Ang Lee "Taking Woodstock" was "Life of Pi", which was adapted from the novel of the same name written by Yann Martel. The story was a retrospective first-person narrative from Pi, a then 16-year-old boy from India, who is the only human to survive the sinking of a freighter on the way from India to Canada. He finds himself on a lifeboat with an orangutan, a hyena, a wounded zebra and a Bengal tiger. During this unlikely journey, young Pi questions his belief in God and the meaning of life. The novel was once considered impossible to make into a movie, but
Life of Pi of the name, in the famous legal case R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) where a shipwreck again results in the cannibalism of a cabin boy named Richard Parker, this time in a lifeboat. A third Richard Parker drowned in the sinking of the "Francis Spaight" in 1846, described by author Jack London, and later the cabin boy (not Richard Parker) was cannibalized. Having read about these events, Yann Martel thought, "So many victimized Richard Parkers had to mean something." Martel has mentioned that a book review he read of Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar's 1981 novella "Max and the Cats"