Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
The director and his actor.
The cameras rolled, and Sharma cried.
Script supervisor Mary Cybulski was stunned. “Suraj really gave himself over to Ang,” she says. “He cried in a really surrendering way that most high school guys just can’t bring themselves to do, that most grown-up actors can’t bring themselves to do.” Says Lee: “Suraj has to work through all the layers of numbness, physical numbness, to reach that deep kind of emotion—he’s not just crying tears—this makes a big difference.”
“And it was quite brilliant. And the third take, it was just like everybody’s heart . . .” Lee pauses. “I was very proud of Suraj.”
And he told him so.
Photograph: Peter Sorel.
How to cradle a dying tiger: Lee blocks the scene for Sharma.
Photograph: Peter Sorel.
“We’re dying, Richard Parker.” The tiger’s weakness allows the one moment of physical contact between the boy and the animal.
“Suraj became a kind of spiritual leader to all of us. Seeing him go about trying his best, not getting sick, not getting hurt. Everything he does is genuine, because it’s his first time. Crews appreciate that kind of actor. It just reminds everybody why they want to be filmmakers.”
—ANG LEE
Still courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.
The blue “stuffie” has been digitally replaced.
a passage to india: a portfolio by mary ellen mark
Photographer Mary Ellen Mark has produced many iconic cinematic portraits, collected in her book Seen Behind the Scenes: Forty Years of Photographing on Set—the calligraphic curve of Federico Fellini’s stocky frame as he calls out through the bullhorn on the set of Satyricon; or Marlon Brando, a giant beetle punctuating his shaved head, staring up at the viewer with dark Kurtzian irony from the heart of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. But the larger part of Mark’s career has been devoted to photo essays on the marginalized, the exploited, and the eccentric: residents of a women’s psychiatric ward, street kids in Portland, prostitutes in Bombay (Mumbai). The latter were the subjects of her book Falkland Road, one of the earliest fruits of a long relationship with India that also inspired her to produce work on the Indian circus and street performers.
This combination of background and sensibility made Mark a great fit for capturing the India section of the Life of Pi shoot. She also returned at the end of production to catch a few days of filming scenes in and around the beach resort of Kenting, which included Pi’s farewell to Richard Parker and his landing in Mexico. Complementing the work of still photographers Phil Bray, Peter Sorel, and Jake Netter, Mark brought an old-school vision to the set. In a world gone digital, she remains stubbornly analog, enamored of working in black and white, chasing light with her beaten-up Leicas, and capturing slivers of her subjects’ souls on the silver emulsion of old-fashioned film.
Photograph: Jake Netter.
Photographer Mary Ellen Mark with extras for the mosque scene.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
“He’s so expressive, if he’d only take off those hats.”
—Mary Ellen Mark.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
Adil Hussain, who plays Santosh Patel (Pi’s father).
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
Shravanthi Sainath as Anandi, the Bharatanatyam dancer who captures Pi’s heart.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
Tabu, who plays Gita Patel (Pi’s mother).
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
Ayush Tandon, as twelve-year-old Pi.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
Suraj Sharma and Shravanthi Sainath.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
The domino effect: schoolboy extras kick back between takes.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
Men from Pondicherry’s Muslim quarter waiting in the extras holding area.
Photograph: Mary Ellen Mark.
Suraj Sharma, at rest.
4 reaching shore: post-production
Still courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox.
Pi watches the Tsimtsum going down.
On a brisk winter afternoon, Ang Lee—along with visual effects producer Susan MacLeod and editor Tim Squyres—was sitting in the comfortable confines of the director’s editing-projection room in New York City watching a scene from the latter part of Life of Pi. Joining them via video conference from Los Angeles were visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer and animation director Erik-Jan de Boer.
The scene conveyed how Pi’s hard-won sense of mastery over the world is beginning to disintegrate under the pressure of day-to-day monotony and loneliness. Everyone watched Suraj Sharma crawl along the tarp of the lifeboat, imitating the motions and vocalizations of a tiger. Richard Parker lounges a few feet away.
“Richard Parker’s rib cage should sync with Pi’s,” Lee said, and noted that not enough bones were showing at this point in the film. “Maybe Richard Parker shouldn’t even be looking at Pi.”
When Pi attempts to communicate, Lee asked, how should Richard Parker respond? How about a prusten—the quiet, puffing sound that tigers use to express friendliness or at least harmless intention. Squyres said, “I think the only thing Richard Parker is saying in this is, ‘What are you saying?’”
“You talkin’ to me?” someone joked, doing a street-tough tiger à la De Niro. There was a ripple of laughter.
In the end, the decision was no prusten. After all, Pi ends up getting on Richard Parker’s nerves, and the tiger lunges at him.
Lee watched the rest of the scene. “The head movement is too big,” he said. “We don’t notice Richard Parker’s eyes.” This kind of detail is important because Lee wanted the audience to feel the impact of the big cat’s presence on a subjective level. “And the tiger is too aggressive when he chases Pi,” the director continued. “Richard Parker’s scolding Pi—it shouldn’t be too scary.”
Over a two-hour period, the blocking of Richard Parker’s movements—that is to say, the tiger’s performance—was critiqued across the handful of scenes that were under review that day. Though the film was in post-production, it felt oddly as if Lee were giving notes to a live actor, one who was more responsive to instructions than a large, regal cat. Even though Le Portier has logged more time working with tigers than probably anyone alive, Lee had one big advantage over the trainer at this stage of the process, for he had almost fifty animators from the company Rhythm & Hues exclusively working on the actions of the tiger. Rhythm & Hues was creating a computer-generated (CG) cat that was photorealistically modeled on the real-life tiger King, but which could be made to do anything the filmmakers wanted him to.
George Stubbs. Four drawings from A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl. Graphite on paper. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
Four plates from British animal painter George Stubbs’s book Structure of the Human Body with That of a Tiger and a Common Fowl (1795–1806). Drawing on studies of tiger anatomy as well as empirical observations, the animators on Life of Pi were reverse anatomists, building the animal from the inside out as the image order shows.
Photograph: Peter Sorel.
Pi of the tiger: Suraj Sharma practices his feline moves.
“I need to forget what I thought over the course—in this case—of more than a year. Or talked about, dreamed, and then prepped and shot. It takes about a month to forget about that, and just recognize what I have as the raw material.”
—ANG LEE
So when Lee said that Richard Parker needed to tone down his aggression toward Pi in the talking scene, the animation company would provide him with a different take of the scene in which the tiger changed his movements accordingly, like a conscientious professional actor. If that take wasn’t to Lee’s liking, the tiger would play it differently
for the next review, and the next one, until everything was as Lee wanted it to be.
Tim Squyres, Ang Lee’s longtime editor, was of two minds about Life of Pi. From a traditional editing standpoint, Pi felt like less of a challenge for Squyres. Usually they shoot a whole bunch of coverage and they get it to me. And I figure out how the scene’s going to be constructed. Here, they’re giving me a film where there’s already a plan.” The plan being the use of previsualization, which dictated most of the way the film was shot, except for the scenes in India and the framing narrative. Not that Squyres was completely constrained by that—he could certainly try to change things around—but because this was such a difficult, technical shoot, Lee and his crew were pretty economical with the footage. There just wasn’t that much extra material coming out of Taichung that an editor could play around with.
Editing screen by Tim Squyres.
For the scene where Pi flips through the Survival Manual, editor Tim Squyres created a montage of Pi’s expression while reading combined with images of the pages themselves.
“In France we have a saying, ‘Le metteur en scène c’est le bon Dieu’ [the director is the good Lord].”
—THIERRY LE PORTIER
On the other hand, Life of Pi presented an amazing opportunity for an editor. In a normal film, Squyres says, “performances are what they are. I have seven takes and that’s it. In Life of Pi, Richard Parker’s not here yet. The waves aren’t here yet. Production and post-production kind of blur together. On an effects film, like in Hulk or this, I get to be involved in creating a performance, which is a part of the job I’m not usually involved in.”
Squyres talks about “tiger” and “waves” in the same breath as “performance.” It might be strange to imagine Ang Lee, old-fashioned megaphone in hand to make himself heard over the roaring din, actually directing the waves—but that is in fact what he did, in a virtual sense, working with Moving Picture Company (MPC), the Vancouver-based effects house responsible for whipping up the two big storms (Tsimtsum and Storm of God). Lee dictated the basic shape of the waves before a mathematical simulation was run, so that the work of the special effects people had to answer both to the demands of the director’s vision as well as fit into the plausible parameters of how the ocean surface would behave under specific storm conditions. And that was no small order in what is probably the most complex type of special effect to begin with.
Though post-production was broken down into a series of subtasks spread out over several companies, for Lee and Squyres the post-production process started in postvisualization (postvis)—a sort of after-the-shoot version of previsualization—where modifications to existing images or the creation of new rough images of the tiger and other effects gave the editor and director something to work with. The two worked with the postvis artist to determine a rough blocking, a sense of where the tiger was going to be or move through the scene. This blocking served as a set of instructions for Rhythm & Hues, or as a basis of discussion.
VFX still: Rhythm & Hues.
A SENSE OF PLACE
The India part of the film was all shot on location and was not effects-intensive except on a few occasions when, appropriately enough for this section of the story, more old-school techniques were used—matte painting (particularly for the backdrops in the Munnar sequence) and simple plates (that is, footage for the purpose of adding effects), which allowed a single shot or scene to be made of several separate components when practically or aesthetically required.
The biggest number of plates was required for one particular shot of the Pondicherry canal, the crossing that traditionally divided the French section from the Tamil (Indian) section in colonial days. This was supposed to be a brief glimpse of the city as it was in 1954, under French rule, but in reality, most of the old buildings are long gone from the intersection, trees have been planted that weren’t there before, and so on. A set for the lower part of the old buildings was built in a parking lot outside of the city, and was shot as one plate; the upper stories, on another plate, were matte paintings by the effects company Crazy Horse; separate plates were also shot for different passers-by, as well as some plant details. This made for a total of six plates in all, which would be blended together—along with a computer-generated extension of the street and computer-generated water in the canal—into the final streetscape shown above: making this brief, unassuming glimpse of the colonial past the most complicated shot in the first, Indian act of the film.
VFX still: Rhythm & Hues.
The animators came back with roughed-out animations. “Sometimes they have better ideas than we do,” says Squyres, “and we encourage them to.” In the scene where Pi gives Richard Parker water to drink for the first time, Lee and Squyres had postvis of the tiger going straight for the bucket; but when they started blocking out the scene, the animators added a second or two of hesitation, the tiger tapping the unfamiliar receptacle a couple of times with his paws before slurping up the water. This heightened specificity gave the scene more character, and was more in line with a cat’s instinctive caution when faced with an unfamiliar object.
The fact that animators often work on a single shot at a time may lead them to creative insights born out of minute attention to detail, but it can also make them think of the shot as an entity in itself. Says Squyres, “Like, ‘this is the movie.’ And sometimes [animators] won’t want to end right in the middle of some action. But that’s exactly what I want to do, because it leads right into the next shot.” With each individual shot—that is, a length of footage from one cut to another—being worked on by a different individual animator or team of animators, there was plenty of room for variations to start creeping in—something for which Squyres, whose job it was to put all the cuts together into a coherent scene, had to be very much on the lookout.
Going over the animations is, in Squyres’s words, “this endless back-and-forth for hundreds of iterations. Usually the animation comes first.” But in fact, bits and pieces of the other elements start coming in as well. “In some instances we’ll have some shots with waves that don’t really have animation in them. And we’ll have other versions of the same shots where you just see the walls of the wave tank behind, because it’s different people working on it. Those all get merged together eventually.”
Early rough cuts of effects-laden films are often an almost hallucinatory patchwork of all different stages. A real tiger, for example, might change into a crude previs tiger and then into a smooth, hairless tiger in the first stages of animation with someone in a blue-screen suit shimmering through the outline, all of these levels of image moving from one cut to another within a few seconds of a single scene—and with pool-ocean and blue-screen sky making similarly surreal transitions. As with all 3-D films, the process was refined again and again, layer by layer, until the stage called “finaling” was reached—the moment that Lee was able to look at a shot and say that a particular scene was done and ready to go into the movie. And that was for the visuals alone—scoring and sound design still had to come into play.
MAKING A SCENE
VFX still: Rhythm & Hues.
Plate: The scene as it was shot with Sharma in the wave tank.
VFX still: Rhythm & Hues.
Tracking: The camera and boat movement is tracked to later match in the CGI elements.
VFX still: Rhythm & Hues.
Animation: Two different kinds: the hand-animated tiger (with basic skin texture) and individual, or “hero” flying fish (the background fish were procedurally animated using a software package called Massive).
VFX still: Rhythm & Hues.
Tech animation: The texture of the tiger’s fur and details of his expression have been filled in, with skin and muscles added under the skin for greater realism.
VFX still: Rhythm & Hues.
Lighting: The silver and matte balls in the bottom left and the strip of fake tiger fur on the top left reference the reflections, shadows, and textures in the scene as shot on
set, and were used for matching the lighting with the CG elements of the shot.
VFX still: Rhythm & Hues.
Compositing: All of the elements produced by other departments—tiger, fish, ocean, and sky—were blended and matched with the live footage.
The process of putting together each shot was far from linear. In fact, all the elements of the film—and therefore the different departments in charge of handling them—were very much interdependent. In any given shot of Life of Pi, after all, the ocean reflects the sky, the sky determines the lighting, which in turn plays across the fur of the CG tiger, whose choreography is very much tied to the movement of the boat as it rides the waves, and so on.
The Making of Life of Pi Page 11