A quick recap:

After the release of A Very Long Engagement, Fox Studios had contacted me to find out if I would be interested in adapting Life of Pi, a novel written by Yann Martel.

So Guillaume Laurant and I wrote a screenplay, which the studio immediately adored (a rare occurrence in Hollywood).

Then we began a period of pre-preparation: visiting Fox’s Baja Studios in Mexico (which were created to make the film Titanic), location scouting in India with my cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, set designer Nigel Phelps (with whom I made Alien: Resurrection) and Iaian Smith, a line producer known for his experience in the country, having produced The City of Joy, a film shot in India.

Rather quickly we came an estimate: 85 million dollars! Much more than Fox Studios had expected…

In order to budget the film more precisely, Iaian Smith asked me to create a storyboard, which I did.

Nigel Phelps asked me to make a model of the boat and articulated models of the tiger and child, much like for an animated film. By using my video camera this allowed me to better visualize the staging and determine the frames.

Throughout four and a half months I took more than 3000 photos, placing the characters on a sea of shimmering fabrics, taking pictures from all angles, choosing the images and editing the sequences on my computer… All of it was then redrawn by Maxime Rebière…

Unfortunately, the more we moved forward with the study, the more we were sure of the original sum of 85 million dollars.

Tom Rothman, the then boss of Fox Studios, asked me if I could produce the film in Europe. So for another two and a half months my teams and I carried out a study in Europe. We imagined building wave machines, and a pool in the Spanish studios in Alicante, and found technical solutions for the tiger / child / sea problem … I worked with Thierry Leportier, the famous wild animal trainer, and finally reached the 59 million budget that Fox Studios was looking for.

59 million… EUROS… unfortunately this was at a time that favored heavily the euro in the euro-dollar exchange rate. Which meant that we were actually back to the same budget.…

Then someone said something that gave me shivers: “Let’s start again from scratch and find some new solutions!” That was when I understood that I could very easily spend the rest of my life working on the project.

So I let Fox Studios know that I wished to work on another film (Micmacs), offering to pick « Pi » back up after that film, knowing that technology would have advanced and that it might have become easier to make the film.

Finally the project was entrusted to Ang Lee, and will be released in France in the next few days. Unfortunately, Ang Lee did what I would have done in his shoes: he didn’t read our script and rewrote his own adaptation.

A quick look on IMDB confirms what I already knew: in the end the film cost 120 million dollars! It’s true that Ang Lee filmed in Taiwan, which apparently invested heavily in the film…

As a consolation, I tell myself that every director must have made: a black and white film, a great success, an American film and a film… which is never made. After all, Tim Burton worked for a year on Superman, which was never made, Kubrick on Napoleon and Marcel Carné on the Island of Lost Children…

What is certain is that if The Odyssey of Pi turns out to be a good movie, it’s going to bug me, and if it is a bad film, it’s going to bug me…

I do feel better knowing that if I had persisted, the film would probably only be coming out today, and I would have spent seven years on a commissioned film…

Here are some images of the storyboard that I made, first in photos, then redrawn by Rebière.