Director says he has cracked the structure of Yann Martel's allegorical novel about a boy adrift at sea with a tiger

It has been stuck in development hell for much of the past decade, but the big-screen version of Yann Martel's 2002 Man Booker prize-winning novel Life of Pi finally looks set to go into production after the Oscar-winning film-maker Ang Lee confirmed it will be his next film.

Martel's acclaimed novel chronicles the travails of a shipwrecked teenage boy stuck on a life raft with only a female orangutan, injured zebra, hungry hyena and brooding Bengal tiger for company. In recent years the likes of M Night Shyamalan, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Alfonso Cuarón have all been attached at one time or another to the project, but none has managed to get a movie into production.

Lee told the Digital Spy website his version was still at the scripting stage and he had not yet begun to think about casting.

"I'm delivering the first draft," he said. "I think I've cracked the structure of the movie and I'll figure out how to do it later.

"How exactly I'm going to do it, I don't know … A little boy adrift at sea with a tiger. It's a hard one to crack!"

Lee said the film would most likely be out in two years' time. The Taiwan-born director's next movie in UK cinemas will be Taking Woodstock, his comedy-drama about the 1969 music festival, which premiered in May to lukewarm reviews at Cannes. It screens at the London film festival today and opens nationwide on 13 November.