What was the hardest scene to cut in Pi?

Very often in a film, one of the scenes you spend the most time on has no visual effects at all. For me it’s the scene where Pi’s family is having dinner and talking about religion versus reason when Pi is 11. That scene we worked on a lot — changed it, rewrote it, reshuffled it, and shortened it. We decided early on that we were going to drop some of it, but what lines do we drop, and what lines do we put back?

Every version of that scene was really good, but it just took a long time for it to reach its final form. Some visual effects scenes, like the shipwreck scene — which is a big long scene, and took them a long time to do that in bits and pieces over a month — basically didn’t change. We got that right, and got it into its final form really early. There were enormous technical challenges in a scene like that, and in the flying fish scene, but the work that we did was about visual effects, and not re-cutting very much. I swapped the order of two shots in the flying fish scene, and we did that very early on. It was enormously challenging, but not in the normal editorial kinds of ways.

The hard part in Pi was the large scale stuff. The hard part was that the film doesn’t have this strong narrative pulling you through. It’s not a caper movie. You don’t want your audience to feel like they’re lost at sea. You want to feel a plot pulling you through, which there is, but not in the way of a lot of movies.

What type of challenges does 3D present for creating special effects?

Visual effects and 3D are really hard. Everything’s much harder. 2D is a lot more forgiving — even just with simple blue screens. Pi’s on a boat that’s moving around, and he’s got wild hair. Often when you’re working with a blue screen, if you don’t get every hair it doesn’t matter much, but in 3D his two eyes have to match and they have to match perfectly. If they don’t, you’ll notice. In order to avoid motion blur you might shoot with a wider angle, defining the edges on both eyes and making them match. If there’s something you have to paint out in 2D it’s nothing. In 3D, you have to have the whole space mapped and track it equally in both eyes, so it takes 20 times as long. Things that are relatively simple in 2D are a nightmare in 3D.

"Things that are relatively simple in 2D are a nightmare in 3D."

In our film, the goal was to make everything look real. Our tiger is not a cartoon tiger or a fantasy tiger. It has to look real, and that was one of the problems with getting this film made. You can’t make this movie until you can do a photorealistic CG tiger, and that’s really hard. In the film there are 23 shots with a real tiger. In some cases it’s intercut with a CG tiger, which set the bar really high.

We used that for scene when Pi was training Richard Parker with a stick. We shot the real tiger first for 4.5 hours. I went through that footage myself, sat down with the tiger trainer in Taiwan, and he told me what everything means in psych terms told me about what the tiger is thinking. Then we worked out what the scene could be, and how the scene could be structured given what we had.

At one point the tiger sits down scratches his claws on a hatch below him. The tiger decided to do that. It decided that’s where it would scratch its claws — that’s a real tiger shot. Our tiger trainer explained that that’s a nervous tiger trying to pretend it’s not nervous. It’s saying, “See, you’re not intimidating me — I’m gonna scratch my claws like I don’t care.” We included that because it was just stunning. Three weeks after we shot that part, we shot the same part with Suraj. He was there with our animation supervisor giving him an eyeline and swatting at the stick, while I was in the back of the boat narrating the scene.