New life for 'Pi' with Ang Lee

By Sarah Sluis

Ang Lee, director of action and romance, will take a crack at developing Life of Pi, a book acquired back in its bestseller days and subsequently developed into a couple of screenplays. Fox 2000 has

never gotten the project off the ground. The property is a challenge: it involves a Sixth Sense-type realignment in the last pages of the book, but doesn't commit to the change, leaving the ending open in a way that Hollywood would usually close.

Not surprisingly, M. Night Shyamalan himself has written a screenplay for the work, along with Dean Georgaris (The Manchurian Candidate, What Happens in Vegas). Whether the project moves beyond talks will probably depend on the director's take on the work (and what to do with that ending). Fox 2000, the rights holder, is currently looking for another writer to make a third go-around on the screenplay, tailoring it to Lee's vision.

The project poses an additional challenge beyond its twisty ending: animals. Most of the book takes place on a lifeboat (a third problem), where a boy is stranded with a zebra, hyena, orangutan, and tiger. Would Lee use real ones, or CGI creations? The boy also communicates with the animals--will they speak or will it be an internal thought?

There are certainly precedents for these types of dilemmas. Who can forget the monologues Tom Hanks conducted with a volleyball in Cast Away? Alfred Hitchcock set a whole movie on a lifeboat (and included a cameo of himself via a newspaper) in 1944's Lifeboat. There's also the countless dog, cat, and horse movies where you can sense the bond not only between the animals but also between the owner and the animal.

The most intriguing, and not immediately cinematic, part of Yann Martel's book is that all of our information comes from the boy, but he himself is not necessarily a reliable witness (thus the Sixth Sense comparison--although there we have the young boy present to give us clues that Bruce Willis is not as he seems). Just as I am curious to see the equally challenging adaptation of The Road this spring, I would love to see what Ang Lee could do with as introspective, animal-oriented a book as Life of Pi.