Why 2006 fantasy The Fall is finally getting the recognition it deserves (2024)

Tarsem is still ruing the box office failure of his 2006 fantasy feature The Fall. “I made a lot of enemies, one of them being Harvey Weinstein,” says the 63-year-old Indian director over a video call from Switzerland. “At the first screening, he got the front seat. 15 minutes into the film, he got up, and went, ‘Excuse me,’ and tried to walk out – and then came back in. Everybody knew his profile – this horrible, little fat guy. He walked everywhere, left and right, left and right, to make sure everybody understood he hated the movie. And then he left. The next thing we knew, nobody wanted the movie.”

Weinstein’s behaviour wasn’t related to the contents of The Fall, which he had already expressed interest in purchasing. Rather, Tarsem, whose full name is Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, wouldn’t allow Weinstein to view the film before other potential buyers, the key one being Warner Bros. “Weinstein must have thought, ‘If it’s not for me, I’ll shit on it publicly,’” Tarsem recalls. “We didn’t know how to counter it. Nobody wanted it. I spent two years working just so that I could pay to put it in cinemas.”

Starring Lee Pace as Roy Walker, an injured stuntman, and Catinca Untaru as Alexandria, a young girl with a broken limb, The Fall takes place in both a grimy LA hospital in 1915 and the realms of Alexandria’s imagination. Heartbroken and bedbound, Roy entertains Alexandria with fantastical stories that Tarsem shoots with jaw-dropping, candy-coloured splendour, as well as outlandish costumes by Eiko Ishioka; shot in at least 28 countries, the vivid film-within-film sequences adapt to the dream logic of Alexandria’s interjections. In return, the child must steal morphine for Roy, who’s secretly planning to kill himself.

All shot without green screen or CGI effects, The Fall is the kind of film that, if it were released today, would be heralded as a masterpiece. It would get Oscar nominations, the top spot on film-of-the-year lists, and maybe its own subreddit. With the words “Presented by David Fincher and Spike Jonze” appearing at the start, it’s a staggering, expensive gamble that other visionary filmmakers stare at in awe. Back then, though, The Fall was a financial disaster that received negative reviews. Variety dismissed it as “convoluted, arbitrary, overlong whimsy”; the New York Times deemed it “a real bore”.

“Because of the internet, it got a cult following,” says Tarsem. “People would say to me, ‘The movie really influenced me.’ It got to the point of: why can’t people see it?” For the past few years, the film was unavailable on streaming services, while DVDs would sell for hundreds of pounds on eBay. However, Tarsem is speaking to me from the Locarno Film Festival where he’s presenting the world premiere of a 4K restoration that will later stream on MUBI. It may have taken nearly two decades, but The Fall is finally receiving the recognition it deserves.

The wait is even longer when considering that Tarsem spent another two decades trying to get The Fall made. After growing up in India and attending film school in LA, Tarsem amassed a fortune in his twenties and thirties by directing high-budget commercials such as a Pepsi spot with Britney, Pink, and Beyoncé singing “We Will Rock You”, and music videos like REM’s “Losing My Religion”. While dreaming up The Fall, which is based on the 1981 Bulgarian film Yo Ho Ho, Tarsem even directed 2000’s The Cell, a sci-fi starring Jennifer Lopez. Unable to convince a studio to finance The Fall, which would be dictated by the improvisations of whatever child was cast as Alexandria, Tarsem funded The Fall himself. With an estimated budget of at least $30 million, it was the Megalopolis of its day.

“I think [Francis Ford] Coppola is the only person who’s ever spent more money on a personal film,” says Tarsem on Megalopolis. “I took a lot of money, threw it all in the film, and lost everything.” Whereas Coppola shot Megalopolis in his 80s at the tail end of a storied career, Tarsem directed his epic, self-funded dream project as only his second feature. “It’s such a physical film, I couldn’t have done it later. I had the audacity of youth.”

In fact, The Fall was such an exhausting, sprawling shoot that Tarsem considers it closer to Apocalypse Now than Megalopolis, which was shot with green screen. “After Coppola shot Apocalypse Now, he did One from the Heart in a studio,” says Tarsem. “After shooting The Fall in 28 countries, I did Immortals and Mirror Mirror, which don’t have a single shot outside of a studio. I went from everything outside to everything inside. I’m a character of extremes.”

When travelling the world to shoot advertisements in the most exotic, visually arresting landscapes imaginable, Tarsem would take notes for The Fall. “The butterfly reef [from The Fall] came because I did an advert with Ronaldinho, Beckham, and the whole gang called ‘Pepsi Surfers’ where I shot them swimming from a helicopter. I was location scouting for 17 years.” He sometimes flew actors from The Fall to where he and a crew were working on a commercial and already had the equipment ready. “It’s shot in 28 countries that I can name legally,” he says. “There’s a few more I can’t name.”

In Roy’s fictional stories, employees from the hospital reappear as bandits, pirates, and other eccentric characters whose arcs allude to Roy, in real life, losing his girlfriend to another actor. The vivid settings range from the “Blue City”, where Tarsem had buildings in Jodhpur literally painted blue, to an underground stairwell in Abhaneri that could be mistaken for an Escher artwork. In the film’s remastered format, these images are richer and more colourful than they were previously; it also reinserts two scenes that were removed after the 2006 TIFF premiere, and an introductory text that declares, “Once upon a time in Hollywood.” “I second-guessed myself and took it out,” says the director. “Then I saw Tarantino’s film, knew I shouldn’t have changed it, and put it back in.”

Recently, Tarsem directed Dear Jassi, a masterful, back-to-basics thriller set in India that gripped me at last year’s London Film Festival. “We have no buyers, no nothing,” Tarsem sighs. “Hopefully it won’t take 20 years for that to come out.” Otherwise, with its rerelease, The Fall may as well be considered the best film of 2024, or at least a stunning example of what doesn’t get made anymore. “Fincher said to me, ‘Everybody who makes a lot of money in advertising always talks about the personal film they’ll one day make, and you’re the only idiot who did it.’ It’s because something happened to them that didn’t happen to me at the time – life.”

Before making The Fall, Tarsem had a long-term girlfriend with whom he planned to have kids. “The reason The Fall happened is because of heartbreak,” he says. “When she dumped me, I was like, ‘What is this money for? If I can’t get my genes out there, let’s get my means out there.’” What percentage of the budget was his own money? “100-plus. I made a lot of money in advertising. I told my brother I’d wait a decade until I asked him how much money we lost on it, which was everything we had. A decade came and went, and I never asked him, and I don’t intend to.” He adds, “But if I’m bitten by a bug like that again, I’d do it again.”

The Fall will stream exclusively on MUBI in the UK and Ireland from September 27.