After the box office disappointment of his last movie, Taking Woodstock, director Ang Lee is apparently looking to adapt an award-winning novel from Canada next. Averaging one feature every two years since The Hulk in 2003, Lee said that his next project "is two years ahead," but he told Digital Spy that he has a story in mind.
I think I'm going to do Life of Pi. A little boy adrift at sea with a tiger. It's a hard one to crack.
Written by Yann Martel and originally published in 2001, Life of Pi tells the story of Piscine "Pi" Molitor Patel, a young Indian boy stranded on a boat in the Pacific Ocean with a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and a Bengal tiger named "Richard Parker." The British edition of Life of Pi won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction the year after its release, and M. Night Shyamalan (The Happening), Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men), and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (A Very Long Engagement) have all been attached to direct the adaptation at one point or another in the past. Lee said that he hasn't done any casting yet, but he is currently working on a draft of the script.
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!