tool for each day’s shooting.

  To the casual observer, the previsualized Pi might seem a bit like an outdated video game: Pi had the frozen expression of a child’s action figure, and the tiger Richard Parker moved like an angry hand puppet. But if the movie’s soul was not yet formed, all the parts of the body were in place; you could see how they worked together—and sometimes more. In the sinking of the Tsimtsum, the dramatic arc, the complicated choreography, and the sheer visceral impact of the storm could be felt like the rumble of thunder, still distant but unmistakable, announcing something genuinely big and powerful. With such a vision, the proverbial green light was not far beyond the horizon: after a series of increasingly detailed presentations, Fox gave the go-ahead, and in August 2010, Life of Pi was ready to move from development to preproduction, and from New York to Taiwan.

  Illustration: Haan Lee.

  In a series of presentation artwork, Pi watches the sinking of the Tsimtsum, first from underwater,

  Illustration: Haan Lee.

  and then, a few minutes later, from a lifeboat.

  VISUALIZING THE ISLAND: A PORTFOLIO BY ALEXIS ROCKMAN

  After Lee returned from his scouting trip to India, he began to focus on how to shape and present the material in a coherent visual form. The island sequence was always the toughest part of the book to bring to life, and Lee thought it might be interesting to bring in someone from the outside to help visualize the surreal topography and details of this floating, meerkat-infested, carnivorous-plant entity.

  The artist Alexis Rockman turned out to be a perfect match. Rockman, who has painted far stranger landscapes over the course of his career, brings field research, taxonomically precise brushwork, and panoramic vision to paintings that juxtapose natural history and the end of history (perhaps his most famous work is the mural , first exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, which paints a gorgeously lurid view of a post-civilization, underwater New York City).Manifest Destiny [2003–4]

  Rockman’s work was the subject of a major retrospective, Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2010, yet the artist says that becoming a painter was actually something of a by-product of a childhood obsession with cinematic special effects. “When I started to figure out how movies like King Kong were made. I realized painting was a big part of the environments the models existed in, and there’s an art historical tradition they’re coming out of,” says Rockman. So “fine artist” became his day job, but a photo of Rockman hanging out with stop-motion animation legend Ray Harryhausen has pride of place in his studio: “Every time I went to the Amazon for real, to study real animals, I was always secretly disappointed they didn’t look like Skull Island from King Kong,” Rockman says.

  With his background and obsessions, he was well suited to help Lee and art director David Gropman define the look of the island. Rockman’s own iconography and recent expeditions to Tasmania and Madagascar seeped into his renditions as well: “I remember thinking about Pi’s island constantly during tough rainforest hikes, and always looking at tree roots,” he says.

  Studies for the island’s roots.

  The profile of the island, with a human figure for scale. (All works are watercolor and ink on paper, except where noted.)

  Painting: Manifest Destiny, by Alexis Rockman (oil and acrylic on panel), 2003–4.

  Pi swims in one of the island’s many waterholes.

  A panoramic view of the island, with some interspecies cuddling that didn’t make it into the film.

  The island’s waterholes glow at night with eerie bioluminescence.

  Island conceptual sketches: Alexis Rockman (watercolor and ink on paper).

  2 setting off: pre-production

  Photograph: Peter Sorel.

  King as Richard Parker, framed by faux temple architecture, banyan backdrops, and an ornamental lotus pond designed in the “exotic” style of old-fashioned zoos.

  “Don’t forget: It’s just a boy in a boat. Easy peasy.” This sign, which someone put up next to the kitchen of the production office, was probably meant as a kind of tired, late-in-the-shoot joke because although Life of Pi could be wryly summarized as a story about “a boy in a boat” the simplicity of the statement belies the fantastically complex technology devised to re-create the story on film—an enormous, custom-designed wave tank surrounded by state-of-the-art equipment—not to mention a crew of hundreds.

  But taken literally, the statement had always been true: once the India segment of the story was complete, Life of Pi was “just a boy in a boat,” a cast of one. A large part of the film was, and always would be, an inverted pyramid balanced on a single point, a big production resting on the slender shoulders of some young unknow
n actor. The big challenge at the beginning of pre-production was finding him. Because, as producer David Womark put it, with a bit of old-school Hollywood rhetoric, “without the kid, there is no film.”

  casting a wide net: finding pi

  Casting director Avy Kaufman and her colleagues in India spent months scouring the subcontinent, from Bollywood to Indian TV to schools to the streets, looking for the perfect Pi.

  For Kaufman, whose long list of credits includes The Sixth Sense, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Brokeback Mountain, there was one teenager who stood out from the beginning: a sixteen-year-old New Delhi high school student with soulful eyes and an easy grin, named Suraj Sharma. Kaufman found Sharma when a fellow casting director, who had worked with Sharma’s younger brother, an aspiring actor, suggested Sharma try out for the role. Sharma, untrained as an actor, was initially reluctant: “I didn’t want to really embarrass myself in front of people because I didn’t know what to do,” he says. But the audition, he says, “was not too hard,” and he got through four rounds in the course of six months. Even as the thousands of potential candidates were being winnowed down to twenty-two, Sharma remained on Kaufman’s list. “He just had something very special,” she says. “He would somehow magically make each cut,” says producer Womark. “Ang would go, ‘I don’t know, put the guy with glasses in there too.’”