single tree with no origin and no end. It was an associative way of connecting the island, which is a very alien ecosystem, to something very familiar and very Indian—and actually part of Ang’s childhood as well, since banyans are fairly common in Taiwan. I also remember walking through the rainforest while doing a project in Madagascar and looking at trees and thinking about the island while I was there. For the freshwater swim holes I looked at wicker baskets and lobster traps. The pools were supposed to be very innocuous and utopian during the day, and then at night they became these horrifying vats of acid. That would actually trap fish. It was a tremendous amount of fun doing dozens of drawings, figuring out the logic of the island. And the effects people at Rhythm and Hues did a fantastic job with it. It looked so beautiful. Well it’s the part of the movie that would challenge the viewer’s belief. It was the part that had the most anxiety for me—you know the tiger is great, the ocean’s great, the sky is great. They’re all just immaculately real, but what about this island? I remember trying to talk Ang out of having the island at all—he dispatched me with a gesture. Of course he was right. Now there’s also this other thing called the French Chef sequence. What was that? Well, it was very vague in the script other than the fact that Pi is at the end of his rope and he goes to the bottom of the ocean in a dream sequence and sees his family and a flooded city. It ended up as this amazing combination of psychedelic natural history and Bollywood musical that takes place in a setting of the religious architecture that Pi loves, zoo animals, and his family together having a picnic at the bottom of the ocean. It was potentially one of the most insane imaginative sequences ever in cinema, and luckily I was slightly skeptical that the studio would ever agree to fund it. It was still a huge blow when Ang told me that it wasn’t going to happen. So that was the end of that.
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