Unscripted Profile: Life of Pi
* Thanks to 20th Century Fox for providing these exclusive images!
* This is a sponsored post. The opinions stated within are my own.
Life of Pi comes out on November 21st and the buzz about this film is ever-growing. Sitting at a pretty 94% on RottenTomatoes at the time of this writing, Life of Pi is not only being heralded as a visual wonder and triumph of storytelling, but also as a potential Academy Award contender.
Director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Brokeback Mountain) was drawn to adapt the famous book, Life of Pi (by Yann Martel), by more than the extraordinary tale it tells, but also because of the spiritual journey that readers, and now audiences, take with Pi."Whenever there is pain and suffering, you have to look up and go "Why? Why?". I think everybody can relate to that. And we're filmmakers. We create illusions and we take it for real and yeah, I can certainly relate to that. I wouldn't make any movie without deeply relating to it. Maybe they're in different forms of expression, but yeah, I can relate to it.
"I think rationality only goes so far. Not everything that you believe in or they go about can be proved. Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith, you have to have a spiritual side to be able to get through some hardships especially, and it helps out in moments of confusion."Storytelling is a good way by the way. That's what this material is dealing with, the power of storytelling, because life doesn't always make sense. Making sense is an artificial and human way of putting it together. Story is one of them because it has a beginning, middle and end. It has wisdom at the end, it has meaning, and we share it with each other, and that's powerful, that's not nothing. It's not just making illusion."
The star of the film, Suraj Sharma, a newcomer to Hollywood who only auditioned for the role with promise of a sandwich, felt the emotional impact of the film's themes while filming."I can't put it in words. It's too much. It was emotionally and spiritually and physically exhausting. I would never be able to tell people what I went through exactly, but hopefully it will come through in some ways."
Part of Sharma's sturggles were sure to have been his inexperience in acting, but he feels lucky to have been under the guidance of director Ang Lee.
"Honestly, I still feel like I don't know how to act," says Sharma. "It was just him. I was just an instrument.
"He has this thing – suppose you're really nervous and stressed out and going crazy – he'll look you in the eye in a particular manner, and no matter who it is, you just go: whoosh! He's like a Zen master or something. He makes you so calm that you just let him mold you into whatever he wants to mold you into."
Lee describes his mentorship of Sharma as less of a struggle and more like painting on a blank canvas."It's good that he doesn't have any habits yet. I don't have to get rid of anything. I just build the acting on him, just keep building. In some ways, it's probably easier than dealing with somebody with a lot of habits.
"The difficult part was that when he had to deliver things with many layers, that skill he has to obtain. He really had to make a great effort, but sometimes young talent, they break your hearts easily because of their innocence; it's pure and very effective.
"In the process of rehearsing, we go through a lot of things and then on the days they're prepared but they're prepared to react, to improvise. I'm the same way. I don't give the same direction over and over. I try to hit them in different ways to see what will come out from them. That's the way I do it but I like them to be somewhat prepared."The struggles of filmmaking don't just come from acting however. The production side of things can be challenging as well.
I had to find where to shoot and Taiwan seemed to be the answer," Lee said, "because it's a challenge for a Hollywood movie, who haven't really hosted this kind of movie since 1965.
"We had to create our own studio there including the water tank and an underwater tank, too, and we took over an old abandoned airport and the hangar became the shooting studio, we had to convert it, and the workshops became our offices."We took over the airport and we shot in Taichung a lot, the third largest city in Taiwan, they hosted us. Every step was kind of a crazy idea, but it seems to be the most reasonable one to do, and then I did pre-visualization. I spent a year doing animation of the ocean part before I made the movie and got the budget down--I struggled with that--before actually starting the making of it."
Of course, things get even harder when you add that infamous, ticket-price inflating, Avatar-inspired 3rd dimension."I thought if I do it in 3D," Lee remembers, "maybe people will be more open to something new. That was a naïve thought but when I studied into it, I thought it would do wonders to the water. This is a water movie and I thought I had a good chance there even though water is very difficult. 3D has no reflections so it may polarize how you see things and give headaches. There were a lot of difficulties I went through that I had to solve."
Luckily, Ang Lee had lots of help makingthe film as visually stunning and realistic as possible in his Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer (The Golden Compass).There was a debate about whether to include a real tiger at all, but Westenhofer pushed for it. “By doing that, it set our bar high for CGI,” he said, referring to computergenerated imagery. “We couldn’t cheat at all. It pushed the artists to go and deliver something that’s never been done before, something as photo-real as anyone has ever done with an animal.”
Westenhofer said some animators have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals, giving them more human qualities. But the crew was careful not to do that and to keep the digital tiger, bottom, fierce and spontaneous with animalistic instincts.Lee admits that undertaking such a complex prject was daunting.
"It will be just as expensive and with technology that's unknown to me and I didn't know if it would work or not," Lee has said. "Putting that aside, rolling such a big dice and not really knowing whether it would work or not in the mainstream, it was pretty scary."
Luckily for Lee, critics and audiences seem to agree that Life of Pi is an amazing film. And from the look of these pics, they're right. The rest of us have to wait til November 21st to see the whole thing, but for now you can keep scrolling to check out the rest of these exclusive Life of Pi pics from 20th Century Fox!!!
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