A Filmmaker's Epic Journey To Strangely Familiar Territory

To make "The Fall," in which a patient at a 1915 Los Angeles hospital spins tales of breathtaking fantasy for a recuperating little girl, Tarsem shot in more than 24 countries over four years to get the exotic backdrops he desired, including this fort in Rajasthan, India. The Indian-born, single-named filmmaker used an international cast and crew but mostly banned translators, letting misinterpretations influence the film's direction. He even let the entire production believe that Lee Pace, a then-unknown actor who plays the movie's bedridden main character (and now stars on TVs "Pushing Daisies"), was actually paralyzed. Tarsem, 46, who directed the landmark R.E.M. video "Losing My Religion" in 1991 and the 2000 film "The Cell," cast then-6-year-old Romanian actress Catinca Untaru to co-star in "The Fall."

Oh my God, there is something very strange about that image. To me it just looks like a big swan and a duckling, and she's just toddling along with him in the background. Catinca's character, Alexandria, forces herself into the story at a particular point when you think the storyteller is dying and doesn't have any control over his own story. And of course she will emulate the one person who is missing in her life, her father, the man. And that's what's going on with those two people in that particular picture.

I made it a period film as I was interested in doing it as if two people are from completely different cultures -- one person telling a story and the other person completely understands it as something else. As if there were no genres, as if it was a time before Chaplin and John Ford. I was looking for a kind of misunderstanding.

And so I pitched that to Eiko Ishioka, who designed the costumes, and I said you have to make something you can't put a finger on, so you can't say that comes from this film that I've seen and that comes from this film that I've seen. So what you have is a Romanian's idea of what a cowboy could look like and what the sidekick would be like. Both guns are on one side, the hat doesn't really look like a cowboy hat, there's a certain amount of bandit-ness in it, but at the same time it's also an 18th-century British army uniform.

The image clicks more with other people than it does with me. It seems to be what I always give to people as a brief: If you have to go wrong, go way wrong. You have to go wrong enough to go right. So for me, it's so wrong that it feels all right.

-- Interview conducted and condensed by Leslie Yazel