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Journalism of Courage
With the disclaimer that “it was not a critics’ baby”, Indian-American filmmaker Tarsem Singh, 63, recounts how he restored his visually-stunning sophomore feature, The Fall (2006). “It is the kind of film, about which everyone thought ‘how ugly is your child’ when we made it. Nearly, a decade later, a lot of older critics had died and the younger generation started loving it. When I attended the Toronto International Film Festival (for the screening of his film Dear Jassi) last year, many people mentioned how they went into so much trouble to watch The Fall and downloaded it from strange sites,” says the writer-director. That’s when Tarsem decided to undertake a 4K restoration of the film.
Though Tarsem initially approached Criterion about restoring the movie, he never heard from them. He then decided to take up the task of restoring The Fall himself and found support from Efe Çakarel, founder of MUBI. The Fall, which is called “a long-lost classic” and “a hard-to-find epic”, is currently streaming on MUBI, after its 4K restored version was screened at the Locarno Film Festival earlier this year.
Filmed over four years in over 20 different locations across the globe, the film is a visual feast of “magnificent costumes and stunning locations”. Set in a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s, in silent-era Hollywood, stuntman Roy Walker (Lee Pace) is brought to a hospital after an on-set accident. There, he befriends Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), a young Romanian immigrant nursing a broken arm. Roy tells Alexandria a fantastical tale of epic heroes taking revenge on an evil ruler. The story transports her from the hospital into the exotic landscapes of her imagination. While Alexandria forms a warm bond with Roy, he has other plans — he intends to die by suicide and tries to make Alexandria steal the morphine pills for him.
When this fantasy-adventure premiered at TIFF in 2006, critics panned it. “The timing was incorrect and Harvey Weinstein (American film producer convicted of sex offences) tried to sabotage its prospects. He was really angry that I didn’t show him the film before. He was sitting in the front row during its premiere and decided to walk out three times. That put everybody off,” recalls Tarsem, whose first major breakthrough work was REM’s Losing My Religion video, which won MTV’s Best Video Award. The film reviews were not favourable and no one wanted to buy it. “I told my brother it was not like a book that somebody will pick up and read. We needed to follow through. I worked for another two years and released it myself,” says Tarsem.
Even though the limited theatrical release failed to garner much attention for the film, over the years it has found much love from a section of avid film lovers. “People who loved it appreciate the fact that The Fall has not dated even though many movies of that period have,” says Tarsemn who directed his first feature film, The Cell, starring Jennifer Lopez, in 2000. He went on to direct The Immortals (2011) starring Henry Cavill, Mirror Mirror (2012) starring Julia Roberts and Self/less (2015) starring Ryan Reynolds.
When Tarsem was trying to make The Fall and later trying to release it in theatres, he found help in his Hollywood friends, director David Fincher and filmmaker-actor Spike Jonze. “They have been very good friends for a very long time. Fincher tried forever to introduce me to people and get the film financed,” recalls Tarsem. However, when people asked Tarsem if he had a script, his answer would leave them unsure. “I used to tell them, it’s a nutshell of an idea,” he recalls. When he found the young actor Untaru, he decided to go ahead with The Fall’s production. “I went off and made the movie. I thought that’s all I had to do. After the Toronto premiere, nobody wanted the movie even for free.”
That’s when Fincher and Jonze lent their names to the film “for free” and supported it “unconditionally”. They came on board as its ‘presenters’ since they believed the movie needed to be seen. “I will tell you what they got out of it: curry at my home,” says Tarsem, who believes that cinema has gotten a lot more wonderful today but drawing eyeballs and figuring out distribution are still a challenge.
