Spencer: Hi podcast,

Chelsea: Hi podcast!

Spencer: Welcome everybody. My name is Spencer and I am here with my dear friend, Chelsea.

Chelsea: Hello!

Spencer: This is, I haven’t seen that

Chelsea: it is?

Spencer: as a matter of fact.

Chelsea: sorry, I think I’m in the wrong studio.

Spencer: Okay, well, this is a podcast about the movies that we have not seen, but it is of course a shame free zone. This is not the podcast where you say, Oh my God, you haven’t seen Goodfellas?

Chelsea: Uh, you haven’t seen Goodfellas? You don’t know about Henry Hill?

Spencer: it is a pillar of American cinema.

Chelsea: Uh, yeah.

Spencer: It is not that. No, this is a loving environment. This is a very supportive space. We share with each other our favorite movies. And today we are talking about one of my favorite movies. And when I asked Chelsea if they had seen this movie, they said,

Chelsea: I haven’t seen that.

Spencer: and that movie is.

Spencer: The fall,

Chelsea: Oh boy.

Spencer: the the, the fall was a movie that ran the festival circuit in 2006 and was released very limitedly in the theaters in 2008. It’s directed by Tarsem Singh who is credited as Tarsem on the film and it’s stars. The one, the only Lee Pace.

Chelsea: our man, Lee Pace.

Spencer: A God walking amongst

Chelsea: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yes.

Spencer: You might know him from pushing daisies.

Chelsea: I haven’t seen

Spencer: You’re kidding, Chelsea. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Well, we’re, I don’t know if the format allows for television shows, but Pushing Daisies was a very short lived one. So we might be able

Chelsea: to Yeah, I have heard it’s one of those that’s like, it didn’t get, it’s due, really, I, one season?

Chelsea: Am I right?

Spencer: just two seasons. Yes. Uh, currently he is emperor in the middle of the tripartite emperor in the television show foundation, which I understand that you also have not

Chelsea: I also have not seen it.

Spencer: What do you know Li Pei’s from?

Chelsea: I mean, I, I, I know of Pushing Daisies, so I’m like, Oh, who’s that man? But I, I mean, I’m sorry to this man, Lee Pace, but I can’t name anything else he’s been in.

Spencer: you have seen The Hobbit.

Chelsea: Oh yes. Yes.

Spencer: Branduil.

Chelsea: Oh, there we go. Thank

Spencer: Yes, of course, of course, of course.

Chelsea: I know him from The Hobbit.

Spencer: Hobbit. Yes. I’m s I didn’t mean to make it seem like, Oh, you like Lee Pace? Name one movie he’s been in. Cause that completely antithetical to the spirit of our

Chelsea: Yeah, this is a shame free zone. I apologize. Don’t shame my Lee Pace knowledge.

Spencer: I’m I’m so sorry! I

Chelsea: No, I know. Yeah, it’s totally fine. I know him from Being a Beautiful Man.

Spencer: And that that stands on its own.

Chelsea: It does. He’s also very talented. So, I mean, yeah, there’s also that.

Spencer: Yeah. So, uh, this film, the fall, it’s set in Los Angeles in the 1920s. Uh, it’s about the kinship that develops between a Hollywood stunt man. Who’s recovering from a, an injury that he sustained during a fall, uh, that paralyzed both of his legs.

Spencer: And a six year old girl with a broken arm and just the most vivid imagination. He’s bedridden, and to pass the time and also to mask a lot of the pain that he is experiencing, he begins to tell her a story of wild fantasy and swashbuckling adventure. She vividly sees it with him. We are actually, in the fantasy sections of this film, seeing what she sees.

Spencer: As he’s telling her this story and the lines between the real world and the fantasy world blur people in the real world bleed into the fantasy world in sort of a Wizard of Oz kind of way. So that’s the basic premise of the movie and it’s just spectacular.

Chelsea: And when did you first see this movie, Spencer?

Spencer: I saw this movie, uh, in college. It was introduced to me by my girlfriend at the time. And this was an extremely special movie for her. And I don’t recall how she saw it. The only times I’ve encountered people who have seen this movie have, you know, very specific relationships to it that are not due to them seeing it in theaters, because most people have not, it is not available on any streaming platforms.

Spencer: It’s quite difficult to get a hard. Copy of it. So yes, she showed it to me because this was a very special movie for her It was like a you know Let’s make a blanket for it in the living room And dim the lights and have this be the only thing that we’re going to be doing right now is experiencing this

Chelsea: Oh, I do think you need that environment for this movie. Oh, completely. Yeah.

Spencer: completely it’s completely Captivating and it grabs your attention in it and it also needs your attention. I think to really experience it in the way that I, I think fits best. A lot of movie critics at the time, a lot of movie critics at the time, wrote very negative reviews of the movie because they said it was all aesthetics. Exactly. In this case, however, I do believe that the style is the substance.

Chelsea: I think it’s a really beautiful story. It’s a simple story,

Spencer: think it’s a really beautiful story. It’s a simple story, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad one, I think.

Chelsea: Yeah, and when you saw this movie in college, what spoke to you about the film, the film?

Spencer: Well, I enjoyed this film. Um. Because I had never seen anything like it.

Chelsea: Mm

Spencer: I just have not seen anything like it. And for the listeners, it is visually spectacular in a way that Lawrence of Arabia is. Every shot is composed to be just as deliberate as possible. Like every choice is meaningful for how this looks.

Spencer: We’ll get into this more in the behind the scenes section, but it was shot All over the world and it was shot entirely without, uh, any computer generated effects. And if you, dear listener, were to look up on Google images, any of the shots from the fall, parentheses 2006, because there are quite a few things named the fall.

Spencer: Um, you’ll see, uh, images that look fake. They look like photo shoots. They look like paintings.

Chelsea: Truly. Yeah, I could not believe my eyes while watching this movie.

Chelsea: I was like, this is real. And I, yeah, I had a, I know that we’ll talk about this later, but I did have a sense that perhaps there wasn’t anything computer generated. And I was like, but how?

Chelsea: It’s so stunning.

Spencer: It’s on a scale so grand that the mind boggles. And I think a lot of that is due to this framing device of the little girl, Alexandria, hearing Roy, the stuntman, weave this story of like high fantasy. Using a lot of tropes and archetypes of storytelling, just mashing them together to make something that’s really fun and could be told in little couple minutes sections to, to Alexandria to entertain her and to pass the time and also to, I imagine we’ll talk about, you know, the more spoilery parts of the story later, um,

Spencer: The ulterior

Spencer: the ulterior motives.

Spencer: Yeah, exactly. Behind telling this story. And it’s also, it has a really nice, yeah. Parallel journey for Alexandria and Roy to take that she moves from, uh, innocence to experience and he from despair to hope, um, Roy begins the movie with, you know, this terrible, terrible injury and having his girlfriend had been stolen away from him by, by a rival actor and he is in a state where he feels like the best choice for himself and for the people close to him would be to take his own life.

Spencer: And Alexandria in a way just like stops that from happening.

Chelsea: Yeah.

Spencer: Something that I really appreciate about this is that because Alexandria is Taking an active part in the storytelling with Roy, she shows up in the story after a certain point. It has that kind of feeling that you get when you’re doing play pretend with a child.

Spencer: There’s this and then, and then, and then, and then kind of aspect to the storytelling and cause and effect are extremely simple and the, the images are stronger than the themes and this, this movie, I think a lot of the negative reviews also came from the fact that it doesn’t have your typical Story structure.

Spencer: It doesn’t have the hero of a thousand faces from what’s the title of the book?

Chelsea: Oh gosh. The Hero of a Of a Thousand Faces, I believe. Yeah,

Spencer: Okay. Thank you.

Chelsea: Yeah. Yeah,

Spencer: so it doesn’t have the hero’s journey Sort of structure to it and there’s quite a bit of it. That’s just sort of like Unsatisfying

Chelsea: unsatisfying,

Spencer: that doesn’t get resolved in the way that you expect from a big fantasy movie But I think that’s because you know a little girl is is like I that I don’t care Yeah, we’re gonna move on.

Spencer: Why would he do that? He should do this instead, and she writes people out of the out of the movie.

Chelsea: Yes. Incredible. She’s, she’s very powerful, Alexandria.

Spencer: powerful. Yeah. Yeah She sits in the director’s chair. She picks up the bullhorn

Chelsea: mean, I’d listen to her.

Spencer: Yeah.

Chelsea: I’d do anything.

Spencer: Yes. Yeah, exactly.

Chelsea: the other thing, the last thing

Spencer: And the other thing, the last thing that I’ll say about why this film spoke to me so much is because I was getting a pretentious liberal arts education at the time.

Spencer: And I’m, uh, a really pretentious arty guy and I love movies about movies. And I love when stories are about stories. And it’s, it’s always just like kind of vapid to talk about, um, you know, like the power of storytelling and, you know, they can take us places and they can show us sides of ourselves that we didn’t know were there, but somehow this, it works here.

Spencer: Resiliency is a big part of this. Dreams are a big part of this. Um, love and kindness and pain,

Chelsea: collides

Spencer: in this really beautiful, messy sort of way that I just don’t see in a lot of movies. I feel like a lot of movies want to be really pat and have an ending that just gets tied in a bow and this one doesn’t have that.

Spencer: So, what did you think, Chelsea?

Chelsea: Well, Spencer, um, I’ve now seen this movie, and I loved it. And, uh, what you were just saying really rings true to my notes because, uh, I literally wrote here, One thing about me is I love a film that’s a love letter to its medium. And that is exactly what this movie is, and yes, it’s all like pretentious or whatever to love, like, storytelling is so important kind of thing, but I, I love it.

Chelsea: I eat it up every time. Uh, so that’s the number one thing. The number two thing is, again, we’ve said it, the visuals in this movie are just absolutely stunning and unreal. It really is a delight. It really is so much fun, and so sweet, and I cried.

Spencer: Mm

Chelsea: I, gosh, I cried. One thing that really stuck out to me, watching the movie, just immediately from the jump, is when the opening sequence, it’s showing horses, and there’s water, and someone’s floating in the water, and it’s all very dark and sad, and they’re pulling a horse up, and there’s a train, um, and I didn’t understand anything about what this movie was about.

Chelsea: And then the opening sequence is over, and the film just completely changes, and I was left like, what? Well, what was all that about? What was all of the opening sequence about? Am I watching the right movie? Am I watching a weird, like, I don’t know, like a Limewire esque kind of thing where you think you’re getting, uh, one song and it’s just something that’s like a chipmunk song or something.

Spencer: like, it’s just, I mean,

Chelsea: Exactly. Yeah. But you get the payoff later on because you understand the very sad. Sad story that, uh, Lee Pace went through or the fall that Lee Pace had. Roy, our man Roy, had and then also you understand that he was filming a movie and then at the end you get all the lovely movie shots of the stunts and it is such a fantastic And, and it really explains why the vibe was so different at the beginning of the movie.

Chelsea: And it’s like, Oh, this is just, I love moving

Spencer: I

Chelsea: I love, I love moving pictures. It’s a love letter to moving pictures. Even though, even though one time, you know, Alexandria says she’s never seen a moving picture and he’s like, Oh, you’re not missing much. You’re wrong, Roy. Don’t lie to Alexandria. I mean, I know he was very, you know, in despair and all of that, but moving pictures are wonderful and beautiful.

Chelsea: And this moving picture in particular is wonderful and beautiful. And thank you for sharing it with

Spencer: Absolutely. Of course. I can’t tell you how delighted I am that you enjoyed it and were moved by it because it could just be those beautiful visuals and still be spectacular. There’s a quote that I paraphrase often. That rattles around in my head, but I cannot find either the original wording or who said it originally.

Spencer: So maybe this is something you could help me with

Chelsea: I’ll do my best.

Spencer: using your, your, uh, research martial arts. The idea is that that movies are as close as we can get to dreaming while awake. And that is just so unbelievably true to me that with something like The Fall, like, what you were saying, like a love letter to its medium, like, what can’t we do with a movie?

Spencer: What kind of stories can’t we tell? What kind of visuals can’t we see? Uh, and The Fall really, uh, exemplifies that. Like, why can’t, why can’t we just go to the Taj Mahal? Why can’t a movie Be very dreamlike and be or be a child’s imagination and have things blink in and out of existence and become reality and not.

Chelsea: Why can’t Charles Darwin wear a flamboyant coat?

Spencer: Yes.

Chelsea: not?

Spencer: Why can’t Charles Darwin just be in a movie where he’s like an action hero? Yeah.

Chelsea: Yeah. And has a little monkey that tells him that elephants can swim. All elephants?

Spencer: you sure?

Chelsea: Really, Wallace? Are you sure? Yeah. Yes, Charles. This is a child’s imagination. Anything can happen.

Spencer: hmm. Mm hmm.

Chelsea: Can elephants swim? Oh, okay. Okay. Good. Wallace was right.

Spencer: Timonkey. Smarter than

Chelsea: Wallace the monkey. Smarter than Charles Darwin. One thing that I really, really love about this film is Katinka Untaru is so captivating, like, I mean, one of the most unique child actors I’ve ever seen in a film because she’s sort of like It’s like she says what you’d expect because she’s six, but you don’t expect what she’s gonna say at the same time, like, she has very childlike moments where she’s like, what?

Spencer: And

Chelsea: What? But then she says something like, at the beginning of the film, Alexandria and Roy meet kind of on a chance encounter where, um, Alexandria has this really close relationship with one of the nurses, Nurse Evelyn, and Alexandria sort of thinks, throws Nurse Evelyn a note, and it, you know, it’s paper, so it doesn’t really make it where it should make it, and it sort of floats into where Roy is, uh, bedridden, and so he gets the note, and she’s like, well, that’s my note.

Chelsea: I’m gonna go get the note, and so she goes to meet Roy, and she Just kind of barges right in and snatches the note out of his hand and he calls the note gibberish and she’s like, well, yeah, it’s gibberish. It’s not for you. She has just like this childlike view, but then also like this very mature of like, yeah, it’s not for you, Roy.

Chelsea: Don’t read other people’s notes.

Spencer: about this is that what she’s seeing, based on the words that he is using, isn’t what you as an adult would see. One of the heroes of the story that Roy is telling, uh, is called the Indian. And what we see in the fantasy world is a South Asian man with a big mustache and a beard and a turban and a shirwani, like a tunic.

Spencer: And that is what Alexandria imagines when she hears that word. But the words that Roy, uh, is using, uh, uh, refer to, like, Native Americans in his film in the Western that he’s making so because he refers to the noble Indian with his beautiful squaw Living in a wigwam. It’s almost like there’s an unreliable narrator, but rather a tug of war between two different narrators

Chelsea: narrators.

Chelsea: Right, yeah, yeah. Two very different people from very different backgrounds and experiences and ages and all of that. Yeah. Yeah, that’s something I really love about the film, also, is so much of what we’re seeing is Through a child’s eyes and that goes for the the sort of epic fantasy that Roy is is telling Alexandria So yeah, we’re seeing how she would interpret his words.

Chelsea: I think how visually stunning the film is is Because of that in my mind because it’s like it is very like candy coated and like something a child would you know, there’s bright colors every color on the spectrum and you know, there’s animals talking animals and that kind of thing, you know, it’s it’s just very bright.

Chelsea: It’s everything a child would imagine the kind of the real world to you’re seeing you’re experiencing from Alexandria’s eyes in a lot of ways because it’s like there’s times where she is Sitting and it’s like she’s hearing adults have conversations like in two different rooms, but she can kind of hear both, but it’s like she can hear the words, but she’s not really understanding them because she’s six.

Chelsea: But we as adults watching the film are picking up some of the other relationships and dynamics that are happening that aren’t necessarily playing out. on screen. And I just think that was such a genius thing to do. I just thought that was so brilliant.

Spencer: Yes, yeah, that was one of the things that I noticed this time around watching rewatching it, which is that, uh, her perspective in the real world is so disorienting to an adult. The kinds of things that have like great meaning to an adult just don’t for her and like how confusing it must have been to be a child.

Spencer: In the twenties,

Chelsea: It must have been so confusing.

Spencer: it’s a world not built for children and in any way, shape or form like, like children are supposed to be small adults. And like Alexandria has spoken to either like incredibly dismissively, like she’s not a person at all or with the expectation of her having an adult reaction. There are a handful of people who do like her.

Spencer: Obviously, Roy,

Chelsea: Despite his

Spencer: mental state at any given moment, does, does care for her quite a lot. And the actor who plays Ota Benga. And also is the ice delivery man loves her very much and is like, okay, you can lick the ice. Yeah. That’s fine. Do you want to lick the ice today? Alexandria? No, thank you.

Chelsea: I’m very busy. I’m

Spencer: busy.

Spencer: That’s

Chelsea: Yeah, I, I love her. Just at the hospital like I I couldn’t really get a sense of how long she been there, but she owns the place I mean, she absolutely owns it the way she just runs around from building to building making Friends with with other adults and just has like this kind of mischievous Innocence, but also like a confidence, you know, I can steal the communion wafer yes, and I can snatch my note right out of Roy’s hand like she She’s very innocent in a way, but she also is very sure of herself and confident.

Chelsea: So self possessed, yeah. Yeah,

Spencer: All of that I think really helps her to deal, I guess, with Roy. Weaponizing the story against her and using her to harm himself. That heartbreaking scene where they’re both crying and Roy trying to end the story on on his terms Which includes killing everybody

Chelsea: off every single character. Yeah.

Spencer: and Alexandria like desperately pulling the story in in her direction where people get the things that they want

Chelsea: Mm hmm. And

Spencer: Live and are happy when she asks, why are you doing this?

Spencer: And he says this is my story and that she says but it’s mine, too The whole movie just like coalesces right at that point and it is just like a stunning piece of cinema. Like, I don’t know why clips of that aren’t playing in the Academy Museum right now.

Chelsea: Truly. Yeah. Or why is this not in the Criterion collection? I feel like it’s, it’s made for it.

Spencer: Yeah.

Chelsea: Please.

Spencer: I,

Chelsea: Mr. Criterion. Sir? The Fall? Have you heard of it? 2006. When I, when I was Googling, oh, to make sure I had all of the characters names right and everything. And yeah, it was like, The Fall. Oh no. That’s not gonna get me to where I wanna be. The Fall movie. Nope, that’s there’s, that’s still not right. The Fall movie, 2006 . Ah, ah, there we go.

Chelsea: Yes.

Spencer: that, with that very Dolly esque poster

Chelsea: Yeah. Can I say something controversial? You might find controversial.

Spencer: Well, let’s see.

Chelsea: Yeah, please. Ready?

Spencer: I’m, okay.

Chelsea: Brace yourself.

Spencer: my girdle.

Chelsea: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wrote down if Wess Anderson made an epic fantasy movie. In, and I specifically wrote this down after, gosh, the princess, I believe, oh, oh, her locket and they’re, they’re reading out the locket and it says a bunch of stuff and the mask bandit says, it says all that on that little locket.

Chelsea: I mean, for one thing, it’s like. Yeah, it doesn’t really follow the normal storytelling structure and I think Wes Anderson does that a lot But then also just that like almost sort of absurd kind of humor and just sort of I don’t even know how to explain it And then of course, it’s just visually stunning and and very bright and colorful and that kind of thing It’s not it’s definitely not a one to one like if Wes Anderson made an epic fantasy movie isn’t totally it but when I heard that It says a lot on that little locket line.

Chelsea: I was like, oh, that’s a very Wes Anderson thing. I feel like,

Spencer: Yeah, it’s, it’s that thing that I feel like he does quite well. A lot of the time where it’s the lines will have some sense of irony to

Chelsea: Yeah,

Spencer: but not so much so that it’s like commenting on the movie itself. Like, like say in a Marvel movie, like, well, that just

Chelsea: Yeah.

Spencer: You know that’s that’s a broad example, but it said all that in that little locket It’s a little a little bit of a throwaway line It’s sort of there to like put a lampshade on something just so that we can get past it But I think you’re right.

Spencer: Yeah, it like it still works within the aesthetic of the thing because maybe uh, alexandria said that

Chelsea: Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. She, she often kind of makes her way into the story, like that whole scene with the, it says all that on the little locket is so funny because, you know, they find out that, that the princess is, is actually engaged to everyone’s arch nemesis, Governor Odius.

Spencer: odious

Chelsea: And then it’s like this very dramatic, like, well, now we have to kill her scene. And it’s like, sort of like exasperated. The princess says. I want to look at you until I die. And the masked bandit just goes, Oh, what a mystery this world. One day you love them and the next you want to kill them a thousand times over.

Chelsea: So

Spencer: over.

Chelsea: funny and silly and dramatic. And yeah, just love in the eyes of Alexandria is so funny because Before we find out about this awful thing, she’s Odius’s fiancé, she and the Masked Bandit are sort of having this burgeoning romance, and Alexandria says, Make them kiss!

Spencer: And

Chelsea: And I just wrote, that’s me watching every piece of media ever.

Spencer: piece of media ever.

Spencer: Honestly, same. Yeah. Yeah. Because, uh, I at Chelsea’s Recommendation have been watching Riverdale, which is so much fun. It is so much fun. And every single episode, I’m like, Oh, they should kiss, kiss, kiss.

Chelsea: Kiss. Are they gonna kiss?

Spencer: are you gonna

Chelsea: Are

Spencer: now? Half the time I’m right.

Chelsea: Honestly, yeah. Yeah. It’s a great show to watch if you would like characters to kiss.

Chelsea: Because they kiss a lot. Yeah. They kiss so much and it’s funny you mention that because that is exactly what I had in mind when I wrote that down. I’m like, yep. Every piece of media ever, but mostly Riverdale.

Spencer: Riverdale. Yeah. Yeah. Make

Chelsea: them kiss. And Roy says, they can kiss, but first marriage. And then I just said, boo,

Spencer: just said,

Chelsea: that’s lame.

Spencer: so interesting. Yeah, exactly. Like you said that love to Alexandria would be this really overly dramatic, very strange thing that is like completely unconnected to how love looks in real life, both from like her perspective, hearing about this kind of thing in stories.

Spencer: And also, I think. I hope I think this is in tech. I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t be Roy would be talking about this because of how movies worked at the time because they were all silent. And so they had like this pantomime sort of feeling of like touching your hand to your forehead and saying, Oh, how strange the situation.

Spencer: Yeah.

Chelsea: sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Spencer: would be just that dramatic so that it could be communicated to. An audience clearly and quickly and the the title card that would come up would be the most perfect poetic version of what could have been said at the time. So, uh, Roy is also teaching her movies throughout this whole thing too, which is such a delightful way to show movies to somebody who had never seen one before.

Spencer: It’s just to describe it in a way that’s so cinematic.

Chelsea: Right, and I was just thinking, it’s kind of incredible that And really just maybe just a testament to a child’s imagination is that she can conjure up these images without having ever seen a movie and a moving picture in her life, but she just has this grand imagination. I think it’s so beautiful.

Spencer: From books or from other stories, like she’ll know what a bandit should look like. And she doesn’t like pirates.

Chelsea: doesn’t like pirates, no. She doesn’t

Spencer: because she knows what those are. She knows what this definition of Indian is, but not that one.

Chelsea: Mm hmm. She knows.

Spencer: Roy will say they’re in the desert. And so she’ll, she’ll imagine, you know, a lonely tree.

Spencer: And then this absolute wall of sand, the size of a skyscraper behind them. Like that just, this is what makes the most sense to her. Um, because you, you know, perhaps hasn’t seen that in real life. The blanks are able to be filled in in such a vivid, imaginative way. NASA, of all things, of all institutions, published a study a few years ago finding that most people lose the vast majority of their creative potential.

Spencer: Between childhood and adulthood. Yeah,

Chelsea: That’s terrifying.

Spencer: I know. So like

Chelsea: the

Spencer: hypothesis that’s drawn from all of this research is that most, if not all children are born creative geniuses, essentially like their, their imagination is boundless and their capacity to invent is equally. So the potential for that begins to go down as you grow up because of School because of responsibilities of growing up and because of trauma and, um, just the, all of the realities of life.

Spencer: Yeah, well,

Chelsea: quite sad. It’s sad. And I

Spencer: yeah, and I think about, I think about that every once in a while when I’m like, Gus, was I happier when I was

Chelsea: a kid. Um, but

Spencer: this movie really exemplifies that potential. I feel like, like, Alexandria is a greater filmmaker than anyone who exists at that time.

Chelsea: Oh my gosh, yes. That’s such a great point. Tarsam Singh, right, has such a way of really grounding you in the real world and making you feel emotionally captivated by the real world characters. But then at the same time, when you enter the fantasy world, I’m also emotionally captivated by those characters.

Chelsea: And when Roy starts killing them off, I’m like, I feel like Alexandria. I’m like, stop, you stop that. And I was, I was actually gasping. I was like, Oh my God. They’re dying? Oh no!

Spencer: isn’t it incredible that you as the audience member move from seeing things from Roy’s perspective to seeing them from Alexandria’s perspective, that like the story becomes, you know, yours as well. Watching this. Yeah.

Chelsea: it’s my story too, Roy. Yeah! And Alexandria’s. Yeah!

Spencer: You’ve gotten to know these people and your entree into them is.

Spencer: Roy’s introduction with like the quick cuts of all their origin stories basically and It’s funny because they all end in the same way where they like drop to their knees and scream Ah to the heavens, but also everybody’s fueled by such tragedy. All their vengeance is very real Uh, and they all share it in exactly the same way.

Spencer: So they’re like the best team, uh, as well. Like, there’s no question about that. Like God, yeah. I was also just thinking about that. Like all these people in another circumstance would probably be really good friends. Yeah. Despite being that

Chelsea: different. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was really beautiful. And then, I mean, Roy and Alexandria become, uh, kind of unlikely friends.

Chelsea: And, uh, another thing I wrote down, uh, towards the end of the movie is, Roy says to Alexandria, we make a strange pair, don’t we? And I was like, me and Spencer.

Spencer: No,

Chelsea: We’re so strange.

Spencer: so old,

Chelsea: We’re so old. We’re so old. The

Spencer: things that also really caught me this time around that I hadn’t given much thought to before was the religious iconography. That’s In this movie, it’s, it’s shot in quite a few Asian and East Asian countries, so you would see a lot of iconography there, like the Taj Mahal, and temples, and also a lot of Western and Christian iconography that I just didn’t pick up on before, that there is a gigantic cross hanging above Roy’s bed, um, and often, it just sort of seems to follow Alexandria around in the hospital, sort of looming over her, it’s hinted at a couple of points that Roy is Catholic, That he knows what a communion wafer is, and Alexandria doesn’t, and he knows what it’s for.

Spencer: He, as a Catholic, would also know that suicide is a sin. The priest, in real life, is Odius’s right hand man in the fantasy world. And he betrays Roy in the fantasy world. In much the same way that his religion seems to have betrayed him in real life. He doesn’t find comfort in that. And so like the idea of him sinning, it doesn’t matter.

Spencer: He doesn’t care. Like that’s how bad it is. And that really hit me this time around and just like the concept of falling. There’s the physical act of it, but then you fall from grace, uh, you fall from grace into sin in a very Paradise Lost sort of way, which in some ways you can read Paradise Lost as we fall from grace so that we may grow up and experience the world in a more full way without just the weight of dogma sitting on your shoulders.

Spencer: And I think because Roy fell, because Alexandria fell twice, and then, in a more metaphorical way, they fall in love with each other. They are saved in that way, because they fell together. That’s, that’s the other thing about this movie, that the themes can be teased out endlessly. That they’re not meant to, like, come to a stop.

Spencer: Right. At any

Chelsea: Yeah. Yeah.

Spencer: really is just like one of those wall sized Renaissance paintings that have a hundred thousand things going

Chelsea: and you

Spencer: and you can just stare at it for

Chelsea: for hours

Spencer: just try and understand what it means and maybe you won’t. Maybe you will. Maybe you won’t.

Chelsea: you will. Maybe you won’t. Yeah. Gosh. Wow. What a brilliant observation that I didn’t even think about until you started saying it out loud, but now it has me thinking about sort of some of the other Religious elements, you know, at the end when or closer to the end after Alexandria’s had her second fall and she’s bedridden and, uh, Roy comes to see her in his wheelchair and he’s confessing to her, he’s saying, you know, I used you to, you know, get, get the medication, all of this story was just to use you, sadly, um, but yeah, he’s like, he’s weeping and he’s confessing his guilt, but he’s also confessing his the pain that he’s in that he hasn’t really verbalized other than I mean it’s quite clear that he wants to take his own life.

Chelsea: I don’t remember exactly what he says but he’s like there’s no happy endings with me or something like that which is just like oh so oh

Spencer: Just

Chelsea: to the heart but he is he’s like he’s confessing and Sort of coming undone and realizing what he’s wrapped this little girl into and really I mean she could have been Seriously hurt or or died or anything like that and he’s realizing what his Grief and pain and all of that has done to a little girl who’s yeah who he’s fallen in love with who was his friend now, and he does truly love and realizing that he Kind of feels worse about that than he did about, you know, his girlfriend or whatever else, you know, like he’s like, oh, yeah, like this is real pain.

Chelsea: And he’s confessing all of that. It sort of is that where he’s realizing you can fuck up, you can do bad stuff and you can kind of come clean and and grow as a person. He and Alexandria both are kind of isolated in some ways. Like Alexandria strikes me as a very lonely little girl. She’s working. at an orange grove, far too young in age, but again it was the 20s I guess.

Chelsea: And she, she seeks friendship in Nurse Evelyn, and then of course Roy, and Roy’s very isolated because, you know, his girlfriend has left him, and he just feels alone, except for Alexandria now, and in the end it just sort of is like, Okay, yeah, we, I experienced all this pain, I fucked up, I messed up, I brought you into this, but then now we can all sit and watch a movie all together, as a community, and Roy has his little doggie on his lap, which was so cute, and I just, the tears started flowing again when I saw that little doggie on his

Spencer: lap. Yeah.

Chelsea: and I just, yeah, that is so so cool.

Chelsea: That is so brilliant.

Spencer: Thank you. Bye bye. Exactly. I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more. Yeah. No, that’s that’s perfect. That’s the perfect way to characterize like what it means what the movie means and what their relationship means both to them and to each other.

Chelsea: It’s at the end of the movie when, uh, Alexandria finally figures out what it is Roy does for a living and understands what a moving picture is and, oh, and she sees her first. Film which is so kind and so cute that she’s I mean, she’s already as we’ve mentioned like sort of created this movie in her own head and then she actually gets to see a real movie, which is such a special moment.

Chelsea: Now. I just want her to be a storyteller and like a filmmaker or something because she says I like the action from the pictures because I know that Roy is making the falling and climbing and he was falling from the train and he was taking a car and she just keeps going on and on about all the cute stunts he does and just how much she admires him and it’s so very sweet.

Chelsea: And I just hope, I hope Alexandria is like an incredible filmmaker now

Spencer: hope so

Chelsea: that world. Yeah.

Spencer: I hope she is like, incredibly pioneering and, and shoots all over the world. To try and replicate what she

Chelsea: Yes. Absolutely. Just a few of my favorite shots of the movie.

Spencer: Ladies and gentlemen, this segment is called just a few of Chelsea’s favorite shots from the movie

Chelsea: the Movie. There’s going to be a subsection in it which is like the most metal shots in the movie.

Spencer: Oh, I can’t

Chelsea: But one of the first ones where I was like, oh, this movie is like. Something else. Um, after Charles Darwin’s sort of like intro story, uh, and he is searching for this butterfly, the Americana Exotica, I believe. Um, and so you, you see the butterfly that he’s searching for and then it like fades into this shot of the butterfly reef where they’re all stranded.

Chelsea: And that was such a beautiful shot. I was like, Oh, what? is this this is amazing

Spencer: Yeah.

Chelsea: the other one is after the masked bandit gets hit in the head at the wedding the way that the people are sort of like laid out on the sand looks like a lion

Spencer: It’s

Chelsea: beautiful that is so neat and then in my super metal shots uh the chandelier made of humans

Spencer: was

Chelsea: That was sick as hell.

Spencer: really was. Yeah.

Chelsea: was so cool. I was like, whoa, what is this movie?

Spencer: like, is

Chelsea: I was like, is this about to get like, like, is this about to be like a Cronenberg? Like what’s happening here?

Spencer: Yeah.

Chelsea: And then Odius leaning back against the pool wall and the sword going through him. Wow. That was so metal. That was so cool.

Spencer: How about the, the other shot that I find really metal? The guy getting hit in the back with a hundred arrows and then just like leaning back and lying. On the points of all of the arrows,

Chelsea: That was so

Spencer: a bed of nails. Yeah.

Chelsea: that was so cool. It’s just so cool. I’m just like, wow, this is a cool movie.

Spencer: Shall we move behind the scenes?

Chelsea: Yeah.

Spencer: This movie was shot over four years.

Chelsea: Oh, I can believe that. Yeah. Yeah. Continuously for years.

Spencer: four years, but it took. A very, very, very, very, very long time because as you can tell, it was all over the world. I’ll give you, I’ll give you a quick little rundown of the countries, the major countries that it was shot in.

Spencer: It was shot in more countries than this, but like larger scenes, India, Namibia, the Czech Republic, Fiji, Indonesia, Argentina, Italy, Turkey, China, and South Africa. That’s

Chelsea: just some of them. That’s

Spencer: some of them. It’s, it’s really, really, really remarkable. My understanding is that, so this. The film is based on a screenplay to a Bulgarian film called Yo Ho Ho.

Chelsea: Ho. Oh,

Spencer: Yo Ho Ho. It is broadly the same plot. A man in a hospital weaves a fantastic tale to a little boy to hide the struggles and pain that he’s dealing with. So yeah, Tarsem saw this movie. Sometime around when it came out in the early 80s and then he bought the rights to the screenplay to remake it for the English language market and he held on to them that entire time from the early 80s until production began in the late 90s.

Spencer: He was scouting locations all over the world.

Chelsea: Oh, wow.

Spencer: took that long to nail down, you know, all of these places that you could be. For instance, the Taj Mahal. You can’t just film there. It is, it is notoriously difficult to, uh, get filming permits for there and also to just, like, keep people away long enough to not be in the shot.

Spencer: Which is why the shot that we see is from kind of a low angle. And the Blue City, that’s a real place. It’s, uh, the city of Jodhpur in India. And it is historically painted blue because uh, I believe it was a mineral that was available nearby to make paint pigments with. But it wasn’t very blue. When they were scouting the location.

Spencer: So he said in exchange for our crews painting everything blue again. Can we film here? And they, they allowed it. That’s why it is that vivid of a blue in the movie.

Chelsea: that’s incredible! Yeah.

Spencer: The butterfly reef real place. It looks exactly like that. I believe they shot the establishing local shot of them on the reef first.

Spencer: And then just very, very, very carefully angled the real life butterfly and got it to be just the right shape and just the right size so that it would match perfectly.

Chelsea: My goodness! Yeah. That is incredible. The

Spencer: labyrinth where, uh, the Indian squaw was. Running trying to escape and eventually, you know fell from from the tall tower. It’s in Jaipur, India It’s called Jantar Mantar.

Spencer: I I’m hoping that I got that mostly right. It is a collection of Celestial Observation Devices.

Chelsea: Oh. Yeah. That, that’s what makes up the labyrinth?

Spencer: Yes. So like, the spaces that she was running around, all the really oddly shaped, curvy architecture, stairs that seem to lead to nowhere, all of that is a series of observational devices for measuring the sun, the position of the sun and the stars and the moon and planets and things.

Chelsea: Oh my

Spencer: It’s really remarkable. It was all built in the 17th century. Yeah, at the behest of the Maharaja of Jaipur at the time. And he just wanted to, like, to, it was to revise the calendar. Yeah, and it’s now like a UNESCO World Heritage Monument. And most of the locations in this movie are things like that. Just, like, functional pieces of architecture.

Spencer: The well with the zigzag stairs going all the way down is an actual water well. Yeah, if you look at photos of those locations in real life, you can see how extremely carefully everything was framed so that you’re not seeing, you know, tourists in the corner or taxis or, or tour buses or whatever. Uh, like it’s all so expertly done by Tarson, just like looking at a place and going like, ah, we could use this portion of it.

Chelsea: I appreciate the time and care that he took in finding like the right location. And it really paid off. Truly. Yeah.

Spencer: Untaru. She was six years old when they began filming. You can see her getting older as the film goes on. Like all of the hospital scenes were shot chronologically and the scenes of her joining the story. We’re shot after that. So you can see her getting close to 10 and like her, her baby teeth falling on her, her adult teeth growing in and getting taller.

Spencer: She did not speak English when she was cast. Yeah. The, the woman playing her mother who speaks to her in Romanian was one of the interpreters on set.

Chelsea: Oh! Incredible!

Spencer: Tarsom. And, you know, other teachers on set were teaching her English, and she, like, Tarson would feed her lines and she would repeat them back, uh, earlier on when she was still learning, and, um, she spoke English with his Indian British accent.

Chelsea: Oh, okay. She would

Spencer: just, like, pick up on how he said things rather than, like, how Leigh Pace did or, or anybody else. Roger Ebert loved this movie. He loved it. He said it was one of his favorite movies he’d seen that year. In his review, he said one of the treasures of the film is the sound of the dialogue by Katinka Untaru.

Spencer: We understand every word, but she sounds as if she’s inventing them as she utters them. Which is really close to something that you said earlier. Like you observed that these, these words just seem to occur to her and tumble out of her mouth. And it is entirely because that was the case. Oh, uh, with the fall, Katinka Untaru became the first Romanian child actress to star in an international film.

Chelsea: what a lovely little fun fact.

Spencer: Yeah!

Chelsea: Go Katinka! Katinka and

Spencer: most of the crew. Remarkably, they were all led to believe that Lee Pace actually could not walk.

Chelsea: Oh, no way. Yeah,

Spencer: He spent most of the time on set in that bed or in a wheelchair. And Katinka especially was like protected from being able to see him walking around at all. And I guess also the crew were roped into this as well so that, uh, you know, the illusion could be maintained and nobody would accidentally say something in front of her.

Spencer: Apparently, he was in the makeup trailer, and a crew member walked in and saw him standing up, and she nearly fainted from shock.

Chelsea: Oh my

Spencer: Oh my god, Lee, you can stand!

Chelsea: stand! It’s

Spencer: movie has hailed you!

Chelsea: has healed

Spencer: I don’t, I wasn’t able to find anything about, like, what her reaction was when the filming was over.

Spencer: Uh, cause I presume, I hope that they told her in a way I mean, she would have been older at that point, uh, so I’m sure it would have been fine. But I would so love to know, like, what she thought.

Chelsea: Well, yeah, and they would have, because he, Is the masked bandit. Yeah, I guess if they filmed all of the hospital scenes when she was younger, at some point before filming the other scenes where he is the masked bandit, yeah, presumably they would have told her like, actually.

Spencer: leg. Yeah. Actually. And to what you were saying earlier about natural presence on screen, especially for a child actor, most of the scenes where the two of them are in the ward together, they had the curtains around the hospital bed drawn, which is a little itty bitty hole for the camera lens to poke through.

Spencer: So it kind of was just the two of them. And Tarsem. You know, occasionally would sit next to one of them to, like, help guide the thing along. Tarsem Singh, for a long time, might still be, I don’t know, uh, was a prolific commercial director.

Chelsea: Oh, really? Oh, okay.

Spencer: he didn’t fund this movie entirely himself, but he was able to, like, leverage his skills there.

Spencer: So, he, in order to make The Fall, Would only take jobs in the countries that he wanted to shoot scenes for the fall in.

Chelsea: Oh, that’s smart. Yeah. Yeah.

Spencer: he would shoot the commercial and then with the same crew from the commercial shoot, shoot scenes for the fall.

Chelsea: Oh, how smart. Yeah. And that makes sense also why it took so long. Well, my next commercial needs to be in India, so I have to wait for that commercial to happen.

Chelsea: Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah. Wow. I love, I love that this was a passion project for him. Yeah. That is so, that’s so beautiful. I love when someone just puts all of their energy into something that they really care about. It really is so beautiful. Mm hmm. Yeah. And it created a beautiful product.

Spencer: Here’s the thing that is the, I think the most mind blowing fact about the entire movie. Not that they shot in 20, 000 countries. Not that it took a hundred years to make. It’s that when Katinka would be listening to Lee Pace tell the story, she would say, no, no, no, no, no. It’s not like that. It’s like this, the way that a child would, they would have to change the script.

Spencer: And so when they were shooting all the rest of the movie. It would be like, okay, so these are the new pages from Katinka.

Chelsea: Katinka. She really is so powerful. Yeah. Wow.

Spencer: much of what made the fantasy portion of the film. What it is, is because she was changing the story on set and they, because they were filming it and they really only had one shot each time because I feel like it didn’t quite make sense to her to do more than one take of like conversation scenes.

Spencer: That was it. That was the story.

Chelsea: my gosh. Yeah. Wow. All of that young, creative potential in that little six year old body

Spencer: an amazing

Chelsea: made an incredible movie.

Spencer: why. It got such bad reviews from, you know, stodgy old adults who had all of their creativity squashed out of them.

Chelsea: Exactly. That’s why. I

Spencer: to it. They’re, they’re mad. They’re, they’re projecting.

Chelsea: How sad. Really. Everyone except Roger Ebert.

Spencer: I mean, like, you know, unless I’m quite wrong, he seemed like a lovely man.

Chelsea: I, I get that impression as well. I certainly hope so, yeah. He loved this movie, so I’m gonna say that makes him a lovely man.

Spencer: A

Chelsea: A plus plus to Roger

Spencer: Stamp of approval. Raj.

Chelsea: Roger Ebert is endorsed by, I haven’t seen that.

Spencer: Ha ha ha ha! Yeah.

Chelsea: Well, Spencer This has really been a lovely discussion about the fall of the movie 2006.

Spencer: I completely agree

Chelsea: Uh, thank you so much for introducing me to this movie.

Spencer: is entirely my pleasure.

Chelsea: So with that, it is my turn to give you an assignment for next week. Spencer, have you seen They Live?

Spencer: I haven’t seen that. They live. Do they die?

Chelsea: Uh, next week. Okay.

Spencer: that sounds good. And as we always say on I haven’t seen that Bye podcast. Bye podcast

Chelsea: Bye, podcast!