The cinematographer, Claudio Miranda, had always wanted to work with Lee, and he jumped at the chance to join Life of Pi. No stranger to the ambitious production, having shot TRON: Legacy and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Miranda was excited. “Ang came to me because I do a lot of jobs that are kind of complicated,” Miranda says. But he only found out after he’d agreed to do it that Lee wanted to shoot the entire film in 3-D.”
“Miranda remembers the day well. They were trying to capture Pi landing in the water while the ship is sinking. A camera was supposed to circle around him as he fell. “It was a lot of coordination,” Miranda says, adding later that the scene didn’t even make it in the movie. In retrospect, Miranda can now pinpoint why things went so wrong that day. One of them was simple: The water in the tank was too hot. But he counts that day among many when things didn’t go as planned with the equipment. Everyone was still learning.