Life of Pi, the successful 2012 film was adapted from the Yann Martel novel published in 2001. Since most screenplay writers don’t have the luxury of writing consecutive pages of description, they must endeavor to be economic and selective with their narrative. Yesterday, I posted both the screenplay and novel versions of To Kill A Mockingbird to demonstrate a quality adaption of a novel. The novel version of TKAM begins with about five successive pages of narrative. The Horton Foote screenplay begins with six sentences of description and a voice over narration.
For Life of Pi, screenwriter David Magee had the challenge of having his main character on a lifeboat for a large portion of the story. He also had to deliver pages of narrative and cleverly used voice over with Pi reading information from a survival manual and talking to himself, which is believable for anyone who is alone for long periods of time. And of course, Magee had the exciting element of having a Tiger in the boat coexisting with his young protagonist. IMHO, what Magee did is fantastic and it won him the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.
For his seafaring disaster story All Is Lost with Robert Redford, screenwriter J.C. Chandor has almost no dialogue. Though there is no tiger in his sailboat, the protagonist has the challenge of keeping his craft afloat with no working radio to call for help, while fighting the elements in time to be rescued. I suspect the challenge of crafting a script for a story like this requires a lot of work, including studying up on the subject of how to skillfully operate a sailboat. But to undertake a project with so much narrative, a screenwriter needs a lot of practice.
I’ve attached a link, for those of you interesting in reading the Life of Pi screenplay.
http://freepdfhosting.com/b9c7d36a4c.pdf
That is such a great film and great script, which was based on the novel by Yann Martel, who also wrote another great novel, Beatrice and Virgil.
Great link, Phil - you are certainly on a roll!
Bill C: Thanks my friend. I'm on a sweet roll.
Visual storytelling is very important. Thanks Guru Phil, formerly known as Zen Master. you change your name more often than I change my underwear. Let's see, Monday, Wednesday, Saturday. Versuchend, komisch zu sein und zu hoffen, fiel ich nicht durch!