Few believed the acclaimed 2001 novel “Life of Pi” could be made into a movie — including its eventual director, Ang Lee. “I also thought it was unfilmable,” he says, “up to like three days before I delivered it.”
He’s joking. Mostly. But it’s easy to see why the adaptation presented such huge challenges, both from a technical and storytelling perspective.
The saga begins with middle-aged, Indian-born Pi Patel (Irrfan Khan) telling his incredible life story to a writer (Rafe Spall). As a child, his family ran a zoo, and his father decided to move to Canada, taking a ship loaded with their animals across the ocean. The ship sinks, and Pi (played at this age by Suraj Sharma) finds himself adrift for nearly a year in a lifeboat shared with a ferocious Bengal tiger.
The reality of putting the story on-screen was a daunting and expensive one, because so much computer animation had to be used to capture the quasi-fantasy tone. The tiger and the ocean were almost completely digital. (Water scenes were filmed in a tank, then digitally sweetened.) The whole process took nearly four years: 1 ¹/₂ to tweak the script and digitally create an ocean test scene, six months of actual filming, then a year and a half of post-production.
The result is a buzzed-about Oscar contender and what reviews have pegged as the most visually astounding film of the year. Lee shared with The Post five of his favorite images from the 3-D “Life of Pi,” which opened this weekend.