For years, the self-funded visual epic “The Fall” from director Tarsem (“The Cell,” “Dear Jassi”) was challenging to find. It didn’t stream anywhere, wasn’t available to rent, and physical copies were either rare, out of print, or expensive. The film, a visually gorgeous drama that prioritizes practical effects and was shot in more than 20 countries, became something of a cult classic for those in the know. Set outside of Los Angeles during the 1920s, the film follows a stuntman who, after a grievous injury, is stuck bedridden in a hospital. There, he meets a little girl with a broken arm and tells her tales about heroism, myths, and villains. The film celebrates the essence of storytelling.
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Now, nearly twenty years after its initial release, MUBI is distributing a 4K restoration both in theaters and through its streaming service. It’s a long-awaited triumph for fans and the many creatives behind the scenes. We spoke to the film’s star, Lee Pace, about the magic of filming with Tarsem, his learning experience throughout the film, and the scale of the picture.
I’m thrilled to talk to you about this movie; it was a formative experience.
How did you come across the film?
I own it on DVD. I just stumbled upon it, and it was incredibly eye-opening. It pushed me to think about the film’s limitations or lack thereof. So yeah, I’m just really excited since it was so crucial, I believe, to my early taste as a film critic.
Oh, well, I’m excited to talk to you as well! It holds a special place in my heart for many of the same reasons.
Did you know how special it was while filming it, or did it take you a little time to realize?
You know I was so young at the time; it was only my second film. And, you know, I think it’s taken being an adult and being in this business for some time to really be able to reflect back and think about how truly extraordinary that experience was. I was just so swept up in what everyone was making, and the creative energy that was happening inside of that film, our locations, just the whole spirit of it felt like, “Oh, this is how it always is. This must be how it always is.”
When you make a film with all of your friends, you feel so creatively inspired, like electrically inspired, because you work with people like Eiko Ishioka. Tarsem has such a clear idea of what he wants, and what he wants is an expression of something inside him. That’s one thing that became apparent to me while we were filming, and that he’s not just telling a story. In a way, he’s assembling all of these symbols from his life, taste, and subconscious and stringing them together through a narrative.
And when I saw that, I was completely conscious of how special he was. He became very much a mentor to me, not just in filming it, because, as I said, I was very young and extremely inexperienced with film. He taught me how to do the critical part of my job, and since then, he’s been an educator to me about his taste in cinema. He’s got such extraordinary taste in cinema. I saw “Mishima” with him. I’d visit him and stay with him for, you know, a few days at a time, and we’d watch five movies. He showed me “La Haine” for the first time and “Irreversible.”
The list goes on and on—“A Separation”—and then we would just talk about it for hours, what he finds interesting about it, and what technically they accomplished in it. Anyway, I don’t want to ramble because I want to answer your question.
You said it was your second film. I believe your first one was “Soldier’s Girl.” That’s such a massive jump in terms of scale. Was there any part of you that was daunted about even taking it on? Or, when you were approached, was it just kind of like a gut “I have to do this film?”
Yeah, I have to do this film. I mean, this is how it came to me. Tarsem wanted to meet me. He had seen “Soldiers Girl,” and we met at the Radical Media offices, where he pulled out a cigar box full of all of these things. I forget everything in it, but I’m sure he still has it. But it was this box of mnemonics that he had been carrying around for, you know, probably 15 years as he was thinking about this story and trying to kind of piece it together.
Dan Gilroy had written a script, and he had found Catinca Untaru. That’s really what began the film. He had found her, a casting agent in Romania had found her, and he was like, now we’re doing this movie. Because that’s her, that’s Alexandria. And we have to do it now before she grows up anymore.
And so he was in this, like, he would do it. And he explained the whole movie to me and showed me all of these images. And, I mean, I was just, you know, blown away. Like absolutely, “Yeah, whatever you want. Sure, yeah. India? Cool, great. And you want me to be in a wheelchair the whole time? Yeah, I’m game for that. I’m game for all of it. Like, yes, yeah, let’s do this. Let’s, let’s jump in. It was a dream come true.”
It’s what I, back in Texas, aspired to do before I came to New York to go to drama school. You know, to be a part of a creative thing like this. So it was thrilling. I mean, it was such an adventure.
I’m sure!
I didn’t know anything about what I was getting into, and I didn’t know how I would do my job. I knew how to play a role and how to connect with another actor, but I had no idea what Catinca was going to bring, the power of her performance and her innocence, or the effect that would have on me.
It was absolutely a back-and-forth between the two of us. And Tarsem created a magic on that set that made it possible. But I didn’t know, going there, what that would be. I didn’t know.
Yeah, and it’s funny, for such a visually bombastic film, that so much of the heart is in there are personal behind-the-scenes in the hospital bed. Could you talk more about working with Catinca and developing that bond? There’s all the behind the scenes stories of you guys, you know, faking the fact that you couldn’t walk, or shooting behind the curtains. How did these things all come about? Were they very natural developments, or were they pre-planned?
Well, Tarsem planned them. I mean, he was. We shot one scene a day, but there was no hurry to do those hospital scenes. They were beautifully lit. They took their time to light them exquisitely. And then I would come in. They would take down all of the lights and flags, and I would get out of my wheelchair and get into the chair. And it just added to the magic on set. It helped me, you know, take a leap away from myself.
And then, like Catinca, the first day I met her was while we were shooting that scene. And, there’s a little bit when she’s in the room before she enters that she would get her props wrong and stuff, and Tarsen would always cut until she’d gotten all of her props right before she walked into the room so that he could get that meeting on camera and get her looking at me for the first time. She had a sense of who I was. Her mother had helped her understand the script. She knew her lines, but she didn’t know English. She didn’t really know English.
But she’s such an intelligent person that she picked up English within that month and a half we were shooting in South Africa. She understood the role of an actor on set, and she understood what was expected of her. She knew what she wanted and didn’t want to do, but it was so interesting. And we shot those in sequence so that we could know that there’s honesty in what you see in that relationship unfolding. I mean, those scenes where we’re inside the curtains, there were, you know, cameras rolling on both of us, and it was film, so they would change the mags. And I would just keep telling her the story, and we would stay on script and go off script, and then she would have ideas and say things back to me.
It was like it was hypnotic being inside that thing with her. And then someone would laugh in the other room after saying something inadvertently funny, and she would look at me and say, “Why are they laughing?” Because she had no idea that there was a mic picking her up and that there were cameras filming what she did.
She was so inside of it, and so was I. Now, towards the end of it, when we have the scene after she’s hit her head, and she’s laying in the bed, and I’m sitting there, you know, in despair, Tarsem had a hard time getting the performance out of her. Because she was just a little bored, the head thing kept bothering her so that she would pull it down.
And, you know, she was best friends with and always hanging around with her stand-in. So she knew she was being filmed, but it was more like sometimes her stand-in did it, and there were sometimes Catinca did it, and then they would go off. It was straightforward in that way.
Interesting.
I remember at one point, Tarsem was trying to get her to, you know, act a little bit more authentically and not how she was like, [stiffly] “Roy, don’t do that. Don’t.” And I remember having this conversation with her, and I was like, “Catinca, we have a responsibility for this set, and you’re responsible for Alexandria. And what do you think Alexandria is feeling now?”
And she would say “sad,” and she had a dialogue with me about it. I was like, “Well, when we do the scene, you want Roy not to be hurt. You want him to, you know, to feel safe. So that’s our job right now. That is our job. And we’re working, you know?” And she heard it and did it, you know, she found her way there. And I remember looking at her after the take, and they were long takes, too, because I would tell the whole story.
I would tell the whole story, and we would get it all. And I just said, “You did great that time.” And she looked at me, and I could see in her eyes that she knew she did. She knew what she was trying to do, and she had accomplished it. She understood it. And it was such a privilege to work with her. And I never had that experience, ever working with an actor. Someone so able to believe the fiction, to give herself over to it. What a privilege to get to have that moment. And for her, I imagine, to have had that moment on film. To have this — six-year-old, yourself at that precious, young, innocent age, with your mind opening…because it was for her. She was experiencing all of these things: South Africa, India. Anyway, like I said, I don’t want to ramble again.
It clearly was a powerful experience. But I wonder if, as such a young actor working in that film, your perspective on acting changed at all while working with Catinca? Seeing how she kind of authentically grew into being a little actress herself?
As I said, I was so young, learning new things every day. And one of the things, look, it is the hardest and the most simple thing to do as an actor, whether on stage or in front of a camera, is to relax and lose yourself in the scenes.
It is so hard, and it is even harder the more you’ve done it. You have the things you know accomplish how you think the character ought to respond. You can get into your head and play it safe. And this was one of the purest experiences of relaxing and allowing it to unfold.
And it was the stage. It didn’t just happen. That was the stage that Tarsem set. One of the things that is extraordinary to me about the way he constructed this film is that he created it. And he very intentionally created it with, you know, asking me to do this in the wheelchair, and my name was Roy, and I was working with her in a very specific way. And then the fantasy, which is, like you said, so bombastic. There’s nothing like it. You know, the mission he had set for himself is to, in the mind of this little person who’s never seen a movie before, create an imagination that is pre-cinematic?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s a film that genuinely remembers that it is a visual medium, too.
Yeah, yeah. I remember him saying, like, we’ve seen so many films. Certainly, now, where there are so many films available to us all, our mind is shaped by them. They shape our dreams. Sometimes I think I dream in coverage camera shots, you know, or at least I remember them that way.
And I think it’s such an exciting challenge he set for himself. How to— with a camera and with tools available to a filmmaker—how do you express her mind without the conventions?
As I mentioned, this film altered my brain chemistry. Do you have a film or film experience that is similar to yours and that helped change your trajectory?
Well, I mean working on this, this is that for me. I would say I am absolutely working on this. I mean, Tarsam did say, “It’s never going to be like this. You know that, right?” And I didn’t. I figured, “Oh, all the directors probably think that.” But it never has been. You know, never, never has been.
And I’ll never forget, just like every choice was his, every violin, he paid for it. Now think about how you spend your money. You don’t spend it carelessly. You spend it on things you care about. And he cared about this. He cared about all of the people he had hired to do it. Every choice was his. Every color, every costume, he was excited about it. It spoke to him. It was his choice. It was his movie, and it’s what he wanted to spend his money on. With that kind of uncompromising energy and enthusiasm, I, in my role in the film, absolutely tried to match it. And I carry that ethic I think, or I try to, anyway, into the other situations I’m in like, total commitment. Total commitment to doing what I can to help the director tell their story. Like I said, it taught me how to do what I do. Are you asking if it’s another film other than this film?
If you had one! But if it’s this film, I think that’s fair too.
I would say this — look, all the things change you. I feel like all the characters kind of become growths that you carry with you. And some of them are welcome, and some of them are not welcome, and you have to figure out a way to cut them off. But I feel like I grew in size with this film in a way that I wanted to grow. It was genuinely artistic in the best way, you know.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for talking today. I’m so excited to see this in theaters. It’s been an absolute pleasure to see it get this deserved re-release.
Well, thank you for writing something for me too. It’s like, when does this happen? A movie you made 20 years ago that had a kind of disappointing rollout, just because of the climate at the time and who knows why, earned its audience and received this reception. You know, it’s really nice.
“The Fall” is streaming on MUBI now and playing theatrically in limited release.