Director Ang Lee’s next project will be his adaptation of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi for the Fox 2000 branch of Fox. He has confirmed that “the project still at the scripting stage he hasn’t started thinking about who will play the lead character.” Lee’s first draft of the script is expected to be delivered to Fox soon, but the film itself is about two years away from fruition.

The novel follows the fantastical journey of the titular Pi, an Indian boy who, through his natural curiosity and his family’s ownership of a zoo, goes on a journey that is marked by his being shipwrecked on a lifeboat with a tiger (and, at one point, an ill-fated zebra, orangutan, and hyena). The bulk of the story takes place on the boat with the tiger, so let’s hope Lee finds an actor for Pi who can carry such a role.

Martel’s book was published in 2001 and received the Man Booker Prize for Fiction (also known as the Booker Prize, a literary prize awarded annually for the best original full-length novel written in English, available only to citizens of Ireland, Zimbabwe, and the British Commonwealth). Receipt of the Booker Prize all but guarantees international acclaim and recognition, and the book went on to sell 185,000 copies in hardcover and about 2 million copies in paperback. The book has also twice been adapted into a play.

The LIFE OF PI adaptation has been a hot ticket for many years, and has, at different times, been attached to directors such as M. Night Shyamalan, Alfonso Cuarón, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

Lee’s latest film, TAKING WOODSTOCK, opened this summer to relative critical and box office failure. He won the Oscar for Best Director with 2005’s BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN.

Source Digital Spy, via The Playlist