I suspect that I don’t get Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi. I base that suspicion on the fact I don’t understand why the book is such a big deal, or so moving or transformative for some people. It’s about a kid on a boat stranded at sea, and the kid is boring and has a tiger companion*. Snooooze.
But it’s a modern classic and it’s been languishing in development hell for nigh upon a decade at this point. Once M Night Shymalan was going to make it into a movie and then the latter half of his career happened. The latest person attached was Ang Lee, and I thought that he had moved on from the project, but I guess that the poor reception of Taking Woodstock pushed him back, since the Guardian is reporting that he’s working on it again.
“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!”
Those sentences all sound, to me, to be contradicting each other.
Life of Pi could very well be Lee’s next film, as he doesn’t seem to have anything else on his plate at the moment.
* I originally had a ‘spoiler’ here but got a complaining email from someone who hasn’t read the book despite it being out for the entire decade. Read a fucking book, heathens.