Rafe Spall credited as playing...
Writer
- Adult Pi Patel: Faith is a house with many rooms.
- Writer: But no room for doubt?
- Adult Pi Patel: Oh plenty, on every floor. Doubt is useful, it keeps faith a living thing. After all, you cannot know the strength of your faith until it is tested.
- Adult Pi Patel: So which story do you prefer?
- Writer: The one with the tiger. That's the better story.
- Adult Pi Patel: Thank you. And so it goes with God.
- Writer: [smiles] It's an amazing story.
- Writer: [reading off the report] Mr. Patel's is an astounding story, courage and endurance unparalleled in the history of ship-wrecks. Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger.
- Writer: I don't know what to say.
- Adult Pi Patel: It's hard to believe, isn't it?
- Writer: It is a lot to take in. To figure out what it all means.
- Adult Pi Patel: If it happened, it happened. Why should it have to mean anything?
- Writer: So your story does have a happy ending.
- Adult Pi Patel: Well, that's up to you. The story's yours now.
- Writer: I didn't know Hindus said 'Amen.'
- Adult Pi Patel: Catholic Hindus do.
- Writer: Catholic Hindus?
- Adult Pi Patel: We get to feel guilty before hundreds of gods instead of just one.
- [first lines]
- Writer: So, you were raised in a zoo?
- Adult Pi Patel: Born and raised. In Pondicherry, in what was the French part of India. My father owned the zoo, and I was delivered on short notice by a herpetologist, who was there to check on the Bengal monitor lizard. Mother and I were both healthy, but the poor lizard escaped and was trampled by a frightened cassowary. The way of karma, huh? The way of God.
- Adult Pi Patel: What has mamaji already told you?
- Writer: He said you had a story that would make me believe in God.
- Adult Pi Patel: [laughs] He would say that about a nice meal.
- Adult Pi Patel: Now we have to send our little boy to the middle of the Pacific.
- Writer: And make me believe in God.
- Adult Pi Patel: Yes, we will get there.
- Pi Patel: Then the ship sank. What else do you want from me?
- Younger Insurance Investigator: A story that won't make us look like fools.
- Older Insurance Investigator: We need a simpler story for our report. One our company can understand. A story we can all believe.
- Pi Patel: [pause] So, a story without things you've never seen before.
- Older Insurance Investigator: That's right.
- Pi Patel: Without surprises, without animals, or islands?
- Older Insurance Investigator: Yes, the truth.
- Writer: [back to present, to Adult Pi Patel] So, what did you do?
- Adult Pi Patel: I told them another story.
- Writer: Have I forgotten anything?
- Adult Pi Patel: I think you set the stage. So far we have an Indian boy named after a French swimming pool on a Japanese ship full of animals heading to Canada.