'I didn’t think Life of Pi could be filmed,' says director in UK for premiere

 
P13 Ang Lee Pic:Rex features
3 December 2012

The biggest-selling novel in the Booker Prize’s 44-year history presented film director Ang Lee with the biggest challenge of his illustrious career.

Life of Pi has its British movie premiere in Leicester Square tonight — but Oscar-winner Lee admits he had thought the fantasy about a teenager shipwrecked with a tiger could never be filmed.

He revealed that he kept film studio Fox waiting eight months after it wooed him to adapt Yann Martel’s novel, which has sold seven million copies.

The director of Brokeback Mountain, Sense And Sensibility, Hulk and Crouch­ing Tiger, Hidden Dragon eventually said he would do it because “it didn’t leave me — I got hooked”.

Even then he could not imagine how his team could pull it off technically, with scenes involving the sinking of a giant ship and 227 days of Pi stuck on a lifeboat with a range of zoo creatures in storms.

He admitted he “got lucky” by finding novice actor Suraj Sharma to play the starring role after auditioning 3,000 young men in India. He then turned to computer-generated imagery, 3D and the world’s biggest water tank to create the sea and storm effects.

Lee, 58, who read the novel with his wife and two children when it came out in 2001, said he was very conscious of literary expectation in trying to film the much-loved story. “At the beginning, the book is the bible,” he said.

“But when you’ve spent 12 hours not getting a shot done with a boy freezing in water, you don’t care any more. You’re trying to make the movie work. I’m pretty loyal to the book but I hope the film stands on its own.”

Sharma, 19, said that by the time he had spent 10 months filming he realised “Pi was part of me”. He has abandoned plans to study economics — opting instead for philosophy.

“Lying there on that boat and wondering what is going on, you do get a little philosophical,” he said. “And Ang has a truly philosophical mind. He is awesome.”

The film will be re­leased on December 20.

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