Life of Pi is being made into a movie. The screen adaptation of everybody’s favourite novel (by Canadian Yann Martell) won’t won’t be out until 2009, but I think it’s worth getting excited about. It’s being directed & filmed by Jean-Pierre Jeuner, the same director that did Amélie, which, if you remember, was a brilliant French film with gorgeous cinemtography and a flavour-filled style. If he and his team are behind Life of Pi, then I think it promises to be an engaging and visually rich film. I wonder how they’ll handle the ending?

Originally, M Night Shyamalan, the director behind Signs and The Sixth Sense, was slated to handle the directorial role for Life of Pi. Thankfully, M Night dropped out to produce Lady in the Water instead. Said to have been “the perfect person” to handle LoP, we all know it would have just been another suspensful, dimly-lit spiritually-infused allegory with a twist ending if M Night had done it. Life of Pi, as you know, is a suspensful, dimly-lit spiritually-infused allegory with a twist ending AND a tiger, so it’s probably best for somebody else to handle it.

After Shyamalan, they were hoping it would Alfonso Cuaron, the man behind Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but “they” were subsequently disappointed when he too gave the big thumbs-down. If you are wondering who “they” are, it’s Life of Pi producer Gil Netten. Don’t worry that his most noteworthy credentials include mediocre pulp like Fever Pitch and Dude, Where’s My Car?, the role of a producer is simply to locate and hire the right talent to execute a concept. In the end, it’s the director who sets and tone and style, and in our case, Jean-Pierre Jeuner will be relying on the same Editor, Cinematographer and Costume Designer as he did with Amélie. This means that Life of Pi is bound to have not only a juicy flavour, but a coherent and sound artistic vision.