Canadian author Yann Martel says he'd consider trying his hand at screenwriting now that he has seen his celebrated novel Life of Pi turned into a dazzling 3-D spectacle for the big screen.
The Booker Prize-winning writer says he's impressed with director Ang Lee's meticulous adaptation of his 2001 tale, about an Indian boy lost at sea with a ravenous tiger.
"I like creative challenges. It might be fun to try something like that," Martel admits in a recent interview from his home in Saskatoon.
"If a film project were available and the timing was right, I might be interested."
The screenplay for Life of Pi was penned by David Magee, the Oscar-nominated writer who adapted Finding Neverland from Allan Knee's play The Man Who Was Peter Pan.
Martel says he had little involvement in Lee and Magee's efforts to wrestle his meditative book Life of Pi into a visual kaleidoscope suitable for the cinema. But he did offer a few comments when the script was in its early stages.
The 49-year-old notes that Lee asked to meet with him in New York before he agreed to direct.
"I guess for some reason he wanted to meet me and talk to me about the book and then I read the screenplay in two early renditions and gave feedback about the language, about small stuff," he says, adding he made a point of limiting his suggestions to the Oscar-winning filmmaker.
"It wasn't for me to say, 'You've got it all wrong.' I mean, the guy's a director. The guy makes movies and it'd be like me going to tell a painter, 'You should use these colours.' "
Martel says the first version of the screenplay he read didn't include the Japanese investigators that appear in his book, although they were later added and ultimately made it into the film.
Martel says he's a big fan of Lee's work and considers Brokeback Mountain a "masterpiece" but admits to having small quibbles about the way Life of Pi unfolds on the big screen.
Nevertheless, he says he doesn't want to be a "fault-picker."
"There's certainly some scenes I perhaps would have done differently but overall I'm happy," he says.
"The movie is beautiful. It's sumptuous, it's visually a stunning movie. I mean, the ocean - there are so many tableaux on the ocean with the tiger that are like, 'Wow.' And it's not just that it's a technical feat, which it is; it's also just poetry. There's some very lovely tableaux and the island is very successful. The island is particularly well done."
Although it took roughly a decade to get made, Martel says he never had any doubts the unusual story would overcome its many hurdles to become a movie. He credits Fox 2000 Pictures with taking a big creative risk in embracing the book.
"People are very cynical about Hollywood and here's an example of them taking a difficult movie, not only in terms of difficult to film but thematically difficult," says Martel.
"It's a novel with three distinct parts, you know.
Part 1 takes place in India and is about zoos and religion, Part 2 is a shipwreck story, Part 3 is this interrogation in a Mexican hospital. So it doesn't have the standard unity of most novels that have a more traditional unity of time, action and place. And that disparateness, the fact that there's three distinct elements and each is essential, makes it that much more complicated to film."
These days, Martel says he's awaiting the birth of his third child in April and is busy working on his next novel, The High Mountains of Portugal.
That book is actually mentioned briefly at the beginning of Life of Pi when the unnamed author who recounts the magical tale mentions he was working on a novel set in Portugal.
"It's an idea I've had since I was a student at university and I just never knew how to tell it," says Martel.
