The Fall

[Redlum]

The Fall
Director: Tarsem Singh

In a hospital a little girl with a broken collar bone meets a bedridden man who starts telling her a fantastical story which reflects his state of mind. As time goes by fiction and reality start to intertwine in this uplifting epic fantasy.

http://www.thefallthemovie.com/

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I never saw The Cell but remember it being criticised for looking great but not much else. This seems to be The Princess Bride, Hero, Pan's Labyrinth, Crouching Tiger, and The Singing Detective molded into one. In the right hands this could be an amazing summer hit.

Interestingly, the trailer has a card "presented by Spike Jonze and David Fincher" - I suppose that must be the music video directors guild.  They've had to throw some weight behind it because this was premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2006 to poor reviews and got buried.

This and Mister Lonely are now my most anticipated films of 2008.

[Redlum]

Poster:
http://www.aintitcool.com/images2008/THE_FALL_FINAL.jpg

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

[MacGuffin]

Insight into the Mind of a Director
Director Tarsem and actor Lee Pace discuss The Fall.

The Fall is driven by its visuals. It moves from one extraordinarily vivid scene to another and is held together by the chemistry between a (at-the-time-of-shooting) relative unknown American actor and a 6-year-old Romanian girl that learned English as she spoke her lines. It was written and directed by Tarsem, most noted for his film The Cell, and was inspired by the 1981 film Yo Ho Ho. In fact, it was that film that first sparked the filmmaker's interest in storytelling.

As such, The Fall is intended to be a transparent tale of childhood — how children perceive the world, the darker side of relationships, and how the innocence of a child can shape and soften the heart of even the most manipulative of men. How do we know all this? IGN Movies recently caught up with Tarsem and his leading man, Lee Pace, at a Q&A session following a screening of the film at Los Angeles' Hammer Museum.

Pace, now famed for his role on Pushing Daisies, was chosen for the role of Roy Walker because Tarsem saw him in 2003's Soldier's Girl and recognized his talent. But he also knew that because Pace played a transvestite in the film, he would not be recognized by the other cast members or the crew. Anonymity was important because Tarsem wanted his crew to believe that Pace, just like his character, was handicapped and unable to walk. He felt that the authenticity of the film depended on the mood set by Pace.

"The camera man felt like a complete fool when we told him because for about 12 weeks he had been around this guy, but no one could know that he could walk," said Tarsem of Pace. "It had nothing to do with most of the people, it had to do with the girl. She was so young that she could not understand the scene unless it felt authentic."

The young Romanian actress, Catinca Untaru, knew little English before she was cast for the role of Alexandria. Tarsem, who originates from India, said that she absorbed the language and her lines in little over a month. "Her English wasn't so good, but after 10 days it got much better. Unfortunately, she started to develop an Indian accent so I had to start talking to the Romanians to get them to talk to her. There were so many levels of miscommunication."

Untaru's Alexandria was key to the film's movement. Together, Alexandria and Roy took a journey through Roy's dark and distrusting mind, but Alexandria was the one to bring light and beauty back into the fantasy. Untaru herself was loveable and added heart to the film. It was the marriage of the innocence of the young and the desperation of the old, however, that kept one foot in fantasy and one in reality.

Altogether, Tarsem traveled for 16 years to location scout for the film. He ended up using shots from 12 countries, but shot in over 20 and took his cast and crew with him to over 10 locations in Europe and Africa. He noted that because the movie moves between a static 1920s hospital and the very depths of one man's imagination the juxtaposition of the two worlds had to be startling and specific to keep audiences engaged. The setting in the fantasy world took on a personality of its own, each location more grand and extravagant than the previous.

Tarsem traversed untouched mountains and isolated deserts to get the shots he needed to keep the fantasy alive. Pace said that in one particularly vivid scene where a gaudy red carriage is being dragged across the scorching orange deserts of Africa Tarsem sacrificed his spot behind the camera to be able to take his place high on a distant mountain to make sure all of the elements were in frame.

"In the bit with the carriage, the carriage was way down in the valley," Pace said. "We were on one mountain and Tarsem was on another with a camera and he would just have to yell and make big sweeping movements to direct us. But that scene is amazing because it is so visually rich."

The film wrapped nearly four years ago and has since been well-received internationally. It opens in America with an 'R' rating, but Tarsem said that this should not stop families from coming to see the film because it appeals to all ages. "In America, its got an 'R' rating, but in Germany it is suited for age 14. People want to pigeonhole it either as a children's film, as a fantasy or an adult's film. But it doesn't work like that; it is something that cannot be pigeonholed."

[MacGuffin]

Special Effects From the Real World
Source: New York Times

IN this era of digital special effects, we've become accustomed to the idea that by manipulating pixels on a computer screen, filmmakers can show us practically anything in a more or less convincing manner.

And yet "The Fall" — an independent feature film from Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, a veteran music video and commercial director who uses Tarsem as his professional name — is full of sights that provoke genuine astonishment: an underwater shot of an elephant swimming gracefully overhead, a palace courtyard built out of interlocking staircases that might have been designed by M. C. Escher, a village clinging to a mountainside where all of the buildings seem to have been individually painted in subtly different shades of inky blue.

These images amaze precisely because they are quite evidently real, bursting with the life and detail that elude even the most advanced digital artist. "I decided it wasn't going to be C.G.I.," said Tarsem, using the industry shorthand for computer-generated imagery. Referring to his only previous feature, the psychological thriller "The Cell" (2000), Tarsem added: "I had enough of that in my first film, as much as I enjoyed it. I decided in this one that the art direction was going to be in the landscape and in the costume design and nothing else."

A small man of seemingly boundless energy who never stopped darting around his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria during a recent interview, Tarsem, 46, was born in India, grew up in Tehran (where his father was an engineer for the Iranian airline) and was educated at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. He currently splits his time between London and Los Angeles, leading a globe-trotting life reflected in the structure of his film.

"The Fall" is really two stories told in two different styles, intertwined in the telling.

Story A: In a Los Angeles hospital in 1915, the movie stuntman Roy Walker (Lee Pace), paralyzed as a result of a fall off a railroad trestle, befriends another patient, Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), a 5-year-old girl who has broken her collarbone while picking oranges with her immigrant parents. Roy begins to tell the girl a story, a wild adventure tale, though it slowly becomes clear that he has a hidden agenda. His story is a crafty way of manipulating the child into stealing the morphine pills he needs to commit suicide.

Story B: As Roy unfolds his tale, he weaves himself, the child and their shared troubles into a swashbuckling epic about a masked hero, the Black Bandit (Mr. Pace again), who with the help of an escaped slave (Marcus Wesley), an Indian mystic (Julian Bleach), an Italian explosives expert (Robin Smith) and the naturalist Charles Darwin (Leo Bill) fights to rescue his lady love, Princess Evelyn (Justine Waddell), from the clutches of the evil Governor Odious (Daniel Caltagirone). In the "Wizard of Oz" tradition, the characters are all drawn from the hospital population.

"The Fall" is based on "Yo Ho Ho," a Bulgarian film directed by Zako Heskija, which had set Tarsem to thinking about the manipulative nature of storytelling when he saw it in 1981. "Earlier, before recorded music or film, you told a story depending on the crowd you had in front of you," he said. "If you have five people you told it with a certain pizazz. If you had 25,000 people you told it a different way."

"I realized I was doing that all the time," he continued, referring to the meetings he had been having with studio executives.

He acquired the rights to the film, and, he said, "I started to collect visuals."

"It took me about 16 years," he added. In the meantime, he continued to work in commercials, for clients like Levi's, Nike and MTV, as well as directing music videos for groups like Green Day and R.E.M.

Although "The Cell" had been a box-office success in 2000, Tarsem was not the sort to rush into another commercial project. The director David Fincher ("Zodiac," "Seven"), who met Tarsem on the music video circuit and has remained a friend, remembers his reaction when he was given a first draft of the screenplay: "I thought, I can't imagine what this is. It's 'Wizard of Oz' meets Tarkovsky."

Mr. Fincher arranged for Tarsem to meet with some film financiers, but no deals were forthcoming. "He's one of those people where you have to go, 'The reason to do it is to see where it goes,' as opposed to 'Let's make one of these or one of those,' " Mr. Fincher said. "And so that fell apart, and I assumed that it had all gone by the wayside. Then he called me from South Africa and said, 'Hey, I'm making "The Fall." ' I said, 'Who's financing it?' and he said: 'Me. I won't have the passion and belligerence that I think this is going to take 10 years from now.' "

After a long search for a girl unaffected enough to play the leading role ended when a casting director found Catinca Untaru in Romania, Tarsem took his cast and crew to South Africa, where a Victorian-era hospital had been put at his disposal.

Then he went to work on the fantasy sequences, saving time and money by piggybacking on his commercial assignments. "I shot first in India, then in Namibia. The crew got smaller and smaller. I would only do adverts in areas where I wanted to shoot: China, Argentina, Bali."

Mr. Fincher, who is listed as "presenting" "The Fall" along with a fellow music video alumnus, the filmmaker Spike Jonze, said of Tarsem's approach, "He told me when he was going in that 'my production value is going to be the earth; I'm going to use the entire world as my backdrop.'

"I was like, 'What does that mean?,' and then I saw that montage where he literally covers 10 countries. I kept asking him, 'That's a matte painting, right?' And he'd say, 'Nope, that was a real place,' and he'd explain where that place was and how he'd found it on some Pepsi commercial or some Audi commercial that he'd done."

Mr. Jonze added: "Had a studio done what he did, it would have been an $80 million movie. But he's so experienced at it and knows people in all these countries and knows how to shoot with a tiny crew. That's how he got away with it. But still, he spent his own money, which is insane."

On the insanity issue, Tarsem concurs: "It had to be made by somebody at a mad junction in his life."

"In the end," he said, "I found really ardent people who love it and think it was a good madness I had, and some people who probably won't like it."

First screened at festivals in 2006, "The Fall" proved to be a divisive film. "People didn't know if it was a comedy or a tragedy," Tarsem said. It took two years to find a theatrical distributor, Roadside Attractions, which opened the film in New York and California on Friday and plans an expansion May 30 into Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington and Cambridge, Mass.

"It's a style that will never be in," Tarsem concluded. "But it will never date."

[Reinhold]

The film is touching and beautifully shot... It's definitely a favorite of 08 so far.

The film explores the main character's youthful subjectivity beautifully-- as the story evolves it becomes a little more clear that hers is affecting the storyteller's. It's also a portrait of innocence in a way that is similar to Pan's Labyrinth (but more successful, in my opinion). A couple wipes and a jump cut here and there were minor annoyances but ultimately didn't take anything away from the film. The little girl is phenomenal.

I don't mean to gush-- it was slightly awkward for its length at times, but as Walrus pointed out to me, the film invites a lot of imagination. Plus, I can see how a certain montage can seem out of place, but i loved that.

SPOILERS


it took me a minute to figure out why there was a discrepancy between east indian/american indian representation versus terminology, but when I did i thought it was great.

gotta love that keyhole camera obscura.

[cinemanarchist]

I snagged a copy of this book at work. Ridiculously awesome for a promotional item. Haven't seen the film yet but I plan to this weekend.

[Ravi]

This is a great film.  A wildly imaginative and breathtakingly beautiful film.

The film explores the main character's youthful subjectivity beautifully-- as the story evolves it becomes a little more clear that hers is affecting the storyteller's. It's also a portrait of innocence in a way that is similar to Pan's Labyrinth (but more successful, in my opinion). A couple wipes and a jump cut here and there were minor annoyances but ultimately didn't take anything away from the film. The little girl is phenomenal.

The comparison to Pan's Labyrinth is apt, though Pan's Labyrinth was more intimate and personal, while The Fall is epic.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

Reinhold and I went to a Q&A with Tarsem following a showing of the Fall, wherein which Tarsem admitted to never having seen Wizard of Oz. 

I had a question for Tarsem. Unfortunately, there were other hands and I didn't get called, so afterwards I approached him and asked him.  I asked "In a recent Onion interview, you said that The Cell's involvement of a serial killer was based on the fact that in the 90's, serial killer movies were getting the easy greenlight.  You went on to say that if he made it in the 70's, there would've been a guy dreaming on the 14th floor of burning building, since disaster movies were en vogue then.  What would the Cell have been like, assuming there were no restraints about what would be produced or not?" 

He said that (paraphrasing) The Cell, if under his control without any outside expectations, would've been about these Mexican pharmaceutical plants where they test their drugs on poor people, and he would be experiencing hallucinations based on these dreams, going back and forth between a horrid reality and lush dream world, which was providing an escape from what was truly occurring. 

Perhaps this belongs in "Stupidest Stuff You Ever Heard Someone Say About A Movie" thread, but a question some guy actually asked was "So, I mean, it's obvious that the guy was the main character, sure, and the little girl was the princess, but what was the rest of the symbolism?  I noticed there were many symbols, like in a William Golding novel, and I was wondering if you could elaborate on some of those symbols"

To which Tarsem replied "What you see is what you get."

[Ravi]

I snagged a copy of this book at work. Ridiculously awesome for a promotional item.

I got a copy of the book today.  Quite amazing.  Pages and pages of photos from the film.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

The book is neat and all, but it's very fragile. 

[cinemanarchist]

I snagged a copy of this book at work. Ridiculously awesome for a promotional item.

I got a copy of the book today.  Quite amazing.  Pages and pages of photos from the film.

I'm the Community Relations Rep. at the Magnolia...I wasn't the person that brought the book down for you but I was the one that sent you the email. The world just gets smaller and smaller...of course if I had known it was you I would have brought it down myself.

[Ravi]

I knew someone here worked for Landmark, but I couldn't remember who.  Thanks for the book!

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

I work at a Landmark theater.

Right on.

[Ghostboy]

Hey! I saw it in Dallas tonight but I didn't get a book!

This really is remarkable. Big and goofy and bizarre at the beginning, surprisingly meaningful and tragic at the end. The final montage of stunt scenes with the girl narrating them is one of the most wonderful things ever.