The few people who know Tarsem Singh's name at all probably recall him as the director who debuted with The Cell, a bizarro horror-fantasy in which Jennifer Lopez plays a sort of psychic psychiatrist entering the fantastical mind of a serial killer. The movie was largely panned, but praised nonetheless for its amazing visuals—the same sort of glorious images the now-mononymic Tarsem brought to the video for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion," to his extensive body of commercial work, and to his new labor of love, the insanely ambitious arthouse picture The Fall. The film, reportedly shot in 24 countries, centers on a paraplegic, suicidal man (Pushing Daisies' Lee Pace) who earns the trust of a hospitalized child (Catinca Untaru) by telling her an improvised fantasy story, which becomes a breathtaking onscreen narrative that parallels events in his own life. Recently, Tarsem spoke at length with The A.V. Club about putting his puke on R.E.M., being a prostitute who loves his work, carrying his own teabags to film school after his father disowned him, and lying to his own film crew for verisimilitude.
The A.V. Club: The Fall screened in Toronto in 2005, but it's only now making it into theaters. Was it difficult getting distribution?
Tarsem: It's been almost exactly a year and a half, true. In Toronto, I ran into—at the time, I hadn't finished all the titles for the film. It made a big difference when those two people's names weren't in front: "Presented by [David] Fincher and Spike [Jonze]." And suddenly, there were a lot of people sharpening knives to say, "The guy who made The Cell is making something like this?" Some people thought it was the best thing since sliced bread, and some people thought it was absolute shit. And I thought, "That's great! Exactly what I intended to make." But it's quite a bit more polarizing than I thought it would be. And the stuff from Variety completely killed it. So until a whole bunch of devotees showed up to say "There's something really special here," it wasn't gonna go anywhere.
So it took that much time—apart from in Japan and a whole bunch of countries that just embraced it and took it on. Though their release still happens in about a month and a half, because they take that much time to put a movie out. So I just figure, if an American release was going to happen, it had to happen around this time. Any other option [but theatrical release] wasn't something I was happy with. It's something that I believe really needs to be seen on the screen. I know every director screams for that. And I just thought, "It's okay, we spent that much on it, let's drop some more."
AVC: So how did the overseas shooting work? You reportedly piggybacked your work in various countries on the commercials you were shooting—
T: No, that's the tail end of it. The original start of it was once I found the girl. For about six years, I was looking for a person whom I thought could carry the film. It was very difficult. It was the kind of film I knew would never get financing. I tried a couple of times, but I would never give anybody a script—I had a structure, and people would say, "Is this the film? Because we'll raise the money." And I'd say, "No, it's going to be written by a 4-year-old." I was obsessed with finding a child who could act in the style I liked, not in the style of A Little Princess, but much more Ponette. I figured age 4 was the cutoff point, until someone sent me a tape of this girl who was actually 6, but didn't speak English.
So her part, after I'd put it all together, took only about a year and a half to two years. And then after that, I needed the characters' backstories, so for those, I went around the globe, saying "I need to go to this location, this location," places I'd scouted for 17 years. I would only take ads that went to those regions. So I'd shoot an ad, and then bring my actors over to shoot on location.
AVC: How much control do you have over where a commercial is shot?
T: You probably haven't seen what I do—most people think of commercials as the kind of work that everybody does. There are one or two people like me, who don't do storyboards, don't do anything, but can pretty much pick the places and the kind of subject matter they want to do. I have a lot of control.
AVC: So you could say "I want to shoot this commercial in Fiji, so I can get shots there for my movie?"
T: It was more like this. I usually have a commercial that needs to shoot in water. There's about 10 ads being offered, all by clients I've worked with before. And I'd just pick the one that would take me to Fiji, and would have me shoot by water. Because that one had—I think I was going to shoot something that required David Beckham and seven other soccer players, who could only be available for so long on a runway in Madrid. I said, "Okay. This is the one that will take me closest to where I want to go."
AVC: How do you approach your commercial work? Do you think of it as art, do you find it fulfilling? Or is it what pays the bills so you can make films like this?
T: All I can say—a lot of people do music videos so they can do commercials, they do commercials so they can do films. I happen to be like a prostitute in love with the profession. I keep saying, "I'd fuck 'em for free. But they pay me money, and I'm very grateful." And unfortunately, I think I must not be anywhere near as talented as the people I admire. Because almost everybody I know hates the filming process that I admire. They always like the prefiguring and the editing, and I am the only moron that just loves being on a set. I shoot more than 300 days a year, I'm on the road all the time, and I love it. So I don't know. When that passion dies, maybe I'll do more films, but I just love being on the set, and film doesn't allow that as much.
AVC: This film was self-financed. If you were shipping your cast and crew and equipment around the world, why did it necessarily matter whether you personally were already in Fiji?
T: Because the crew and the equipment were there already.
AVC: So it was all the same crew and equipment on the film that you use for your commercial work?
T: Yes, yes, yes, yes. Originally, my college professor did my last film, and we did a lot of commercials together. But at the last minute, I had to change it and make my loader my cameraman. Because the girl—she had no idea what was happening. She thought we were basically going to be shooting a documentary. Apparently that's the information the casting director had given out. She thought Lee was like Christopher Reeve, and actually was handicapped. An idea dawned, and I told my brother, "We can't do this in a studio. It has to be in a real place." So I found the institution where we shot down in South Africa, and I had to get rid of my main crew, because they knew the plotline I'd had for 23 years. I promoted the camera loader to cameraman—he'd never shot anything before, but I'd known him for 13 years. And I put a crew together that had no idea what the film was going to be about. We changed the script so the lead was not Lee, it was the father of the Romanian girl, and we told everybody "Lee can't walk." We told everybody that he was a theater actor in New York who'd had an accident and was paralyzed.
So the cameraman, the production designer, every actor, everybody isolated where we were shooting did not know that Lee could walk. And I shot the movie in sequence. I just said, "The first time she sees him in the film is really the first time she sees him. The second time she sees him is the second time she sees him." So I couldn't really use the crew I work with most of the time. About three people knew the truth about Lee, but they were never on the set. So we shot their material in sequence, and after 12 weeks, I had to tell everybody the truth about Lee, and it made a lot of people cry and angry and just, you know, feel manipulated.
AVC: Why go to all that trouble to pretend a man playing a handicapped character was actually paralyzed? Did it wind up adding that much verisimilitude?
T: Everything had to happen that way, because the little girl's magic was required. It wasn't the cliché of a Method actor wanting to stay in a wheelchair the whole shoot—it was really depressing for Lee, actually. But here's why—when you're on a film set, no matter how dire a situation you're putting across, from a concentration camp to a handicapped person—when you're on that set for long enough, it gets jokey. And I didn't want to get to a stage where people would walk on Lee's bed, or tell handicap jokes. I knew it would filter down to the girl, even in body language. So nobody knew Lee could walk. In the end, a lot of people said, "You could have trusted me." And I was telling people, "It had nothing to do with trust. It had very much to do with the atmosphere I needed for these 12 weeks."
Once I found the girl, I knew I had to cast somebody for Lee's role within a week or two, because I knew that within four months, the girl was going to be a different person. I originally said she should be 4. After that, child actors turn into A Little Princess. But when I found that she couldn't speak English, I was fine with her being 6. Because the miscommunication—her trying to understand the language made her more natural. But one thing I didn't anticipate was how quickly she'd learn English. Within about 10 days, she was speaking English, and with an Indian accent, because she spent so much time with me. So I had to get Romanians in, and start speaking through them, which made her a little more disinformed, which was better.
AVC: And no one caught on at any point during the shoot, and realized he wasn't paralyzed?
T: Almost. I said that wrongly before, that she thought she was doing a documentary. That's what she thought before she was cast. The casting director thought there was going to be a handicapped person telling kids stories. So once I came into it, I immediately said, "No, it is a feature film, but the guy is handicapped." I thought, "How long can we carry this façade?" And funny enough—it was such a big lie, it was so audaciously big, and we isolated everybody from everything else, and after about a week and a half, it was absolute. Only one person on the set knew, and that was a nurse who would take him to the toilet. Lee would go to the gym, and once, he said, "Today, I almost got caught, because one of the actors walked right past me!" It was just like nobody could see him walking. They were all day working with him in a wheelchair, so they didn't see him when he was standing up. And a lot of times, with men in the gym, you don't want to look at a person. It's like a nightclub, you know? It might be seen as making a pass. So literally, people don't make much eye contact in a gym. So he'd go to the gym, and just he would see these people and say, "Oh my God, I'm caught!" And they'd walk right by him.
With Lee, I just had to make sure that nobody had seen him before, ever, in anything. I thought I might end up going to drama schools to pick the person I wanted. And then the casting agent showed me this movie, Soldier's Girl. And I said, "Who?" He said "Look at the girl." And I said, "Is that a tranny?" He said "It's a guy." I went, "Oh my God." So I went and got him, and he was great—and nobody was familiar with him yet. So we shot for 12 weeks, and then spent about a year filming with the guys in Namibia, India, Bali, Fiji. And then after that were all the character backstories, which I piggybacked on other things.
Somebody told me at one point that it would have been a better film if there was no fantasy in it, if it was just Lee and the girl in the room. And it could have been. When I started shooting, I told my brother, "This here might be the film." I said, "In 12 weeks, I'm going to call you and say 'The movie's done,' or I'll go on what I'm calling a magical mystery tour." He had to call me and tell me "You need to go on this tour." I was a bit screwed up in my life. Somebody I wanted to spend the rest of my life with had just left, and I was completely shaken, and I just said, "Yeah, I'll come out of this tunnel when I come out."
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