The Making of Life of Pi
Page 9
Photograph: Jake Netter.
Je m’appelle π: Piscine Molitor Patel writes his new name on the blackboard in French class.
among schoolchildren
Take, for example, all the schoolchildren that were needed for the sequence in which Piscine Molitor Patel, tired of the urinary puns at the expense of his odd, swimming-pool inspired name, transforms himself into “Pi.” Over the older Pi’s narration at the beginning of the film, we see a quick succession of scenes involving crowds of mocking, jostling schoolboys, a very determined twelve-year-old with a piece of chalk, a series of blackboards, and an irrational number that goes on and on until the jeering is replace by cheering when Pi triumphantly assumes his new identity.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
Ang Lee and Ayush Tandon (as twelve-year-old Pi) in the classroom.
“We needed different kids, age groups, and everything,” says Mehra. “And so we had to pull them out of school. And then we would take them into the soccer field, and I would train them the way I trained the extras. You know, about how you can’t look into the camera. And sure enough, once that big giant camera’s there, you know, they weren’t going to listen much to it. But it was super fun,” adds Mehra. “The younger boys were beautiful.” Following Lee’s ideas, costume designer Arjun Bhasin did not make twelve-year-old Pi stand out from the rest of the schoolchildren in any way. “I went to those kind of schools when I was little,” says the now quite dapper Bhasin, “where you weren’t allowed to wear anything that everyone else wasn’t wearing. I mean, not a watch or a pair of shoes. And then Pi realizes that he is special. Nobody is like everybody else.” Though Pi’s true individuality comes as part of his journey on the boat years later, the realization probably dawns at the age of twelve, when he separates himself from his name by an act of theater on the school blackboard, and then goes through repeated attempts at transformation as he tries on one religious faith after another.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
Lee and first assistant director (India) Nitya Mehra, trying to make an unruly roomful of extras laugh on cue.
Photograph: Peter Sorel.
The bulky 3-D camera doesn’t lend itself to hand-held work, but cameraman Lukasz Bielen gives it a good shot.
Photograph: Peter Sorel.
Tea pickers, Munnar: “We wanted color, and Ang wanted it to be like prints and busy and layers,” says costume designer Arjun Bhasin, who dressed more than eight hundred extras.
three places of worship and two kinds of trouble
Having been introduced to God in his manifold aspects through the Hindu faith into which he was born, Pi’s religious curiosity blossoms as he grows older, leading him to further religious explorations where he discovers Christ and Allah. For this part of the story, the production was fortunate to secure access to three of the most authentic and beautiful places of worship in and near Pondicherry.
The Church
The first and last locations to be shot in the India trip—the interior of the Holy Rosary Church in Pondicherry and exterior shots of the mountainous tea-growing station of Munnar in the neighboring state of Kerala—were combined to form the sequence in which Pi discovers Christianity. The exterior shots required a great deal of setting up. “In Munnar, for example, the shots we were taking were very simple,” says Mehra. “But the thing is with Ang—I love that about him, about his scale—you know, he’d just point, and he’d be like, ‘Nitya, do you think we can get, you know, some tea pickers on that mountain?’ Now, that mountain, just to get there, in Munnar, takes forty-five minutes.” And Lee wanted not just a few tea pickers, but four or five hundred at a time, which meant finding and training up to nine hundred extras who had to be dressed in layers of bright prints and colors. Like the placement of small figures in a Chinese landscape painting, the tea pickers moving across the vast landscape add an element of fleeting, almost intimate beauty.
Photograph: Phil Bray.
Tea plantations, Munnar, Kerala, overlooking the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu.
Photograph: Phil Bray.
Photograph: Phil Bray.
Photograph: Phil Bray.
Photograph: Phil Bray.
Ang Lee directs Ayush Tandon to sneak into the church where Pi discusses Christ with the priest (Andrea Stephano).
Photograph: Phil Bray.
Pi catches a glimpse of Muslim women praying.
Photograph: Phil Bray.
Pi stands outside the gates of the mosque.
The Mosque
To shoot in Pondicherry’s Jamia Mosque, a graceful, whitewashed building in the city’s small Muslim quarter, was a challenge even for Noorani, who in the past had obtained permission to film in New Delhi’s largest mosque. Finally, everything was cleared and exceptional permission to shoot inside was granted, but only within certain parameters, the most important of which was that the camera could not go inside the mosque beyond a certain point within the building; a blue screen was placed on the threshold, and the crowd inside was added later, in post-production. Noorani had been careful to cultivate a personal relationship with the imam—“the minute anyone wants to shoot in India, I feel that’s the most important thing,” he says. “They’re all educated people. So the imam knows about Ang. He loved the fact that Ang was just so—Ang was Ang. He was simple, humble, and he chatted with him. I think that made a big difference.”
The Hindu Temple
The Sri Gokilambal Thirukameshwara Hindu Temple is located in Villianur, about six miles away from Pondicherry. It had never been used for a film and, with elements dating back to the twelfth century, was much older than the average temple used as a backdrop for musical numbers in Bollywood productions.
To represent the magical quality of Hinduism in the life of Pi (in this case, his five-year-old self, played by Gautham Belur), Lee decided to stage a temple float festival in honor of Vishnu, with hundreds of worshippers and the glittering light of thousands of floating clay oil lamps, or diyas—a dazzling spectacle.
Lee based the idea of the floating Vishnu on an image and a description of a float festival that was discovered in the early stages of research. In this type of festival, an image of the deity is brought out, often at night, and floated around the central basin, or tank, of the temple. On board the raft are Brahmin priests as well as musicians playing for the deity, while worshippers throng the sides of the tank. The local priests had no particular model for such a festival at Villianur, but certain elements such as the diyas and ritual gestures were nearly always observed in such situations. “It’s that faith that I find so fantastic about our country,” Mehra explains. “The thirty-million-gods multiplicity of Hinduism is such that this ceremony could be both a complete invention and, at the same time, deeply authentic.”
Photograph: David Gropman.
The Sri Gokilambal Thirukameshwara Hindu temple in Villanur, near Pondicherry. Parts of the temple date back to the thirteenth century.
The feeling of authenticity comes in part from the large throng of extras, the entire populations of a number of local villages recruited for that one scene. Earlier, Mehra and her assistants had done a rehearsal with seven hundred of them, to teach them the language of film: what “action” meant, what “cut” meant, and exactly where to go when she said “back to one.” “The villagers just stood around, and they loved it,” says Mehra. “They were laughing at us, because they were just like, what are these crazy people doing? And I said, ‘Now go and tell the other villagers what a blast you had.’”
Because of the digital camera’s sensitivity to low light, most of the actors and extras in the float festival segment were lit by candlelight, with the artificial lights mainly illuminating the temple backgrounds. Everyone in the production participated in lighting the lamps and launching them across the water. With about three thousand floating lights in the water, and another three thousand scattered across the grounds, the effect was incredible. Kho Shin Wong, David Womark’s assistant, says, “
The process was almost like more than just the filming of a movie. In the way that Ang embodies the entire movie all the time, we were able to help embody that aspect of it. And it’s what helped bring the crew closer together, too.” “It was a very, very exciting night. Nothing like it, very spiritual,” says Lee, recalling how the wind blew strong that night. “All night long the crew kept lighting candles.” Makeup and hair designer Fae Hammond, who has worked and traveled in India a number of times, said, “For me, that was my most magical moment of filmmaking—ever. It was like we were just India’d out. Just relaxed—and the imagery was incredible.” Producer Gil Netter concurs, calling that night “probably one of my all-time favorite memories of any movie I’ve ever worked on.”
Photograph: Peter Sorel.
Up late: five-year-old Pi (Gautam Belur, left) and his older brother Ravi (Ayaan Khan) bask in the glow of the temple ceremony in the company of their skeptical father (Adil Hussain).
Photograph: Peter Sorel.
On the float, the statue of Vishnu reclining on a bed of snakes, with his consort Lakshmi, is attended by Brahmin priests, while musicians play the nadaswaram—a South Indian woodwind.
“You know what makes Ang so special? He sees the largeness of the thing. Mostly when foreign crews come to India, they want elephants and bright things, dance girls, swirling. They want that exotic-y India: peacocks and saris. And Ang only wanted that to show the isolation of the boy later—to contrast the two things. He doesn’t show off.”
—ARJUN BASIN, COSTUME DESIGNER
Photograph: Jake Netter.
Extras lighting oil lamps for the float festival scene.
For all the spectacle, there’s an intimate human dimension to the scene. “Actually, when you see the scene, it’s about this little boy,” says Arjun Bhasin. “And I think, if I had that skill of understanding the gist of what that moment is, rather than getting lost in the beauty and the size and the scale of it, I would be so successful in my life. And so I learned that. I loved being able to see India through that kind of light.”
Photograph: Jake Netter.
A stand-in for the giraffe that would be digitally inserted later on.
zoo stories
In the end, there was an overabundance of extras in some of the Indian location scenes. But getting animals to fill the set of the Pondicherry Zoo was a more challenging proposition. India’s animal protection laws, particularly as they relate to the use of animals in film, are among the most stringent in the world. Large animals could not be transported from other zoos, but it was possible to secure an assortment of smaller creatures—rabbits, goats, birds—plus an elephant for the set. The rest of the animals were filmed at Taiwanese zoos and, along with a few computer-generated creatures, added in post-production.
The Bengal tigers were born, raised, and trained in France and Canada and filmed on the set in Taichung.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
On the monitor, Pi’s mother (Tabu) tends the plants in the botanical garden.
Photograph: Peter Sorel.
Pi shows off Richard Parker to Anandi. (The reverse shot of the actual tiger exhibit was filmed in Taiwan.)
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
Production designer David Gropman discusses details of the zoo with Ang Lee.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
King is described by his trainer, Thierry Le Portier, as “very intelligent,” and “the most beautiful”—a tiger’s tiger.
FOUR TIGERS AND A HYENA
Let’s meet the four real-life felines and one hyena who made their contributions to the role of Pi’s fellow traveler. Needless to say, the process of filming tigers wasn’t as linear and predictable as shooting with a human actor. As David Ticotin, whose unit spent the most time with King and company, observes: “the one thing you have to remember when working with animals is that every day is different. Every minute is different. So we just keep rolling the camera.” He adds, “We have to.”
But in the end, each tiger contributed his or her share of moments that would become part of Richard Parker’s performance. As the main model for Richard Parker, King was used a great deal for close-ups, more than any of the other tigers. Along with providing extensive, detailed reference footage for the animators in post-production, the other tigers had some fine on-screen moments as well.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
Minh, King’s beautiful sister, is “calm and cool,” according to Le Portier, but with a bold side that came out in front of the cameras.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
Themis, looking fierce, was in fact quite a professional, whose previous credits include Two Brothers.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
Described by the crew members as a “pussycat,” Jonas, the fourth tiger, came with his trainer, Niall Higgins, from Canada.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
Along with the felines, Le Portier also brought Vlad, a spotted hyena, one of seven that he owns, to the set. By the end of the shoot Vlad and Lee had become fast friends: “I love the hyena,” Lee says. “She let me scratch her neck, she made a noise—a crazy, shrieking noise. I think I’m the only one she let do that other than the trainer.”
shooting tigers in taichung
After the India portion of the shoot, Life of Pi became two parallel productions, with a second splinter unit in Taiwan under the direction of first assistant director David Ticotin shooting the animals’ routines and reactions for various specific scenes that were being shot with Sharma in the main tank. (The two co-stars of Life of Pi could never share the same space, except digitally.) “Each one of the shots had to cut into a sequence that Ang had designed,” says Ticotin. Which translated to a lot of shots.
While the tiger trainers rehearsed the animals, a team led by visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer and VFX producer Susan MacLeod observed and videotaped the sessions, ultimately creating an entire library of tiger details: the way a tiger’s paws compress on the ground as it walks, the way the animal stretches and yawns, the way the skin on a tiger’s belly (which hangs slightly loose, like a house cat’s) swings back and forth as the animal saunters away—all of which served as raw material when it was time to construct the digital elements of Richard Parker in post-production.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
Themis is ready for her close-up.
Photograph: Peter Sorel.
Jonas, finding his inner housecat. The action was filmed for the scene where Richard Parker swats at a swarm of flying fish.
piscine molitor
As work with the tigers continued, a large-scale replica of a celebrated Parisian Art Deco swimming pool rose out of the tarmac next door: the Piscine Molitor. The pretext, of course, was a brief scene shot to accompany the adult Pi’s narration of how he got his name, Piscine Molitor Patel, thanks to his mamaji (“honorary uncle”), who venerated the pool as the purest and most beautiful in the world. And so on an unseasonably cold March day, 120 extras, dressed as sun-worshipping 1950s Parisians—all bright red lipstick and frilly pastel bikinis—arrived in Taichung to start work.
While costume designer Arjun Bhasin had kept things plain for the Pondicherry scenes, he allowed himself a lot more leeway with the swimming pool sequence. He and production designer David Gropman worked together to create a very particular color palette, bringing out a kind of artificiality without violating historical authenticity. “It’s kind of fantastical, but it’s not,” says Bhasin about the dreamlike quality of the costumes and set. “There’s so much about it like a story being told to Pi as a child, who’s then telling the story to somebody else, and it’s like Chinese whispers [the game of telephone], you know? When you get to the end of it and you see it visually, it’s like, is that really what happened? Or is it someone’s interpretation of someone’s interpretation of someone’s interpretation of what that could have been?”
Still courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.
Mamaji, Pi�
��s honorary uncle, swimming through the pure waters of the Piscine Molitor.
Illustration: Joanna Bush.
The Piscine Molitor, circa 1950, as imagined by the art department, with the help of old postcards.
Photograph: Jake Netter.
The set of the Piscine Molitor.
Flyers: Katie Lee.
Crowd assistant director Katie Lee doggedly scoured Taichung for European extras with flyers and footwork.
Flyers: Katie Lee.
A list of requirements for extras, from flip-flops to makeup.
Photograph: David Lee.
The Piscine Molitor in 2009. The pool was abandoned to graffiti for years, though plans are afoot to transform it into a new sports complex.
Like the Temple float festival—indeed, like all of Life of Pi—the entire world that Lee built up exists only in order to frame a small figure. Here, Mamaji, Pi’s swimming guru and pool connoisseur (played by Elias Alouf, Sharma’s yoga coach), stands solemnly poised as if on the edge of some holy river, about to dive in. When he does, the Piscine Molitor’s liquid, enhanced by 3-D, shimmers and ripples so pristinely that for a brief moment, Mamaji’s assertion that this swimming pool’s water is so pure that it can cleanse the soul seems not so absurd after all.