Trivia / The Fall (2006)

• Acting for Two: Everyone in the story, sometimes very well disguised.
• California Doubling: The hospital scenes are set in Los Angeles but were filmed in Cape Town, South Africa.
• Cast the Expert: Jeetu Verma, who plays the Indian, is the owner of horse stables in real life, and most horses used of the film were his. They are Marwari, a breed native to India.
• Completely Different Title: In Brazil, the movie was titled An Angel's Stunt Double ^note  Dublê de Anjo.
• Doing It for the Art: Tarsem funded this mostly with his own money to ensure complete creative control, shot it over multiple continents only in real locations and, with the exception of some CGI work to remove railings and bystanders in some shots, the butterfly Wallace chases, and the arrows hitting Ota, he used solely practical effects. Writing the film and scouting locations apparently took 20 years for him.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • Lee Pace spent the first 12 weeks of filming pretending to be a real paraplegic in order to make the story as real as possible for 6-year-old actress Catinca Untaru. He consistently went by the name of "Roy" and only a tiny handful of people on the set knew who he really was or that he could walk, everyone else being told he'd lost the use of his legs in a motorcycle accident (a makeup artist almost fainted upon accidentally finding Pace standing up). This wasn't as difficult to achieve as it might sound: it was only Pace's second role—and in his first, he played a transgender character—so it was unlikely anyone would recognize him.
  • The first time the characters meet is also the first time the actors met, and the hospital scenes were shot in sequence so that the real relationship would develop and Cantinca would advance just as the fictional relationship and Alexandria did. More punishingly for the other actors, Cantinca was basically allowed to write her own dialogue and "Roy" had to respond in character to get the reactions needed for the scene. Everything involving her is some serious Enforced Method Acting for everyone else.
  • The scene where Alexandria finds Roy after his suicide attempt and wakes him up took over 30 takes as Tarsem Singh was unhappy with Catinca's inability to hit her mark exactly the way he wanted. Each time he would call "cut" right before Roy's reaction to being woken up, which meant Lee Pace got more and more frustrated. By the time Tarsem let the scene continue Pace had so much anger built up that he completely unleashed and started screaming (in character) and knocked over the bedside table. Catinca was terrified by this, so Alexandria's reaction, freezing in place and desperately looking anywhere else in the room, was completely real. After the take finally ended she refused to do any more and insisted they let her go home, something Pace praises her for in the DVD Commentary.
• He Also Did: At the time of The Fall's release, director Tarsem Singh was well known for directing the award winning 1991 video for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion".
• Throw It In!: Alexandria's unintentional misreading of Roy's note as "Morphin 3" as opposed to "Morphine") was an actual mistake by the actress in rehearsal that was worked into the film as a plot twist.

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