This seems like such an awesome looking film! It is from the creative mind of Tarsem Singh ("The Cell") and he spent 17 years (yeah!) making this film and shooting in 24 different countries! It also stars Lee Pace ("Pushing Daisies," "Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day").

Here is the trailer: http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/thefall/

Here is the website: http://thefallthemovie.com/

‘The Fall’: The Original Creative Genius of Tarsem

By LISA TSERING
India-West Staff Reporter

In a wide-open mountain landscape in Ladakh, a vast monolith of silk hangs between two stone pillars, its whiteness splashed blood-red.

A turbaned warrior escapes his captors by racing up the staircase of the Jantar Mantar stone observatory in Jaipur, hurling himself into space.

Soldiers enter a darkened palace hallway in search of their companions, and look up to see their dead bodies shaped into a bloody chandelier of limbs, dangling high above their heads.

The images that director Tarsem Singh has crafted for his latest globe-trotting epic, “The Fall,” stay with the viewer long after the lights come up.

Shot on location in India, South Africa, China and around the world, “The Fall” is a fantasy fable packed with images of beauty, horror and poetry. But it also has a human side.

Roy Walker (Lee Pace) is a silent-era Hollywood stuntman confined to a California hospital bed. In pain from a broken back, and depressed that his girlfriend has just deserted him, Roy can only lie there thinking up ways to commit suicide.

He is completely unprepared, then, for the appearance of Alexandria (Cantica Untaru), a spry young girl who is also in the hospital for a broken arm.

Alexandria, bored and in search of a playmate, plops down next to Roy’s bed and demands he tell her some stories to pass the time. Roy spins an elaborate and whimsical (and sometimes horrific) tale, which Tarsem illustrates with his usual fantastical visual flair.

Singh laughed when an India-West reporter compared it to “The Wizard of Oz.”
“I’ve never seen ‘The Wizard of Oz!’” he said. “At Bishop Cotton School in Shimla, we used to have a teacher who told us these fantastic stories. She would use our body language to tell us stories that were so over-the-top ridiculous. She would mix the Indian Robin Hood, James Bond and Richard Nixon in these wild scandals. We were mesmerized!”

“The Fall” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006 and earned the Best Feature Film award at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2007.

“It’s taken 17 years for me to shoot this film, in at least 24 countries. When I finished it, everybody wanted to release it, but nobody was as behind it as I wanted them to be,” he said. It was ultimately picked up for distribution by Roadside Attractions, a quirky independent company whose titles include “Super Size Me,” “Teeth” and Independent Spirit Award winner “The Road to Guantanamo,” and will hit theaters in May.

Despite its visual splendor, “The Fall” makes some of its greatest emotional impact in the scenes between Roy and four-year-old Alexandria. Untaru, with her apple cheeks, brown curly hair and an adorable gap where her front teeth should be, is a born charmer, and her interplay with Pace is warm, fresh and organic. Her performance is so natural that one would assume Tarsem has children of his own, because he instinctively knows how they talk and act.

“I don’t have children. I have lots of nieces and nephews,” Tarsem told India-West. “I’m ready, my girlfriend’s not!”

Tarsem and his team literally searched the world for just the right actor for the role of Alexandria. “I didn’t know if it would be a girl or a boy. I would send out people to schools and have them tell stories and video the children’s reactions. I came to realize that after about four years old, they were already ‘acting’ as opposed to acting naturally,” he said.

When Tarsem’s scouts found Untaru in Bucharest, Romania, they knew they had found their leading lady. “Catinca was six, but she didn’t speak English,” he explained. “I figured, ‘ah.’ If she doesn’t speak English, then it buys me another two years.”

Lee Pace was another casting coup. Now a star on the rise — he was seen in Bharat Nalluri’s “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day” and “Soldier’s Girl” and currently stars in the ABC series “Pushing Daisies” — Pace was an unknown when Tarsem tapped him for the role of Roy.

To further immerse Untaru in the role, Tarsem decided to shoot in strict sequence (“The first time she met Lee was when they shot that first scene,” he said). In another trick to make their scenes more natural, Tarsem deliberately let everybody on the set — the cast, crew and Untaru — believe that Pace couldn’t walk.

“People’s body language changes when they are around a person who is acting, versus a person who’s the real deal,” Tarsem told India-West. “You don’t jump on their bed. You don’t tell handicapped jokes, which is the kind of atmosphere that a film always leads to.

“They were told Lee was an actor from New York who’d had an accident. At the end, when we told them, some people understood and others were very, very angry. The cameraman, the production manager, these were people I’d known for 15 years. They said, ‘You could have trusted me.’ But I had to do it.”

In his “day job” as a highly sought-after director of TV commercials, Singh travels the world and rarely touches down in one place, except for brief rest stops in Los Angeles and London. He said he has spent the last 15 years scouting locations for this film, which took four years to shoot.

Tarsem — he prefers to be known by just the one name — was already world famous for his rock videos (that include REM’s “Losing My Religion”) and surreal TV commercials for Nike, Coke, Levi’s and Pepsi before he burst onto the big screen with his flashy 2000 drama “The Cell.” That film, which starred Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn, earned worldwide acclaim for its twisted look and dark mood. He is still making commercials, and will direct an upcoming feature called “Unforgettable.”

Born in Shimla in 1961, Tarsem was educated at Bishop Cotton School and came to the United States at the age of 24, where he graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif.

Tarsem’s work in commercials has won the BAFTA Lifetime Achievement Award and two major awards at Cannes. His work is also on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

So what inspires his creativity?

“I’m not a person who meditates or can take a holiday,” he told India-West. “If I stop for a day, I drive my friends nuts. I watch a lot of crap television, from porn to ‘Law & Order.’ All of those images get stored in the back of my head.

“When something drives me, nothing can hold me back. I just talk very fast and bounce my ideas around.

“I hold nothing sacrosanct and I have always been blasphemous.”

http://www.indiawest.com/view.php?subaction=showfull&id...=&start_from=&ucat=7

Exclusive: The Wild 'n' Wacky World of Tarsem!

Source: Edward Douglas
May 5, 2008

The only thing that may be stranger and more amazing than Tarsem (The Cell) Singh's visually stunning second film The Fall is what it took to make the movie, a 17-year passion project that had the Indian-born director traveling the globe and using unconventional means to get the most out of his actors and crew.

At its heart, the film is about a stuntman from Hollywood's silent era played by Lee Pace ("Pushing Daisies," Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day), seriously injured in a stunt gone wrong that some feel was a deliberate suicide attempt after being left by his girlfriend for a handsome actor. While bedridden in the hospital, he meets a 6-year-old girl (Romanian newcomer Catinca Untaru) with a broken collarbone who is fascinated by this sullen man and the fantastical stories he tells the girl in order to gain her trust.

It would seem like a simple enough premise, except that Tarsem decided to make everyone else working on the movie think that Lee was actually paralyzed and confined to bed for nearly 12 weeks while they shot his parts, and after telling the six-year-old Catinca the adventure story at the film's core, he had her help arrange hundreds of photographs Tarsem had taken in his years as a commercial director in order to inform the production crew where the story should take place. It took four more years for Tarsem, Pace and the actors playing the characters in the stories to revisit all sorts of remote locations in order to film that fantasy story, but the results are a fantastic and wonderful visually unforgettable film on par with the best works of Terry Gilliam and Peter Greenaway, taking the viewer to many places they never could have possibly seen otherwise.

For those unfamiliar with Tarsem's commercial work, he most famously won an MTV Movie Award for one of his first music videos for R.E.M's "Losing My Religion" followed by him directing the Jennifer Lopez thriller The Cell, released over seven years ago.

ComingSoon.net sat down with the visionary filmmaker and director, now just going by the name Tarsem, to talk about the film and the amazing journey he took to get there. We found him to be a lively man with an infectious amount of energy who was still very excited about what he had accomplished, despite it having taken 17 years to get there.

ComingSoon.net: This is a project that you've been working on for more than a decade, your dream project, and probably one of the most unconventional movies ever made… I don't know if they give Guinness records for that…
Tarsem: (laughs) It will be in there.

CS: Let's go back to the very beginning. When did you decide "I want to make a movie about this…"?
Tarsem: God, It was long ago. There was a theme I was interested in and then I saw a film called "Yo Ho Ho" that kind of made me think I wanted to go in that direction, so I bought the rights to it and now this film has nothing to do with that film, doesn't look like it at all. What interested me a lot was the idea—apart from the visual side of it which was almost a separate film and it might not be two films together. For me, it was very much like the idea before cinema or before recorded music, is that you told a story depending on three things for film: The story I want to tell, the story that the person wants to hear and the story that they remember in 20 years. It's three different films. A lot of times people will say, "Oh, I saw this movie, a masterpiece, you got to see it." Sit me down with it and see it and they go, "I saw this about ten years ago, it's sh*t." And they'll tell you that before anything. Your experience in the last ten years, you put them in the film, and you've got to mean something completely different. Storytelling always worked like that. When you told a person a story, they leaned forward, they made eye contact, they were listening. You kind of played the thing out, to the ten people you told it differently. If you're telling it to a studio head and he's kind of looking at his watch out of the corner of his eye or taking a call then you kind of introduce the crazy person who walks in with a machine gun and shoots people, just to pick it up, then a car chase. You pitch accordingly, and I just thought the idea that you were using a person's body language to tell them the story you want to tell, but you're still dictating by their body language, and that puts one person in an impotent situation where you need something from this person, not just the studio head, which would be one situation, but here is a person drugged-up wanting to get him pills. I wanted a really transparent subject and that turned out to be a kid. I thought, "Okay where do I go from that?" and I kept trying different children, seeing my sister's kids and I realized that after four-and-a-half, they were acting, and it became a film that I loved ("Little Princess") but it wasn't the style I wanted to go in. I was very much thinking like "Ponette," which is a very realism-based style, for the hospital. Nothing needed to come out of it. It needed to be as bland as possible, like "Ozu," if I could lock it and just do nothing, that's what I wanted to do. I had that style in mind and for the fantasy, I wanted it to be limitless. It had to be something that could happen anytime since photography existed. No special FX, everything had to be as fantastically-made before any genre, thus it became a period piece. Because today, there's nowhere in the world where you can find a child who hasn't seen cinema or isn't familiar with genres. If I could make a contemporary film, which "Yo Ho Ho" is, I also wanted a particular time thinking a person in America and a story from a girl in India and she wanted it to be a musical.

CS: So the movie's really about the art of storytelling…
Tarsem: Yes, to see how you think it's a one-way street, it's not. The person you're telling it to influenced you as much on the story, unless you just said, "I just want to make it" and that's what you can do in a film, which is what happens. You make a movie, people come to see it on its terms, but never with storytelling. It was never there before that. You had to take into account the people you were telling it to and they fed you, which is what the studios do now. They preview the film and they tell you, "We don't like this person and too much blood" and you do exactly that but it was a lot more immediate and textural when you tell it to people directly, when you were doing that, so that is where it started. Over the years for 17 years, I was looking for locations all the time. I would have people go left, right, center everywhere… I kept taking photographs everywhere and I kept using the "Godfather" line, "I'll be back one day. This is a paid job and that day may never come but I may need a favor if I come back," so I left that kind of stuff all over the globe. Then I started looking for this girl 7 or 8 years ago. Wherever I went, I would just tell people, "Girl or boy, I didn't care." I just said, "I think the person has to be four years old." So finally I got a tape of this girl, and I was just shell-shocked about what was happening. I thought she was phenomenal and I went out there and tried to figure out in Romania what was happening and I realized that she misunderstood the situation because the casting person told her that the real actor is like Christopher Reeve, that he's paralyzed, so she believed that. I thought if she believes it, in four months, she's going to be a different person. At that age, she was 6, she's going to change very quickly, so I thought we had to make the movie right now or not make it, and it has to be a real place, it can't be sets. I called my brother and said, "Okay, we're going to make this movie right now or we'll never make it, but let's make the first half first, the hospital scene and see if there's a movie there." I told him, "Sell some stuff, let's go make the movie." Went down to South Africa and found this hospital that was a lunatic asylum, took over a wing, created it, got the girl in and decided to make the movie. I just decided that if she believes it, more for her or anything else, it's not like the character actor wanting to be in a wheelchair. It wasn't for Lee, because Lee is a phenomenal actor. I said, "No, it had to be for the child and the people around, the other actors." The atmosphere changes when people know, no matter what the subject matter, if they think it's the real deal or you're acting. After two weeks, if you're acting, you still don't jump on the bed of a cripple and tell handicap jokes. I just said that the crew I talked to originally, I couldn't use them, so I changed the script and said the fantasy's main person will be played by her father who's a Romanian actor. Lee is only in the hospital, we changed his name and I needed somebody that nobody would recognize and said he's a character actor, a theater actor from New York, who's lost the use of his legs and he's playing the hospital part. Nobody, not the cameraman, the production designer, none of the actors, knew he could walk. I got one male nurse for him, a guy name Pierre, who would take him around and set the atmosphere with that and we shot the movie in sequence, so the first day she sees him is the first time she saw him, second day she sees him is the second time she saw him in the film. I laid the structure out with that and then proceeded.

CS: Did you have any kind of script at that point?
Tarsem: I had a structure, and I said, "I need to push it here and push it there" but man, was it a tug of war. If you think it's difficult pitching to a studio head, try pitching to a six-year-old that wants a happy story. It was very difficult.

CS: Catinca knew that she was in a movie though, right?
Tarsem: She knew she was in a movie but she was thinking that he's handicapped and why is he trying to tell me a bad story? She was all thoroughly nicely confused and I wanted that. I kept that. The problem was and I realized that it would take about a month for her to speak English because she didn't speak English, but in about ten days, she had it… and she was speaking with an Indian accent, which turned into a problem. I had to get Romanians in who I would speak to who would then speak to her, just to keep that way because she'd just mime my language.

CS: So you were feeding her lines on set?
Tarsem: No, I would tell her the situation and then certain words she would pick up and then she'd say it in my style and I knew that problem was only getting bigger and bigger. We stopped that and continued with the Romanians telling her what needed to happen. There was nothing like feeding lines with her. You had to explain a situation and man, did she change the script. It was almost always the first two takes, she wouldn't understand, third and fourth would be phenomenally right with the right amount of confusion, and after that, when she got the thing, she would go into bad la-la land and get bored with it. I had to get it right about there and if I didn't get it right, I had to introduce new words and new angles or otherwise you couldn't get her back. That's what I chose for that.

CS: How did you get Lee involved? He basically had to be in on the ruse, he'd have to travel to all these different locations over the course of four years…
Tarsem: Lee went to six countries because that lead character played there and the other part's played by the father. I already had that thought out, but Lee, I had only seen him as a woman, because I didn't want anybody to recognize him. I just said, "That's the only actor I want," and everybody said, "Don't do that because his agent will kill you." I said, "No, we only have one deal on the table. Everyone's getting the same money, the focus-puller, camerama, production designer, everybody has the same money." If that breaks the rules, we can't make the movie because it's in everybody's contract, so when I met Lee I said, "Let me just ask you one question. You were very convincing as a woman. Nothing else is required. If you have a penis, the part's yours." He said, "I have a penis," and I said, "The part's yours. You're going to be a cripple for 12 weeks. Do you want it?" and he said, "I'm up for it." So we just ran along with that sense.

CS: What was involved on Lee's part in keeping up that ruse?
Tarsem: Very difficult. He came out very depressed at the end of it because we were all staying together, we could all do things. He couldn't do anything for 12 weeks, because he was the only guy I kept separate because there was a ruling that everybody needed to stay together, so I had to get apartments for everybody, nobody had a better apartment than others, but Lee because he needed medical help (we said), put him in another place and he was in 12 weeks, very depressed. But then the fantasy part, once we told everybody, it was very traumatic because some people freaked out, some people were happy, the mother had completely fallen in love with him at this particular point. It was just a very strange atmosphere. The cameraman was saying, "You could have trusted me. I've worked with you for 13 years." I said, "No, it had nothing to do with trust. Your body language would have changed and the child would have smelled it. There was nothing you could provide extra if you knew." It was all for the child.

CS: I wanted to ask about the visuals and the locations. You took photographs at a lot of these places but how were you able to film there?
Tarsem: It was very difficult and that's why you haven't seen stuff shot there before. It was bloody impossible. We've had riots, been stoned out of places, went back to one location three times and everything was difficult. Otherwise, these would be familiar locations to you. They just are very difficult places to go to, because I think they're the few places on the globe that are still unexplored and unfamiliar to people.

CS: I thought the Blue City was pretty amazing because that looked like something you'd either have to build or add using CG, so it's surprising that it's an actual place.
Tarsem: It's a real place. They only have one rule there, you can only paint your house one color, so what I did is that I arrived there two months before with the art department, and we said, "You know what? For the whole city, which is maybe 40,000 people, we have free paint for whatever color you want to paint your house." But we knew that they could only paint it blue, so everybody came and of course, there was only blue and they could only paint it blue, and they painted their houses. So that is already a blue city but it never zings like it zings in the film because we just had them paint it whatever color they wanted… which was blue. That kind of stuff we did to work it into the structure.

CS: Did you have any sort of storyboards or did you just have your original photographs to work from?
Tarsem: You know, for the first time, I kind of started with some things because after I shot the girl in the hospital, I just thought that story might be enough, and somebody called me from Belgium, a critic, and said, "You know, that might have been a better film." And I said, "You might be right" but that particular time, I was separated from my girlfriend and I was in such a traumatic (state) that I thought I was going to go on a "magical mystery tour." I think this will happen in this particular way. I looked at the assembly in the hospital and I said, "That's a complete film." Without any fantasy, I said, "It's a completely film." It's a completely good performance, everything's fine and that's the movie it can be, but I feel it can be different. Finally, I said, "No." I've worked 17 years on this and I feel mad enough to take it on, and I don't know if the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train, but we're going into it. I called him and said, "Sell everything, I have no idea if I'll be back in 7 months, 3 years, 4 years, 8 years…" It ended up being four and I just left with that in mind.

CS: This story that Lee told to Catinca, that was basically what you set out to recreate, right?
Tarsem: Yes, because what happened was after I was done, I had this room that was full of photographs of 17 years of scouting, then finally when I decided to go around, I took the little girl and I said, "Now tell me where the stories go" and of course, she mixed it up…

CS: So Catinca decided where you were going to go?
Tarsem: Yeah, because she dictated everything. That's why you could never get financing anywhere, because I just said, "What we have is not a script, it is a structure. The script is going to be written by a six-year-old who doesn't speak English" so no financer is going to give me any money, so I just said, "It's fine. I'll do it on my own." She came and she just changed EVERYTHING, so I took her to this room and she kind of told me where what goes and what goes and then we turned around and said, "Okay, off we go!" All the background stories of the Indian or Darwin, none of those were written in. Once we had found the structure and laid it out, then I had made Lee tell them a year and a half later because I was going to these places to fit them into characters, so that was done much later. It didn't require any actors except the actor playing in the backstory, so it was one individual I'd get from South Africa for his story. I'd get one person for the Indian.

CS: Has she asked for a production credit yet?
Tarsem: A production credit? (laughs) Hopefully, she doesn't belong to the WGA.

CS: After all that, how long did it take you to edit all of the different things you shot together?
Tarsem: It was very difficult, because that was the thing to find its tone and the assembly worked very quickly, and then to finesse it, it just took forever. Every time I would do something, I'd send them to the editor and he'd tweak them and really, I owe him everything because we were working on peanuts, and he has a family and he works in advertising and all of the guys had a life to put on hold. I feel it was one of those projects you only make when you're stupid and feel immortal at a particular age. Life kicks you in the teeth and you go, "Right!"

CS: Did you edit all the stuff from South Africa first before adding the fantasy parts?
Tarsem: First… that was the pamphlet and then I said, "I feel we can go here. I feel I can do this." That feeling led me to more than 24 countries.

CS: Can you talk about some of your visual influences? Obviously, you were inspired by the locations, but do other films or paintings inspire you to create those fantastic visuals?
Tarsem: I am and I think of a particular style, like work I was very obsessed by in earlier days; I like Tartosky and there's a little bit of that. I like photographs a lot. I'm not particularly zapped by paintings unfortunately. Photographs work a lot for me. They carry a lot more emotion, so I just think that to each of these places I was going, what was influencing me, I'm trying to remember it, but never bring it up as source when we're filming because otherwise, you end up taking it out and what you end up shooting ends up like it. I try to remember what I think it looked like and then I draw derivations from it and then come up with something and then when the project is finished, I go back and look at it. I think in about a year or two, I'll go back and see "Yo Ho Ho." Somebody saw it recently and said, "My God, it looks nothing like this movie" but it completely influenced me. I want to leave it there.

CS: The film's so dreamlike that I wondered if some of the fantasy segments were influenced by your dreams or if it was just from the photographs you've taken.
Tarsem: Over 17 years, I'd been looking at these locations and thought it would be great so I knew the way to push the tone, get Lee to push the tone to go here, but it needed to be theatrical and it's great for somebody like Lee who would trust the situation. If you don't know the picture, it would look so theatrically dreadful, it just sounds so over the top. I was like, "It's okay, it's over the top, it's not wrong." The question would be, "Is it comedy or is it tragedy?" and I would be, "It's the same f*cking thing! Have you seen Chaplin? You can laugh and cry at the same time." The criticism a lot of people have is they go "I didn't know if I should be laughing… is it a comedy?" And if you did, what's wrong with that? Do you have to be told you're supposed to laugh?

CS: Catinca was great, because she was really natural, and she won over the audience I saw the movie with.
Tarsem: I know, I know… everywhere I go with this girl. The girl, you can't say anything wrong about her. She was phenomenal.

CS: Also, it was somewhat fortuitous that the movie took so long to make because now Lee is somewhat of a star from his television show "Pushing Daisies" and he was just in "Miss Pettigrew."
Tarsem: I hope so because he's been so supportive and so behind us for so long.

CS: Now that you've finished this dream project that's taken up 17 years of your life, where do you go from here?
Tarsem: (laughs) This was stopping me from making any Hollywood film I want to make, because I would keep talking about this thing I wanted to do, so I just needed to make it. It was an artistic child that I had to deliver and that's done. I love all of it, and I think I'll probably make those films and maybe I'll make a passion project again but I've no idea. It might be something… that I've got a couple of sparks that might take a week or might take 20 to 30 years to turn it into something and by that time, if I feel like making it, I'll make it. Otherwise, right now I don't know.

CS: But making a movie every 17 years…
Tarsem: I don't want to do that! I'm 46 and I thought that this is a mad f*cking project. I was obsessed and this thing needed to be exorcised.

CS: I know this played at a lot of festivals… including Cannes?
Tarsem: No, it wasn't in Cannes. We won the Sitges one that the year before us "Pan's Labyrinth" won, so we started from there, we went to Toronto, and now it's coming out. It was at Toronto the year before last but we just ran it that time and it wasn't particularly finished.

CS: Has the movie changed a lot since it played at the festivals?
Tarsem: No, very little, just basically tweaked it, finished the scenes and actually made it slightly shorter.

CS: Are you still doing commercial work and music videos?
Tarsem: Music videos, I kind of only did two of them, "Losing My Religion" and Deep Forest. The kind of music I like doesn't really require music videos. My taste is a lot more folky and classical and that stuff, and hardcore dance, which doesn't really make music videos. It was a passion at a particular time but for me… I know most people do music videos because they want to do commercials, and most people do commercials because they want to do films. I loved music videos when I was doing them, and it was the only reason I did them. When I did commercials, I still love them, and unfortunately, it's like I'm a prostitute in love with my profession. I'd sleep with them for free but they give me money, and it's the only thing I know how to do.

CS: Doesn't it seem somewhat disparate to do commercials and then do something as artistic as "The Fall"?
Tarsem: Have you seen my commercials?

CS: I'm sure I must have…
Tarsem: No, you haven't. (Hands me a DVD of his commercial reel.) Don't see it with children, and you tell me if you think that looks like advertising. You might have seen one and you will remember it.

The Fall opens in select cities on Friday, May 9.

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=44339

I just wanted to add this, look at how awesome these stills look!: http://www.cinematical.com/photos/the-fall-stills/

And here's more here from IMDB!: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/mediaindex

Stunning-looking ‘The Fall’ is totally illogical

Whacked-out fairy tale for grown-ups has jaw-dropping visuals

By Christy Lemire
The Associated Press
updated 7:45 p.m. ET, Tues., May. 6, 2008

“The Fall,” a whacked-out fairy tale for grown-ups, is as stunning in its beauty as it is in its lack of logic.

Indian writer-director Tarsem Singh, who just goes by the name Tarsem, knows how to create some sumptuous visuals, as he did with his similarly gorgeous but pretentious 2000 thriller “The Cell” starring Jennifer Lopez and Vincent D’Onofrio. He has quite an imagination, all right, as you would imagine from a commercial and music-video veteran. (Tarsem’s best known work is still the clip for R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” and that was back in 1991.) You just wonder where he’s going with it.

Too often the images, shot over several years in countries including Bali, Fiji, South Africa and Italy, seem to exist because they’re cool-looking and weird, and for no other reason.

The convoluted story, which Tarsem co-scripted with Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis, follows the friendship that forms between an injured stuntman (Lee Pace) and a little girl with a broken collar bone (Romanian newcomer Catinca Untaru). Both are stuck in a hospital in 1915 Los Angeles.

Every day, Untaru’s cherubic Alexandria visits Pace’s bedridden Roy and hears pieces of an increasingly wild tale, the details of which he draws from his own life. The pretty nurse becomes a princess, the leading man who stole Roy’s girlfriend becomes the villain and little Alexandria, who lost her own father, becomes Roy’s daughter — sometimes. Again, that would require consistency.

Roy hopes that by charming the girl, he can talk her into stealing enough morphine so that he can kill himself. See, we warned you this wasn’t meant for kids.

Pace, the Golden Globe-nominated star of ABC’s “Pushing Daisies,” would seem to have the right charismatic presence for the job, but it’s sometimes tough to tell under the elaborate costumes and fantasies his character has concocted.

Tarsem takes us underwater to swim with an elephant in slow motion; to a butterfly-shaped island in the middle of an aquamarine sea; to sun-baked, dark-orange sand dunes; to a hilltop palace surrounded by buildings that are only painted cobalt blue.

Individually, these are all striking shots that’ll make your jaw drop. As part of Roy’s story, in which he plays a masked bandit among a motley posse of men trying to take out the evil Governor Odious, they feel arbitrary and often just plain silly. One of the men on his team is Charles Darwin; another is a freed slave who, in real life, is the guy who delivers ice to the hospital. The shades of “The Wizard of Oz,” with its blending of fantasy and reality, are pretty hard to avoid, as are the comparisons to “Time Bandits,” which had a similar storytelling structure.

That would make Untaru our Dorothy figure (and our Fred Savage, if you will). With her pigtails, chubby cheeks, turned-up nose and inquisitive delivery, she’s almost too cute for words. (Now 11 years old, she didn’t even know English when she was cast in the role.) But Pace’s low-key, down-home demeanor balances her out nicely.

The moments they share together chatting and teasing each other have an easy, father-daughter sweetness to them. They’re more enjoyable, and make “The Fall” more watchable, than Tarsem’s many self-satisfied flights of fancy.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24491729/

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Fantastic Landscapes
Tarsem indulges his imagination in ‘The Fall’

By Andy Klein

The summer I was eight years old, I was driven to camp every day – along with five or six other kids – by one of the counselors. In order to keep us in line, “Uncle Bernie” Snyder would give (or withhold, if we were bad) stories of the swashbuckling hero Ben Gurin, his Cloak of Invisibility, his Magic Ring, and his loyal sidekicks. I can no longer remember many details, but it was several years before I realized that most of the plot elements were adapted from The Arabian Nights (with bits of Saturday matinee serials mixed in) and his hero’s name – perhaps ironically, in hindsight – from the then-prime minister of Israel.

I have no idea whether everyone has an Uncle Bernie somewhere in their past, but I hope so, because my fragmentary memories of his stories still hold a magical place in my imagination. I assume the experience was not unique, since The Fall, the new film from director Tarsem Singh (who professionally goes by first name only), is built around a similar idea.

In the period before World War I, five-year-old Alexandria (Romanian actress Catinca Untaru) is in a Los Angeles hospital, recuperating from a broken arm. Among the other patients is Roy (Lee Pace), a movie stuntman paralyzed from a fall and depressed over the loss of his girlfriend, who has taken up with the very actor (Daniel Caltagirone) he was doubling for. Roy knows that Alexandria has the run of the hospital, so he starts spinning her a fantastical tale and then threatens not to continue unless she fetches something for him – the pills he needs to kill himself.

Roy tells of a band of six warriors, seeking revenge against the evil Governor Odious (Caltagirone again) – an Indian (Jeetu Verma), an explosives expert (Robin Smith), an escaped slave (Marcus Wesley), Charles Darwin (Leo Bill), the Mystic (Julian Bleach), and their leader, the Masked Bandit. As the little girl visualizes the story, each of these characters bears a striking resemblance to someone she knows; tellingly, the Masked Bandit at first looks like her late father (Emil Hostina) but then turns into Roy. That the version we see is in her mind, not Roy’s, is driven home by the film’s best joke: The Indian in Roy’s narration has a squaw and a wigwam, but Alexandria sees him as the turban-wearing Indian who works with her family in the orange groves.

Tarsem started out directing commercials (Nike) and music videos (“Losing My Religion”) before making his first feature, 2000’s The Cell, with Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn, in which it was clear that his central concern was visuals, not narrative. It received mixed-to-negative reviews, but was championed by Roger Ebert. Whatever its flaws, it displayed a prodigious visual imagination.

Tarsem clearly chose to make The Fall – which he adapted with Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis from the 1981 Bulgarian film Yo Ho Ho (directed by Zako Heskija and scripted by Valeri Petrov) – as an excuse to splash more beautiful images across the screen. And splash he does, from the gorgeous black-and-white of the pre-credit sequence to the desert landscapes of Roy’s story. The only problem is that the story is precisely the hodgepodge a young amateur might realistically improvise; it has little of the wit or invention of the most obvious cinematic comparison, The Princess Bride.

There are some other narrative problems: Late in the movie, one seemingly important bit of exposition is so unclear that no one leaving my screening was quite sure what had happened. And, more significantly, the last half hour, as Roy’s bitterness turns the story into a nightmare, becomes downright sadistic; his behavior toward a sick little girl is so brutal that we lose all sympathy for him. My colleague Ray Greene points out that this plot curve is identical to J.D. Salinger’s “The Laughing Man,” one of my favorite short stories. I can only argue that Salinger effects it swiftly, whereas Tarsem attenuates it torturously.

But, even then, the visuals hold us rapt, as does Untaru’s amazingly natural performance.

The Fall. Directed by Tarsem. Screenplay by Dan Gilroy, Nico Soultanakis, and Tarsem Singh; based on the 1981 screenplay Yo Ho Ho by Valeri Petrov. With Lee Pace, Catinca Untaru, Robin Smith, Justine Waddell, Leo Bill, and Julian Bleach. Opens Friday at the Landmark West Los Angeles, AMC Loews Broadway 4, and Laemmle’s Playhouse 7.

http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/fantastic_landscapes/7006/

REVIEW | Imagine That: Tarsem Singh's "The Fall"

by Michael Joshua Rowin (May 6, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

Playwright John Guare must have had Indian director Tarsem Singh (or as he's often simply known, Tarsem) in mind when he wrote about the increasing exteriorization of the term "imaginative": "Why has 'imagination' become a synonym for style?" Singh makes films that inspire a bevy of similarly misused adjectives: "sumptuous," "surreal," "eye-popping," "hallucinatory." He specializes in audacious compositions, shoots in exotic locales, fits his actors in unique costumes that appear simultaneously futuristic and old-fashioned, and in only two features, including the new and fifteen years in the making "The Fall," has shown a predilection for stories about, yes, "the power of the imagination."

Unfortunately, lacking the ability to fashion cohesive tales driven by engaging characters, Singh overcompensates with his trademark visual palette and loses a hold on both in the process, a fatal flaw that can be traced back to his only other non-advertising work, the poetically vacuous video for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" and the "Silence of the Lambs"-as-Dali-toss-off "The Cell." His is a classic case of a natural-born cinematographer playing at being a filmmaker.

Based on the 1981 Bulgarian film "Yo Ho Ho" and cowritten by Singh with Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis, "The Fall" takes place in Los Angeles 1915 ("Once Upon a Time," of course) and stars Lee Pace as Roy Walker, a movie stunt man who winds up in the hospital after falling off a horse on the set. Laid up and unable to bear the sight of his nurse girlfriend (Justine Waddell) leaving him for a handsome star, Roy decides to kill himself by convincing five year-old Romanian immigrant Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), also in the hospital recovering from a fall, to steal him a bottle of morphine so he can take a fatal dose.

He befriends her by telling a fantastic fairy tale in which he plays the Black Bandit, Alexandria his daughter, the nurse a princess, the star the evil Governor Odious, and a group of ragtag supporting foreigners (The Indian, The Italian) from the hospital the Black Bandit's loyal followers, including a pea****-coated and monkey-aided Charles Darwin (Leo Bill), each holding their own personal grievances against the villain.

Liberally taking its structure and epic storybook whimsy from "The Wizard of Oz" and "The Princess Bride," "The Fall" squeezes every bit of "imagination" out of lavish costume designs and the two dozen countries used as settings: exotic temples, swimming elephants, a city of blue stone buildings, whirling dervishes, a huge sheet dripping blood in the middle of a desert. Add religious overtones ("Are you trying to save my soul?" Roy asks Alexandria), rich symbolism (teeth, butterflies, dolls), a self-referential paean to the magic of purely visual cinema (the film concludes with a montage of silent-era slapstick classics), and you've got a whole lotta movie.

Then why does "The Fall" end up feeling so empty? Singh should be given credit where it's due: he's followed through on his vision with a monumental undertaking, and he's also improved upon the empty-headed horror of "The Cell" by crafting a film both fun and serious in nature. But this labor of love doesn't come together because its story -- so essential in a movie about storytelling, after all -- just isn't there. The characters on the reality side of the rainbow are completely one-dimensional, which leads Singh to make terrible decisions like seemingly allowing Untaru room for improvisation (her wriggling and adorable line readings grate).

On the fantasy side, his exaggerated art direction and color schemes -- red blood is RED; desolate locations are DESOLATE -- grow punishing in their immodest scale and melodramatic excess, forcing the often sloppily told tale to take a backseat to the director's visual grandiosity. I'm not ungenerous enough to say certain moviegoers would be wrong to be moved by "The Fall," and maybe my disapproval is a simple matter of taste for the unassuming over the ostentatious; but I also can't help but compare it to Hou Hsiao-hsien's latest, "Flight of the Red Balloon," a film that so gently and delicately creates a world of enchantment out of the raw elements of everyday life that it proves wonder can be achieved without bludgeoning the viewer into submission.

http://www.indiewire.com/movies/2008/05/review_imagine.html