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Tarsem Singh and the Fall |
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Wednesday, 11 June 2008 |
Special Effects Give Way To Special Reality
Tarsem — the filmmaker formerly known as Tarsem Singh — has done "the digital thing" before. He's made a movie ("The Cell") and music videos that used the latest technical trickery to show us things we haven't seen before.
But for "The Fall," his adult fairy tale, he wanted to go old school. He wanted to show us the amazing things he's seen in his travels but that no one has filmed before.
"I thought I would make a swan song for this sort of old-fashioned filmmaking," Tarsem says in the lilting, musical accent of his native India. "I wanted this to be a heightened reality, but still real. So I thought 'Why not make the last film of this style, with real settings that filmgoers have never seen before?' The last piece of real eye candy."
For "The Fall," essentially a wild adventure tale a movie stuntman invents for a 5-year-old girl while both are recovering in a 1920 Los Angeles hospital, Tarsem went to 24 countries, from the Nicobar Islands to Namibia.
He had memories of an old Russian film where an injured man tells a boy a fantastical pirate tale while both are in a hospital (Yo Ho Ho, 1981). Tarsem abandoned that story and made one closer to his own experience. No pirates, plenty of exotic Far Eastern locales.
"Everything in this movie is real. The 'Blue City' is a real blue city [Jodhpur] in India. You are legally not allowed to change the color of your house. To live there, your house must be blue. But we could go round and tell people there, for two months you could have all the free blue paint you want, to get them to put fresh paint on their houses. So it was that much more vivid.
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