Director Ang Lee has set his Oscar-winning eyes on adapting Yann Martel's fantasy novel, Life of Pi, for the screen. But will the post-colonial allegory about a shipwrecked orangutan, tiger, hyena, zebra and the son of a zookeeper set adrift in the Pacific chew up Lee and spit him out as it did Alfonso Cuarón, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and M. Night Shyamalan?
Those directors had previously expressed interest in turning the Man Booker Prize-winning book into a film. With legendary comics scribe Alan Moore's "inherently unfilmable" Watchmen headed for a March release, replete with nauseating merchandising tie-ins, Martel's critically acclaimed fantasy remains one of a few high-profile film adaptations stuck in development hell.
But Life of Pi's purgatory may not last as long as Watchmen's did, according to Variety. Lee, who directed Brokeback Mountain and Hulk, is currently in talks with Fox and producer Gil Netter to supervise a script to be penned by a yet-to-be-hired writer. IMDb has a 2011 release date nailed down.
Until the inevitable happens, we'll have to settle for Hoss Gifford's Life of Pi-inspired CGI short, viewable above, the first trailer ever made for a Booker-winning novel. It has aged relatively well, but Lee's film will no doubt age better.
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