Ang Lee breaks every rule in new Life of Pi film
Purchase this article for republication
Buy SPH photos
NEW YORK (AFP) - Director Ang Lee says he broke every rule in Life of Pi, which premiered on Friday, bringing the best-selling novel into stunning 3-D life with a production featuring an unknown Indian actor, four tigers and the world's biggest wave machine.
"There are a few classic advices in movies: never make a movie featuring animals, kids, water or 3-D," the Taiwanese-born American director quipped at the premiere, which was the opening screening of the New York Film Festival in Manhattan. "We ignored all (of them)."
The filmmaker, who won Oscars for Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, had to pull out all the stops to get Yann Martel's 2001 novel of the same name on screen.
The story, centred around a shipwrecked Indian boy called Pi who survives in a life raft with a Bengal tiger, posed obvious casting difficulties. The overriding theme of the search for God was also not standard Hollywood fare.
