Tarsem’s The Fall is now showing exclusively on MUBI.
A version of the following interview was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine. The conversation has been expanded and edited for republication on Notebook.
The Fall (Tarsem, 2006).
“If Andrei Tarkovsky made The Wizard of Oz”—that’s how David Fincher summed up his friend Tarsem’s globe-spanning, decades-in-the-making magnum opus, The Fall (2006). This shapeshifting fable about the art and power of storytelling is maybe more Alejandro Jodorowsky than Tarkovsky, but, most importantly, it’s all Tarsem.
Tarsem: the mononym is of a piece with his bold, brazen style. Like his film-school peers Michael Bay and Zack Snyder, the Punjab-born Tarsem is a bona fide vulgar auteur. He was still a student when he made his first hit music video, for R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” (1991). A young Tarsem Singh Dhandwar had arrived in the United States under the pretense of studying business administration at Harvard; against his father’s will—and having never before held a camera—he finagled his way into the film school at Los Angeles City College, and went on to pick up a scholarship at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design. A string of wildly successful music videos and commercials followed: like “Losing My Religion,” his clip for Deep Forest’s “Sweet Lullaby” (1993) was big on MTV, while ’90s kids undoubtedly recall his ludicrous Colosseum-set ad for Pepsi (2004), in which a gladiator-garbed Beyoncé, Britney Spears, and Pink are pitted against Emperor Enrique Iglesias.
Tarsem made his divisive feature film debut with The Cell (2000), a $100 million Matthew Barney–esque fantasy thriller about an experimental psychologist (Jennifer Lopez) who must infiltrate the mind of a serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio). But The Fall was always on his mind; the concept for the film, in which a man manipulates a young girl by weaving a fantastical adventure story for her, was first seeded with a chance viewing of Yo ho ho (1981), a little-seen Bulgarian film. Tarsem’s totally distinct reimagining proved Sisyphean not just because of the multiplicity of far-flung shooting locales his concept required but also because of the difficulty of finding the film’s star: he was determined that an unknown child should both play the lead and help him to shape the plot of the story-within-a-story. Tarsem found her in Catinca Untaru, who plays Alexandria, a shy but wilful Romanian girl who finds herself stuck in a California hospital with a broken arm, circa 1915. There, she forms an attachment to Hollywood stuntman Roy (Lee Pace), bedbound after a tumble gone awry. He regales the girl with a fantastical, free-form story, which she envisions set against a stunning series of landscapes and landmarks—the film plays like an issue of National Geographic staged for the opera—but what initially seems like paternal affection reveals itself to be clouded with something darker.
Ahead of the Locarno premiere of The Fall’s glorious 4K glow-up, I spoke to the infectiously effusive Tarsem about filming in impossible situations, playing to your audience, and how not to get a movie financed.
The Fall (Tarsem, 2006).
NOTEBOOK: The Fall was your second feature. You worked on it for decades; you've described it as your baby. Almost twenty years and a handful of films later, how have your feelings about it evolved?
TARSEM: Actually, even when I made it, I felt kind of the same way. I always believed that your ticket to immortality is in your genes and your memes, as it was put by Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker. Now I have a son, but probably the thing that most carries my genes and memes is this personal film that I made so many years ago. I was obsessed with the project; I had to get it out of my system, because it was stopping me from doing any other work. Everybody in advertising has a pet project that they think they’ll put their money into, and instead they just become old people with money who never made that film. My brother [Ajit Singh, The Fall’s executive producer] said, “Are you going to be that guy?” But I finally found the girl [Catinca Untaru], and so I said, “We’ll make it right now.” While I was putting together the 4K restoration, I was close to doing a new project, a very visual film with a very cool script called Butterfly. But the moment I saw The Fall again, I just thought, “I blew my wad on this film”—so I walked away from Butterfly. Everything and the kitchen sink ended up in The Fall—and I'd given myself the license to do that, by having the little girl’s imagination dictate the story.
NOTEBOOK: Let’s go back to the film’s origins. I think no one who’s seen The Fall would guess that it’s an adaptation, but it’s actually based on a Bulgarian movie, Yo ho ho.
TARSEM: It is! I saw it at a film festival in India—the first festival I went to. Somehow, the nutshell of the story stayed in my head. Twenty-five years later, I said, “You know what, let’s get the rights.” I got them; never watched the original film again. Now I look at it and I see that it’s the same and completely different. As the quote goes, originality is the art of concealing your source. With that kernel of an idea, I started looking for locations—which took about sixteen years. I kept shooting commercials and making contacts, saying “I’ll come back.” Basically, I would write scenes, but I didn’t really know how to interweave them. That’s perhaps why the film seems a bit indulgent—I put the cart ahead of the donkey. Whenever I would do a commercial—Scotland, Ireland, India, Russia, anywhere—I would tell somebody, “Hey, just take a camera, go to a school, tell the story of the film to the kids. Just capture them in a wide-angle shot, and I’ll find the child. Boy or girl, I don’t care.” That took forever. I had just done The Cell when my girlfriend dumped me, and my whole world fell apart. I was thinking, “What exactly am I saving this money for?” And then, when I was shooting a commercial in Romania—I had actually gotten stuck there because my assistant lost my passport—I saw the girl.
NOTEBOOK: Lucky they lost the passport, then!
TARSEM: That lost passport really cost me, but it was worth it. I called my brother and said, “Sell everything, you’re going on a magical mystery tour. I don't know where it will end.” David Fincher had introduced me to financiers, but I mean, I had nothing to show them. There was a very basic screenplay structure, and the box that the little girl carries around. So I’d tell them the story through her box: “These are the things she’ll have in her box.” They’d say, “Is this the script?” “No, it’s a guideline, and the child will help us evolve it,” and, “What countries?” “I don't know, maybe twenty”—it turned out to be 28—“and there’s no way you can insure this.” That's no way to get a movie financed.
The Fall (Tarsem, 2006).
NOTEBOOK: In the range of locations, I see a connection to the video you made for the Deep Forest track “Sweet Lullaby” back in 1993.
TARSEM: That was actually the dry run. I think we shot that in seven or eight countries—just me, my niece, and a tricycle, going everywhere. There was another ten years where I was doing commercials and looking for locations. Even when we started the movie, there were still a lot of locations left. I was still trying to figure out what the backstories of the hero characters were. But I had a very good relationship with Pepsi: they would say to me, “Here’s a commercial,” and I would say, “Okay, I want to do it in this place.” So I would do the commercial, and then do the movie parts in that location. The actors were kind of on hold. Fortunately, there was nobody that famous in the film, so we were flexible.
NOTEBOOK: You were shooting at Hadrian’s Villa, the Taj Mahal, the Hagia Sophia, the Namib Desert—places that are remote, or huge tourist destinations, and/or sacred in some way. Were any of them particularly difficult to get access to?
TARSEM: Every one of them! We almost got pelted with stones once. We had religious riots three times. I refused to give up. They found me alternatives, I just said “No, this is it.” Even Pangong Lake—which nobody had shot before; it’s high in the Himalayas—when we went up there, there was nothing. Now they’ve shot so many Bollywood films there, there are whole campsites up there. Whole industries got built because the right people saw the film and realized that the reason nobody shoots there was just that it's difficult to get there. But that was really my brief—I said, “Find me impossible situations and we’ll make it work.”
Same thing with the iconic scene in the well, the zigzag one where Darwin dies [Chand Baori, in Rajasthan]—those stepwells are everywhere in India, and now they shoot them all the time, but at the time nobody had. I just saw this well with these steps going down and asked somebody, “What's that?” They said, “Basically, that's how they knew how much to tax people—by seeing how many steps the water level has gone down.” And I said, “How low does it go?” “Very low.” I said, “How low?” They said, “Well, it depends if there’s a drought.” So I said, “Find a place where there’s a drought and show me pictures.” They showed me, and I said, “Okay, we’re going there.”
Of course, after I made the film, nobody wanted to buy it, so I had to work for another two years to release it myself. While I was doing that, a whole bunch of people from Bollywood went out there. They were saying, “Why would Tarsem film this? It’s such a horrible little place—but it was good enough for him!” So a whole bunch of films got shot there and came out before mine. Before that, these wells had been there for 400 years or more, but nobody saw that it was something to make look cool on film, and then suddenly, it became this iconic thing. That was the location they had in mind for the jail scene in the Batman film with Tom Hardy [The Dark Knight Rises, 2012]. When they went out there, they realized the limitations of shooting there, and then they built a set in England. But I shot the real location, because I was obsessed with the idea that I could only use the kinds of effects that would have been around at the time the film was set—1915, 1916. Everything else had to just be, like, the unlimited imagination of a kid.
The Fall (Tarsem, 2006).
NOTEBOOK: These very beautiful, far-flung locations are a large part of what makes the film so striking. Can you speak to your love of visual storytelling?
TARSEM: For ten years growing up, I was in a boarding school in the Himalayas, and my parents were in Iran. Every time we were snowed in, I’d go visit them. I saw a lot of Iranian television, but I didn’t speak the language well enough to understand, so I always took it to mean whatever I wanted. Back at school, every Saturday was a half day and we had to tell stories—and I would be the guy who tells the stories, because I had been “abroad” and seen a lot more movies and television than [my classmates]. But my stories were so bizarrely off. Now, my friends make fun of me about it, but they made complete sense at the time. I don’t know if you've seen the TV series Get Smart, where the guy has a telephone in his shoe. It’s a comedy, a parody of spy movies—but in Iran, the laugh track was taken out and it was dubbed in Persian. I didn't realize it was a spoof. For an Indian, a guy having a phone in his shoe is not over the top at all. So when I would tell it, it wasn’t a spoof at all, it was just about a cool guy. Years later, when I saw it again, I was like, “‘So, this was supposed to be funny.”
On Saturdays, our teacher would also tell us stories. I probably owe the most to her. She would take current events and mix them up with mythology, with whatever; I remember this story about the Watergate scandal, and it was being solved by James Bond in collusion with Daaku Man Singh, who’s like an Indian Robin Hood character. We knew that there was something about a “Watergate” going on, something about the American president—and it felt so visceral to us. The story would just continue every Saturday. Then when we’d come back next week, she would go, “Where was I?” and we would look at her like, “As if you don't remember, it was the biggest cliffhanger in the world!” And then we realized that she was literally making it up. She could see these ten-year-olds, and to tell the story, all she had to do was look at our body language—we were so eager and so transparent. I realized later on, there’s nothing more transparent than a child’s body language.
Everybody complains that studios show early versions of movies to test audiences and take notes—but that concept was completely normal long before cinema. If you go to a street in Morocco or India, there the audience is as much the author as the person telling the story. When you go to a studio to pitch a movie and you see the person getting bored and looking at their texts or something, you introduce a crazy person who comes in and shoots everybody; you pick up the pace. Then, when you’ve got them and they're leaning forward, you can take your time and milk it.
NOTEBOOK: There's a kind of Jorge Luis Borges quality to the film in the way that it rewrites itself as it goes.
TARSEM: My favorite writer in the world! I've always wanted to adapt “The Secret Miracle.” I had [adapted] two short stories for a possible anthology series, but nobody wants to make an anthology, so it never happened. Unfortunately, I’m not really a poetry fan. He's done a lot for poetry; his poetry does nothing for me. But his stories! They’re beyond poetry to me. They’re so Escheresque-ly complicated; I love them.
In my generation, once you saw a movie, it was really hard to see it again; you had a certain kind of nostalgia. You would think that this movie you saw as a kid was so amazing, but then you sit down as a grown up with your friends and show it to them, and they go, “But this is a piece of shit,” and you go, “Yeah, I kind of agree”—you had changed it in your head. So that was always true about storytelling: you’d change it in your head. This is a phenomenon that I think the newer generation won't be that familiar with. Now, people can keep looking at film clips on YouTube or whatever, so the film kind of keeps up with how you remember it. But back then, you saw it and as you grew, the story changed and evolved—and you have to walk away for five, ten years at least to have that happen.
The Fall (Tarsem, 2006).
NOTEBOOK: Speaking of which, this film has actually been kind of hard to see since its premiere. It’s acquired a cult following since then, but when it came out, The Fall divided critics.
TARSEM: For quite some time it was hard to see, yeah, and that’s really been great for me. I've never done a movie that was critically beloved, ever. That means nothing. My favorite film, one of the best of that decade, is Jonathan Glazer’s Birth [2004], and it’s below 50 percent on the Tomatometer. What I love about that is it usually means that it’s polarizing. People love it or hate it—and that's okay with me. It's “comme ci, comme ça” I'm terrified of. Things that score in the eighties and nineties rarely interest me. I just go, like, “Yeah, so Shawshank Redemption [1994] is the greatest film ever made, right.”
NOTEBOOK: And a 90 percent score can just mean that 90 percent of people think it's “okay,” which is also not very inspiring.
TARSEM: When everyone gives it a six out of ten, that makes it 100 percent. OK, so it didn't offend anybody. The good news with The Cell and The Fall is that now, the older critics who saw it and hated it, they’re all dead and gone—thank you! [salutes]—and a younger generation has grown up and have completely new values, and they’ve become critics. Their reviews have started to take it upwards. Now a lot of people tell me that seeing this film is what made them want to go to film school, and suddenly it’s, “Oh, it’s a very good film that should be loved,” and I’m thinking, “Thank you, but you should have seen it when it came out.”
NOTEBOOK: So let’s talk about its debut. When it premiered at Toronto, it got a negative review in Variety that, as I understand it, pretty much nixed its festival run.
TARSEM: Completely. The funny thing is that two years later, Roger Ebert saw it, and he gave it the best review. Ebert always used to go to Toronto, but that particular year, he got cancer and he wasn’t there. He had really loved The Cell, and The Cell had had the same problem, where people really hated it—but Ebert had put it in his ten best films of the year. But when those guys nixed it, all the buyers, everybody, left. Whoever gave me that review in Variety, I hope they died a horrible death. I hope they suffered. [We are pleased to confirm Dennis Harvey is alive and well. –Ed.]
NOTEBOOK: The Fall’s having its comeback, I don’t know if you need to go full Vincent Gallo…
TARSEM: I’m being facetious. I mean, yeah, it's fine. And it’s really quite incredible—after all those years, suddenly everywhere I went, people were asking me, “How can we see The Fall? Or The Cell?” I was touring with my last film Dear Jassi [2023], and everybody was bringing up The Fall. Nobody had been able to show it—but then MUBI and Locarno approached me, and I realized it’s the perfect time for a 4K release. We did it properly.
The Fall (Tarsem, 2006).
NOTEBOOK: I also wanted to ask you about the costumes, which are so important to the film’s look and feel. They were designed by Eiko Ishioka, who worked on all four of the features you made before her death in 2012. Can you tell me about that relationship?
TARSEM: It started officially with The Cell, but me and my classmate Nico [Soultanakis, associate producer on The Cell; co-writer and producer on The Fall] used to rip off Eiko’s work all the time when we were in school. We would go to the library and see the things that she was doing—at that time, she was directing commercials in Japan. Then she did the production design and the clothes for Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters [1985], which we loved. Me and Nico were just in awe of her. And then, unfortunately for us, she exploded quite big after doing Bram Stoker’s Dracula [1993]; she won an Academy Award and everything. So, for The Cell, I just said, “This is the woman I want.” They said, “Oh, we hear that's difficult. How about somebody like Eiko?” I said, “No, I want Eiko.” Finally, we had a meeting, and it was love at first sight.
So she was there at ground zero. For every film we did, she would camp out in my place. She would come to the house and just throw everything on the floor. So, to a certain extent, that's why the work ended up being even more “cart ahead of the donkey”—because I would start with those visuals and say, “How do we get them into that shitty story?”A lot of the time, you tell the people you’re working with, “Try to have the unlimited imagination of a child. Think outside the box.” Eiko never understood what a box was. She just was so left-field, you had to rein her in. Like, “Eiko, help me here, people actually need to walk in these clothes.” She’d think this big [holds arms out as wide as they can go]—but you could also change anything on her, and she’d be like, “Yes, captain.” She was never scared of the amount of work.
My girlfriend at that particular time said, “I think Nico and Eiko are going out.” I was like, “You silly cow, she’s like, decades older than him.” But then Nico and Eiko said, “We’re in love.” I was like, “Fucking hell, that’s brilliant.” They got married; they literally were made for each other. When Eiko passed, Nico was gutted. He’s been living in Hawaii on a little farm, and all he’s doing is taking care of her clothes, going to different museums. He’s taking care of her legacy.
The Fall (Tarsem, 2006).
NOTEBOOK: I’m also curious about the religious iconography you use, there’s a lot of—
TARSEM: You’re gonna say “spirituality.” Everybody says that to me! I've been an atheist since my early teens; Darwin completely opened the universe for me. The imagery that I use, I go, “This is what you like, let me think about that.” It’s calculating, manipulative. I’ve never understood what the word “spirituality” means. I don’t meditate. I just play a lot of chess, watch a lot of porn—I watch whatever shit’s in front of me, any cop show, anything, a khichdi of everything.
NOTEBOOK: But it’s not only religious imagery that you make use of; there’s also a lot of stuff from myths and legends.
TARSEM: Yes, because they're good stories, and should be appreciated as such—and we should be worshiping the people who wrote them, not the characters in them. That’s what I’ve always claimed. When you look at the Ramayana, those characters have become gods to people, living gods; meanwhile, you should be worshiping Valmiki, the guy who wrote the Ramayana. But those stories were so phenomenal that people just believed them, no matter how phenomenally unlogical they look—you know, an elephant’s head on a human body and all that. If you can tell the story in such a way that, for 3,000 years, people worship your characters, you did good! So if you have to steal from anybody, steal from that.
NOTEBOOK: For a film of this scale, I can't think of a better venue for a premiere than the Piazza Grande.
TARSEM: I’m so excited. I’ve been to Switzerland, I’ve shot there, but I’ve never been to Locarno. Apart from a couple of things I did for The Fall, I've never really been to festivals. Because of Dear Jassi, I've been doing the rounds and I’m really loving it—mostly now because they like my baby. It's hard to go to festivals when they tell you that your baby's ugly. The Fall was that. I told myself, “Yeah, my baby’s ugly, and it smells, but it’s mine.” It will be a really cathartic experience for me, after putting everything into this film, for people to finally say, “Yes, your baby still smells, but it’s beautiful.” Starting with Locarno, and then with MUBI, I think this is the perfect second coming for me—because the first coming never really happened.