Ang Lee's wild ride to bring 'Life of Pi' to the screen

As Ang Lee tells it, he was destined for the difficult task of turning Yann Martel's philosophical novel Life of Pi into a film.

"I read the book when it came out and found it mind-boggling," Lee says after a screening of the film at this year's New York Film Festival. "But I remember thinking that no one in their right mind would make a film of it, as it is literature, it is philosophy. Although the book has some cinematic elements, I thought it would be very expensive to adapt and very difficult to achieve, technically speaking. But about four years ago, Fox 2000 Pictures approached me, and said it would be their dream to work with me on it. Little by little, it started to become my destiny, my fate."

It's a good thing the fates were with Lee: the movie stands as one of the thoughtful director's most interesting works. If good cinema, as Jean-Luc Godard said, is defined as research in the form of a spectacle, then Life of Pi is a resounding success. Clever use of 3-D technology makes for spectacular viewing that rivals James Cameron's Avatar, and careful attention to the literary source, by Lee and screenwriter David Magee, means the philosophical nuances of the novel remain. Equally impressive is that the 3-D effects, while big, are never distracting. Instead, they open up the book's confined setting and augment the story.

The story of Life of Pi is essentially a tug of war between a young Indian boy called Pi (played by Suraj Sharma) and a character called Richard Parker. The spin here is that Richard Parker is not a man, but a ferocious Bengal tiger originally captive in Pi's father's zoo in Pondicherry, India. Pi's father decides to relocate the zoo to Canada, and packs all the animals, along with his family, into a ship, Noah's ark-style. But the ship sinks in a storm, and Pi finds himself adrift in a lifeboat - with the hungry tiger as company. The bulk of the movie describes the mental battle that ensues between boy and beast as they try to survive.

Filmmakers don't like constrained locations. Unless you're a master like Alfred Hitchcock, who was adept at opening up small spaces in films such as Rear Window and Rope, they don't usually result in good cinema. Most directors will likely baulk at the idea of shooting a full-length feature set almost exclusively in a small boat. That's where the 3-D technology comes in, says Lee, who uses 3-D to add an extra dimension to expand the setting, so that it never gets boring. "I didn't think the film would be possible in 2-D," he says. "I actually thought about using 3-D before I understood [the technology behind it] properly. I thought it would be a way to add another dimension. We just couldn't have done this as a regular story set on a boat."

The 3-D technology provides the spectacle necessary for a modern Hollywood release, but Lee says he also paid attention to the tiny details of surviving disasters at sea. Martel, the author of the book, used an account called Survive the Savage Sea for his research. That book by Dougal Robertson tells how, in 1972, the Scotsman, his family and a Welsh hitchhiker survived 24 days marooned at sea in a dinghy after their schooner was holed by killer whales.