The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent

Ang Lee's Life of Pi opens 21 November 2012: USA, Canada, and--Taiwan

<< < (8/15) > >>

Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.vulture.com/2012/11/life-of-pi-ang-lee-interview.html


Director Ang Lee
on Life of Pi,
Petting Tigers, and
His Hulk  Regret

By Jennifer Vineyard
Today at 12:30 PM



For those who haven't read the book, Life of Pi  is about a boy named Pi who is shipwrecked in the Pacific, his only company for a long time a companion called Richard Parker — a Bengal tiger who was being transported with other zoo animals and shares Pi's lifeboat. At least, that's the better version of two possible stories about Pi's survival, which hits the big screen in a wondrous 3-D rendering courtesy of director Ang Lee, who is already garnering Oscar buzz for the film. Lee chatted with Vulture about surviving at sea, petting tigers, and where he thinks he went wrong with The Hulk.

Yann Martel thanked you for being "crazy" enough to take on his book. Do you think you were crazy?
No, I was just possessed. [Laughs. ] The book is inspiring, fascinating, and mind-boggling, and I read it when it first came out and talked about it with my wife and my sons. But when I was first approached to direct it, it seemed like a crazy idea — and the book seduced me into it, because it was a puzzle to crack. It's an intellectual book, and you have to make it emotional and visual, and without Tom Hanks to help you! [Laughs. ]

There are the old adages of never work with children or animals, never shoot on water ...
I did all three! [Laughs. ]  

Plus you worked with a child — a teenager in this case — who couldn't swim at first. When did you discover that?
After I casted Suraj Sharma. He said, "Oh, yeah. I probably won't drown." [Laughs. ] So I tested him to see how long he could hold his breath, and it was only for fifteen seconds — and we had shots planned that would require him to do that for a minute long! So he had to learn. But everything else, you look at him and you see he is Pi. I remember, when we were testing him, I asked him to tell the second version of Pi's story, and to make it real, and about halfway through, he started to tremble and cry. It was heartbreaking.    

How deep was the tank? Was Suraj ever in danger of drowning?
About eighteen feet? Four, five meters deep. The wave tank could create long surges like the open ocean, so his raft could act and interact with water before it was digitally extended to the horizon. But he wasn't going to drown. [Chuckles. ]

You consulted with real life shipwreck survivor Steven Callahan. Apparently you asked him to leave you out at sea so you would know what it felt like?
I asked him a couple of times, but he wouldn't. The first time I visited him, David Magee, the screenwriter, and I went out to Maine to go on the ocean with him, and I asked him to take the sail down so we could go up and down for a while. And then we consulted with him a few more times in Taiwan, and at the time, he was fighting cancer, but he still went. And this time, we sailed out to see the north tip. We went out on a motorboat, just to go up and down on the big ocean for quite a while. I sat at the water level on a step. But we weren't allowed to be left out there on our own, with no sail, because the waves were too big and it turned out to be too crazy of an idea. The marine guys wouldn't let us, so we took the speedboat.

Were there ever any Crouching Tiger  jokes on set because you were now finally working with actual tigers?
[Laughs. ] Yes, and even just last night we were talking about that! I guess the tiger means something to Pi, because it's his inner self. I see the tiger now as not just his opponent, but also the serious beast side of himself. And the tiger is quite fascinating, because you see yourself in his eyes. You somehow relate to the animal, or it's an emotional projection. It's like in the movie — Pi can't prove it, but he sees something.

Suraj said he wishes he got to pet a tiger. That's his one regret.
Which one did he want to pet?

Jonas.
Ah, yes. He's more pettable. Our main tiger was King, who does all the posing and all the swimming, and then some of the scenes when he's hungry. And when King was sick, we had Jonas. The other two tigers were female — Themis and Minh — and they did the more ferocious scenes, because they're actually more aggressive than King. But we kept Suraj away from the tigers. There was no tiger on the boat! We did a digital tiger for the shots next to him.

How did doing The Hulk  prepare you for this? And what did you think of Mark Ruffalo's Hulk in The Avengers ?
I learned quite a bit about CG from The Hulk,  and I wouldn't have been able to do Life of Pi  without that. But it's easier to create an animal, because there exists a good reference — so a tiger or a hyena is easier than a 2,000-pound rage monster. The hardest thing to do is the weight, not the skin, because there's no reference for something that size that is agile. And the technology's improved, so you can have more details with Mark's Hulk. My problem is that I took the whole thing too seriously. I should have had more fun with it, instead of all the psychodrama! [Laughs. ]

What did you think of your son Mason's turn as Teddy in The Hangover Part II ? Do you give him any advice about films to do next?
He's a Method actor. [Laughs. ] I just told him, "Relax! It's a broad comedy. Just enjoy it." Because that's something we have in common — taking things too seriously. He's trying to make it on his own, and he doesn't want any of my influence, so he's suffering like the rest of them.

Marge_Innavera:

--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 19, 2012, 01:44:24 pm ---(quoted) The trailers left me a little uninterested. Visually stunning of course, but the overwhelming, uplifting score and title cards declaring WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER KNOWN IS LOST and FIND YOUR COURAGE didn't exactly peak my interest or flatter the complex source material. It seemed Ang Lee had sidestepped the unfilmable challenges of the narrative and decided to distract audiences with a smorgasbord of kaleidoscopic colors, effects and action.
--- End quote ---


I've only seen one film in the current improved 3-D so far, and am looking forward to this being the second.  The ads for the movie had rather turned me off -- they considerably sentimentalized the relationship between the title character and the tiger (maybe believable if the animal was a wolf; hardly in this particular story).  But I did a 180 after watching Ang Lee's interview with Charlie Rose and seeing a clip.

The show business adage about directing children and animals is true.  In stage productions, the same is true of a gun on stage: the audience is so preoccupied with waiting for it to go off they tend to miss a lot in the meantime.

Aloysius J. Gleek:


After You've seen Life of Pi,  come back and listen to our [Audio] Spoiler Special with
Dan Engber and Dana Stevens, by clicking:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2012/11/life_of_pi_directed_by_ang_lee_reviewed.html




Life of Pi
See it stoned.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 21, 2012, at 11:24 AM ET



Suraj Sharma in Life of Pi


Life of Pi,  Ang Lee’s adaptation of the best-selling 2001 novel by Yann Martel, might be a good movie to see stoned—or maybe it’s just one that makes you feel as though you already are stoned, floating along on a sea of hyper-crisp 3-D images and evanescent spiritual insights. I suppose it’s suitable that Life of Pi  would be a movie that sets its viewers mentally adrift in this way, since it’s about someone who’s literally adrift: A young Indian man named Pi who survives a shipwreck, only to find himself stranded in a lifeboat with a hungry Bengal tiger.

Why was a tiger crossing the ocean the first place? Well, Pi’s father (Adil Hussain), the owner of a zoo in Pondicherry, has decided to emigrate with his animals, wife, and two young sons to start a new life in Canada. After a stiff frame-story setup in which a French-Canadian writer (Rafe Spall) sits down for an interview with the middle-aged Pi (Irrfan Khan), there’s an extended whimsical flashback to Pi’s childhood in India. As a dreamy grammar-school misfit (played by Ayush Tandon), he annoys his modern-minded atheist dad by incorporating Christian and Muslim prayer into his daily rituals. But later, in his teen years (as played by Suraj Sharma), Pi’s spiritual bent will serve him well. If you’re going to spend months alone in a lifeboat with a giant carnivorous jungle cat, you’d better know how to pray in several languages.

The long middle section—the movie’s strongest stretch— plays like a hallucinogenic mashup of Hitchcock’s Lifeboat,  the reality show I Shouldn’t Be Alive,  and a soothing promotional video that might play on a loop in the waiting room of a very fancy Ayurvedic spa. Many scenes involving the logistics of Pi’s struggle for survival on the raft aim for conventional verisimilitude and suspense—and achieve a surprising degree of both, given that the tiger is a CGI creation and the protagonist’s survival is already assured. But now and again Lee will veer off on lush imagistic tangents, his camera plunging to explore luminescent jellies beneath the ocean’s surface or rising into the heavens to look down on boy and tiger from a chilly stars’-eye-view.

There’s something admirable about Lee’s commitment to lavishing sheer visual beauty on the viewer. Like his God-besotted hero, the director seems passionately in love with the natural world, even as he renders it with a high degree of technical artifice. The tiger is an extraordinarily convincing (and refreshingly unanthropomorphized) digital creation, the ocean water resembles thick molten glass, and the sky, often shown in unnatural shades of peach, gold, and celadon, has a palpable depth, as if the movie were being projected inside a transparent cube. Lee doesn’t do anything especially new with 3-D, and he’s not above having characters poke or throw objects at the lens in the medium’s oldest “hey, looky here!” gambit. But Life of Pi’s sophisticated use of the technology recalls Avatar’s rather than, say, Clash of the Titans’. The image is remarkably bright, clear, and (to use the word James Cameron ’s publicists seem to have implanted in all our brains with a chip) “immersive”—even if what we’re being immersed in feels at times like a vat of warm caramel.

For Life of Pi ’s theology is as gauzy as its images are sharp. Everything happens for a reason in this best of all possible worlds, it seems—unless that world is a godless arena of dog-eat-dog carnage, which is also a distinct possibility. The story of the boy and the tiger in a boat wants to be both a magic-realist fable and a tense survival adventure, two modes of storytelling that undercut and sometimes undo one another. If this is all some symbolic parable about the soul’s struggle with itself, why bother to invest in the practical questions of how Pi will find fresh water or keep his food supply dry? If the tiger isn’t just a tiger but a stand-in for God or nature or the universal Other, do we still need to worry about him chomping off Pi’s arm?

In the disappointingly tiger-free last 20 minutes we hear Pi recount his incredible story, first to investigators at a Japanese shipping company shortly after his rescue and later, as an adult, to that wide-eyed French-Canadian novelist we had completely forgotten was sitting in Pi’s living room. The movie’s energy peters out in a series of book-club conversations about divine will, the power of storytelling, and the resilience of the human spirit. The ending’s pious dullness is enough to make you wish you were back on that lifeboat, where the most pressing questions weren’t spiritual but gastronomic: What’s on the menu for lunch, and what can I do to make sure it isn’t me?

southendmd:
I saw this last night with Lynne and her cousin Chris.  It's showing in both 2-D and 3-D and we chose the latter.  I'm not really a big fan of 3-D and I'm not sure it added that much, except near-seasickness.  

Very true to the novel, which I had read this past summer.  Of course, it's visually stunning, but also emotionally compelling, even exhausting.  I jumped out of my seat more than once.  There are some brutal details in the novel, and the film, rated PG, doesn't dwell on these, thankfully.  Still, there are some very intense moments.  I noticed a few people walked out of the theatre.

The performances of the three Pis are nothing short of wondrous.  I still can't believe that the tiger--named Richard Parker--wasn't real.  

Lynne remarked on Ang's love of ambiguity, and it's no different in this film.  The ending is just like in the book (don't let anyone spoil it for you), and includes a scene filmed in a stark white background.  Sound familiar?  

This film stays with you.  I even greeted the cat with "Hello, Richard Parker" this morning.

Meryl:
Thanks for the review, Paul.  I hope to see it in the next few weeks.  I happened upon a livestream Q & A with Ang from France the other day on youtube.  He's out and about doing promotion now.  8)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page