The Fall




Directed by: Tarsem Singh


Roy Walker (Lee Pace), an early 20th century Hollywood stuntman,
lands in the hospital after performing a dangerous
stunt to impress his girlfriend. Bedridden, distraught,
and suicidal after losing her to the star of the film, he befriends
fellow patient Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), a young immigrant girl
with a broken arm. He enchants her with a fantastical tale about
five heroes: an Indian, an ex-slave named Otta Benga,
an Italian explosives expert called Luigi, a highly fictionalized version
of Charles Darwin accompanied by a monkey sidekick named Wallace,
and a masked bandit. An evil Governor Odious has committed an
offense against each of the five, and they all seek revenge. They unite,
and are joined by a sixth hero, a mystic. Their story is presented as
Alexandria vividly imagines it.

Although Roy develops genuine affection for Alexandria,
he also has an ulterior motive: by telling tales and gaining her trust,
he tricks her into stealing morphine from the hospital pharmacy
so he can attempt suicide.







Official website

The film was shot on 26 locations over 18 countries.

Tarsem says there are no special effects in the film despite its surreal looks. Everything was shot on real locations.

In order to keep Catinca's reactions genuine, Tarsem asked Lee Pace to tell the entire cast and crew that he was a real-life paraplegic for the first part of shooting.


Trailer:

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Lee Pace (Roy/The Masked Bandit) - The Fall Darren Rea: What was it about The Fall that attracted you to the project? Lee Pace: This was the second movie I'd ever done so it definitely wasn't like a money job. It was all about Tarsem [Tarsem Singh (pictured) the director of The Fall] I had this meeting with him... I was in the middle of shooting something and I was rehearsing a play in New York. So I was travelling back and forth between Toronto and New York a lot and I heard that Tarsem wanted to sit down and talk with me about this film he was doing. I read the script, I liked it and I sat down and talked with him about it and he gave me this kind of wild pitch which basically is what the movie turned out to be. He'd seen one other movie that I'd done and he said: "That's what the idea is. I'd like you to be in a wheelchair for the first two months. Do you want to do it? I think you're my guy. So if you think you can do it I want you to do it." So it was kind of his enthusiasm and his interesting vision that made me want to do it. DR: Tarsem has said he was adamant that he wanted to make it outside of the studio system because of the fact that in his discussions with studios they wanted to make it into a very different movie - more for kids. Would you still have been interested if it had been more of a kids film? LP: Erm... Yeah, I probably would have still wanted to be onboard if it was a kids film - if it was somehow made in the studio system - if Tarsem was involved. But I guess a lot of what was successful about the movie was the fact that because it was outside of the studio system Tarsem was able to really make every decision himself. He didn't have a barrage of voices weighing in about every little thing. DR: And he probably wouldn't have been able to shoot in as many locations as he did, so the movie would have looked very different. Of all the locations that you went to which did you find the most interesting? LP: They were all kind of great. South Africa was a really exceptional place. I loved it there. We shot a lot of the sequences in Leh which is in the Himalayas, India in a place called Ladakh. We shot the capture of the princess there with the big red carriage and we shot the part where we're tied up, I fall asleep and Alexandria thinks I'm dead. We shot a few really fun sequences out there because the altitude is so high in these high mountain deserts that the colour of the sky is a darker blue. It was really incredible. DR: Were you disappointed that they used a double for your scenes with the swimming elephants and that you couldn't experience that yourself? LP: Er... yeah, I was. I heard a lot about it. You know me and Tarsem had become friends, so he would tell me all about it. An interesting thing that he told me [laughs] is that when an elephant swims they... er... poop [laugh] as they swim. It's actually very difficult to get a shot that doesn't have big balloons of elephant ***** [laughs] floating towards camera [laughs]. DR: You mentioned earlier that you knew early on that you'd spend a great deal of time in bed on set, but did you know at that time you were going to have to pretend to be disabled on set too? LP: I did, I did. Tarsem talked about it on the first day that we met. He said that it was the way he wanted to work with this little girl, so that she would truly believe that I was paralysed and that everyone on the set would believe it, because if they didn't believe it then she would figure it out pretty quickly. The thing about that was that originally I thought that it was all about her performance, and trying to find a way to help her to make her performance really authentic, when she's not really an actress. But it helped me, actually, an incredible amount. It put me in a place. Lying to everyone that I was paralysed - they were all the way on one side of Cape Town and I was all the way on the other side of Cape Town - it took a lot out of me. DR: Afterwards how did Catinca and the crew react to the fact you could walk? LP: There were a few that weren't too happy about it. Catinca was actually a pretty good sport about it. I think that when she found out, she wasn't quite sure if it was still part of the movie. She didn't know what was going on really, and then after her mum explained to her that actually it was a big trick, she was fine with it. I think she was quite happy that I could walk. There were some members of the crew, I think, that didn't appreciate it so much. I don't blame them to be honest. I mean, I don't regret doing it because I think it added such a good authentic layer to the movie, but I don't blame them for being a little ticked off. The grips would set up these really great lighting setups and then they'd have to take it all down so that I could get into the bed, and then they'd have to put it all back up again. You know, you sit there and lie to people and you think it's all to make it a good movie, but these are still people you consider your friends after a while, and I'm sat there talking about a motorcycle accident that never happened. Like I said, I truly have no regrets about it, and you know I don't think anyone, probably, had any regrets about it because everyone's working to make whatever ends up on the screen as strong as it can be. DR: There's also a scene where you lose your temper and Catinca, not expecting it, panics a little and freezes on set... Did you feel a little bad about that too afterwards? LP: I was worried about that after it happened, but something I can say for Catinca is that she takes care of herself better than any actress I've ever met. She was supposed to run out of that scene, but she got so scared that she stopped, and didn't, and Tarsem came out and said: "We need to go again, because you didn't run out." And she said: "I'm not going again. I'm not doing it any more." Tarsem said: "We need it because we need to cut it into a shot we've already done" and she said: "Well I'm done. I've been scared and I'm ready to go home." And she didn't do it again. That was it. It takes balls to stand up to the director and say: "I've had enough" [laughs]. And she did it, and I say good for her.

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Originally Posted by GenL (View Post) I love, love, love this movie. It never once felt "acted" to me.

I think Lee Pace is SEVERELY underrated as an actor. He really needs to do more movies where he can show off his acting skills!!

AVC: So it was all the same crew and equipment on the film that you use for your commercial work? T: [...] the girl—she had no idea what was happening. She thought we were basically going to be shooting a documentary. Apparently that's the information the casting director had given out. She thought Lee was like Christopher Reeve, and actually was handicapped. An idea dawned, and I told my brother, "We can't do this in a studio. It has to be in a real place." So I found the institution where we shot down in South Africa, and I had to get rid of my main crew, because they knew the plotline I'd had for 23 years. I promoted the camera loader to cameraman—he'd never shot anything before, but I'd known him for 13 years. And I put a crew together that had no idea what the film was going to be about. We changed the script so the lead was not Lee, it was the father of the Romanian girl, and we told everybody "Lee can't walk." We told everybody that he was a theater actor in New York who'd had an accident and was paralyzed. So the cameraman, the production designer, every actor, everybody isolated where we were shooting did not know that Lee could walk. And I shot the movie in sequence. I just said, "The first time she sees him in the film is really the first time she sees him. The second time she sees him is the second time she sees him." So I couldn't really use the crew I work with most of the time. About three people knew the truth about Lee, but they were never on the set. So we shot their material in sequence, and after 12 weeks, I had to tell everybody the truth about Lee, and it made a lot of people cry and angry and just, you know, feel manipulated. AVC: Why go to all that trouble to pretend a man playing a handicapped character was actually paralyzed? Did it wind up adding that much verisimilitude? T: Everything had to happen that way, because the little girl's magic was required. It wasn't the cliché of a Method actor wanting to stay in a wheelchair the whole shoot—it was really depressing for Lee, actually. But here's why—when you're on a film set, no matter how dire a situation you're putting across, from a concentration camp to a handicapped person—when you're on that set for long enough, it gets jokey. And I didn't want to get to a stage where people would walk on Lee's bed, or tell handicap jokes. I knew it would filter down to the girl, even in body language. So nobody knew Lee could walk. In the end, a lot of people said, "You could have trusted me." And I was telling people, "It had nothing to do with trust. It had very much to do with the atmosphere I needed for these 12 weeks." AVC: And no one caught on at any point during the shoot, and realized he wasn't paralyzed? T: Almost. I said that wrongly before, that she thought she was doing a documentary. That's what she thought before she was cast. The casting director thought there was going to be a handicapped person telling kids stories. So once I came into it, I immediately said, "No, it is a feature film, but the guy is handicapped." I thought, "How long can we carry this façade?" And funny enough—it was such a big lie, it was so audaciously big, and we isolated everybody from everything else, and after about a week and a half, it was absolute. Only one person on the set knew, and that was a nurse who would take him to the toilet. Lee would go to the gym, and once, he said, "Today, I almost got caught, because one of the actors walked right past me!" It was just like nobody could see him walking. They were all day working with him in a wheelchair, so they didn't see him when he was standing up. And a lot of times, with men in the gym, you don't want to look at a person. It's like a nightclub, you know? It might be seen as making a pass. So literally, people don't make much eye contact in a gym. So he'd go to the gym, and just he would see these people and say, "Oh my God, I'm caught!" And they'd walk right by him. With Lee, I just had to make sure that nobody had seen him before, ever, in anything. I thought I might end up going to drama schools to pick the person I wanted. And then the casting agent showed me this movie, Soldier's Girl. And I said, "Who?" He said "Look at the girl." And I said, "Is that a tranny?" He said "It's a guy." I went, "Oh my God." So I went and got him, and he was great—and nobody was familiar with him yet. So we shot for 12 weeks, and then spent about a year filming with the guys in Namibia, India, Bali, Fiji. And then after that were all the character backstories, which I piggybacked on other things. AVC: Catinca does seem tremendously naturalistic, like she's living the role, making it up as she goes along. Was her part mostly ad-libbed? T: [...] The focus person is looking at them on a monitor, and she was completely unpredictable. There aren't any lights in the room. The sound people, I wouldn't allow them in. [...] Let them be there when the situation is right. We're in another room. Nobody else is allowed in the room where the acting is happening." Sometimes she would go in closer to Lee and whisper, thinking we couldn't hear. And every now and then, she'd say something and we'd laugh in the other room, some idiot would laugh, including me, and she'd say, "What's that about?" Because she would forget that we could still hear her very clearly, and see her! So that atmosphere was very important. AVC: Was capturing how she changed over time part of why you chose to shoot the film in sequence? T: That saved our lives. She showed up the first day—you'd be dead if you were in a studio, because she showed up for the first day of shooting, and she had lost her two front teeth! If you weren't shooting in sequence, it'd be like "Go home." So I just thought, "No, put it in the structure." And we made the teeth an issue. As she gets to know Lee better, her English gets better, she falls in love with him more, more teeth come out. And I knew that some magic was happening the moment we set it out there, because when she arrived, she changed everything. One thing I didn't bargain on, I didn't realize, is how scared children are of handicapped people. So of course I had it in the script that from the very beginning, she'd be charmed with him, sit down with him, talk to him. And she comes in, and she wouldn't go near him. So I just said, "Okay, well then, play your scene by his door." She would come near him, then go away, sit on a chair far from his bed. Second, third day, she got closer and closer. And I knew that everything she was doing was right. AVC: The cinematography of your work is very recognizable—The Cell and The Fall and "Losing My Religion" and other videos all have a very striking look. And yet in each case you worked with a different cinematographer, mostly people with very few past credits. What kind of relationships do you have with your cinematographers? T: Very strong, I would say. Because, the first film, The Cell, and 90 percent of my commercials, were with a college professor of mine. I come from a very visual background. As a boy, I spent a lot of time in Iran. I watched a lot of TV there, but I didn't speak Farsi very well. So I was always watching Get Smart or films or things like that, and judging them just by the visual storytelling. And of course Indians tend to love color, and somehow all that hodgepodge is coming out in my work. So with cameramen, I am quite specific. It's not a very give-and-take relationship for me. I just tend to be very specific: "When you go to fantasy, it has to be like this, but when we do the hospital…" No cameraman wants to hear that he can't bring lights in, he has to sit outside the window. He did an incredible job. If you watch poor Lee, you'll see he's doing an incredible job too. Every time the girl moves, he's lighting her. The light is behind his head, so he has to make sure, because she's completely unpredictable, that every time she moves, he isn't in the way of her light. She moves to the left, he moves to the right. I had forgotten all about it until, I saw the movie after eight months. And all I could say was, "My God! Lee is amazing!" After I saw it again, I gave him a hug and just I said, "You're the unsung hero here."

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Originally Posted by GenL (View Post) There was a point in Wonderfalls where it was a more Lee-centric episode and all of a sudden I was like "wow. I LOVE this guy!" so... That's when my devotion began!

I'll have to head to the Lee thread!

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I didn't realize how nice of a... physique... he had until The Fall. Wow. Do I sound pervy. I'm really not. I just am trying to show that I have a wide range of appreciation for the man. He's also younger than me (by 7 years), so I kind of feel squicky now.

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