Tarsem Singh: ​‘I went bank­rupt mak­ing The Fall, and I’d go bank­rupt anoth­er ten times to do it’

There are few cin­e­mat­ic imag­i­na­tions as delight­ful­ly sur­re­al, as full of won­der, and as crit­i­cal­ly divi­sive as the one belong­ing to film­mak­er Tarsem Singh Dhand­war. Often going only by the name Tarsem, those famil­iar with his work may eas­i­ly betray when they came of age: he cut his teeth mak­ing com­mer­cials (Nike, among them) and music videos (includ­ing R.E.M.’s Los­ing my Reli­gion) in the 1990s along­side a crop of tal­ent includ­ing David Finch­er, Jonathan Glaz­er, and Spike Jonze. When I meet Tarsem at his Lon­don flat, he greets me warm­ly: before long we are sit­u­at­ed on plush cush­ions on his floor, bare­foot, drink­ing fresh­ly squeezed orange juice and chat­ting movies.

“I remem­ber in school, we all used to sit on the floor and they’d put our din­ing table to the side and put a sheet up to project the movie. And if any­body was in front of you, you’d think, I’ll nev­er under­stand the movie. You’d think: what if there’s a snake in the movie, I won’t see. You’d for­get that the snake would be a close-up, he’s gonna be 50 feet long. But we’d always fight for the good seat when the movie start­ed,” Tarsem tells me, talk­ing about grow­ing up watch­ing all man­ner of inter­na­tion­al films – often with­out under­stand­able sub­ti­tles – at his school in India. ​“The truth of the mat­ter is that you aren’t even aware that that’s the lan­guage of cin­e­ma. You’re just in it, or you’re not,” he says. It’s quite an object les­son for a film­mak­er so well-known for being a styl­ist first and fore­most: a pro­tean, light­ning-strike reac­tion to motion pic­ture imagery that tran­scends cold intellectualism.

Tarsem burst onto the scene with his first fea­ture in 2000: max­i­mal­ist sci-fi thriller The Cell, star­ring Jen­nifer Lopez. But his real cult favourite these days is The Fall (2006), a wild fan­ta­sy adven­ture about a silent movie stunt­man who befriends a child in hos­pi­tal. He’s made some Hol­ly­wood filler in between, but now he’s returned to our cin­e­ma screens at the Lon­don Film Fes­ti­val just gone by to show his epic, real­ist dra­ma Dear Jas­si. It could not be more dif­fer­ent from the lush, extrav­a­gant dreami­ness of his past projects. It’s also the first film he’s made set in his native India.

“Dear Jas­si is the first film to even be rec­om­mend­ed by the Tomatome­ter, or what­ev­er it’s called. With The Fall it’s tak­en 15 or 20 years for peo­ple to appre­ci­ate it. I guess a lot of the old crit­ics died, maybe,” he says with a cheeky grin.

The Fall has been woe­ful­ly crit­i­cal­ly ignored, to movie culture’s detri­ment. Unre­leased in the UK and US until 2008 and almost entire­ly self-fund­ed, it is a film of heart­break­ing phan­tasms and child­like joys, look­ing at the human need for sto­ry­telling and escapism in the face of an often unbear­ably harsh and unro­man­tic reality.

In it, a dash­ing but severe­ly injured silent movie stunt­man (Lee Pace, bed-rid­den for most of the film) is con­va­lesc­ing on a ward with a young Roman­ian immi­grant girl (unknown child actress Cat­in­ca Untaru, who spoke only bro­ken Eng­lish at the time) and begins to tell her fab­u­lous sto­ries to pass the time – ones which often sad­ly bor­row from his own tra­vails being chewed up by the Hol­ly­wood dream fac­to­ry, repack­aged as vain­glo­ri­ous adven­tures for the lit­tle girl’s ben­e­fit. With a dash of Ara­bi­an Nights in its frame­work and more than a bit of Cecil B. DeMille in its spir­it – both in the enor­mi­ty of its scope and artis­tic endeav­our – The Fall is tru­ly one of a kind.

“It’s my baby,” is the first thing the direc­tor says when I men­tion The Fall. ​“I went bank­rupt mak­ing it and I’d go bank­rupt anoth­er ten times to do it. I mean, not exact­ly bank­rupt, but I lost all my mon­ey. But if I had anoth­er mon­key on my back like that, I would do it again with­out blinking,”

Includ­ing all its fan­ta­sy sto­ry sequences, the film took four years to make and was filmed across over 28 coun­tries, on loca­tion in some of the most stun­ning nat­ur­al and archae­o­log­i­cal sites from world his­to­ry. There are few com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed effects, as Tarsem was deter­mined for there to be a time­less­ness to the look of the movie.

“I set it in the 1920s because I want­ed it to be in a time before there were real­ly gen­res. And I put a lan­guage bar­ri­er between them [the two char­ac­ters] because I grew up going to a board­ing school in the Himalayas, and going into Iran three months of the year, and watch­ing films where I didn’t know the lan­guage and it wasn’t sub­ti­tled,” he explains.

The film’s aes­thet­ic homages to every­thing from Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky to Ken Rus­sell, its tilt­ing-at-wind­mills roman­ti­cism set against the wild back­drop of ear­ly motion pic­ture-mak­ing, and its fairy­tale approach to sto­ry­telling all might send the aver­age film­go­er of 2008 – or, maybe, 2023 – run­ning for the exit. It’s heady, strange, state­ment-mak­ing stuff, and Tarsem knows it.

“It is polar­is­ing, because I think as a film­mak­er you are offer­ing the audi­ence a pill, and it’s if they decide to take it: in this par­tic­u­lar sce­nario, do you buy this sit­u­a­tion? I remem­ber when I got all this crit­i­cism for The Cell, they were say­ing, this is unre­al­is­tic. And I was like…you’re com­ing to see a film where J. Lo is a shrink,” he says.

“With The Fall, I sort of wish I’d done a title more like Quentin Taran­ti­no did with Once Upon a Time In Hol­ly­wood. Because peo­ple just saw it as eye can­dy,” he says. ​“With me, it’s ok that it’s polar­is­ing. I’m okay with a film being the best thing since sliced bread and I’m okay with it being a turd. I’m not okay with comme ci, comme ça. This will keep you young and it will keep you hired.”

Spo­ken like a man with a real sense of him­self and his projects, Tarsem’s love for the craft and his throw-it-all-at-the-wall artist’s men­tal­i­ty are abun­dant­ly clear. ​“I was going around to meet­ings with­out a script, say­ing that when I found the right child for the part that Catin­ka plays, the script would come from her,” Tarsem says. ​“So nobody even came close to think­ing that they could make it. At a par­tic­u­lar time – Finch­er always said – every guy who had a lot of mon­ey from com­mer­cials talked about a film that they want­ed to make. But he said, you’re the guy who had the balls to make it,” (Finch­er con­tin­ues to wax lyri­cal about the film, call­ing it ​“what would’ve hap­pened if Andrei Tarkovsky had made ​‘The Wiz­ard of Oz’.)

“But the rea­son – lat­er on, after 15 years, I realise – the rea­son was that all those peo­ple had a life. I didn’t, at that par­tic­u­lar time. The per­son I was plan­ning to spend the rest of my life in Italy had just dumped me. And I turned around and I went: well, what is this for? I’ve got the mon­ey. So let’s just embrace it and go. Now I have a son. If you look at that, you have to go: I need to leave him some­thing. But at the time it turned out that I had noth­ing to lose. So I just went: let’s make this film.”

These days, The Fall has some­thing of a cult rep­u­ta­tion among the ones who know, though it remains elu­sive on home video and stream­ing. That’s some­thing Tarsem Tarsem wants to rec­ti­fy, and soon. ​“The rights have revert­ed back to me and I have a 4K restora­tion,” he says. ​“I feel like it needs to be out there. Peo­ple are watch­ing real­ly bad YouTube ver­sions and everybody’s ask­ing about it. I always wish they were around when the movie came out because no one want­ed any­thing to do with it. It just tanked. But in the next two or three months, I’d real­ly like to find a home for it.”

Giv­en this back­ground, it’s par­tic­u­lar­ly fas­ci­nat­ing that Tarsem – always a Hol­ly­wood direc­tor – has now set his sights on mak­ing a film in the Pun­jab region he hails from. Dear Jas­si is also his first fea­ture in almost a decade, and it departs dra­mat­i­cal­ly from all the visu­al extrav­a­gance we might asso­ciate the film­mak­er with. This is more or less ground­ed in real­ism, based on a true sto­ry of a hor­rif­ic hon­our killing that hap­pened twen­ty-three years ago. He first became inter­est­ed in the project after read­ing the sto­ry in the news – par­tic­u­lar­ly the phone call between kid­nap­pers and the fam­i­ly who arranged their crimes, and what tran­spired between them.

“I was nev­er ready to make [Dear Jas­si] but I always remem­bered read­ing about that phone call. Then The Fall came along and I went on this kind of mer­ry jour­ney. And when the Indi­ans asked me, are you inter­est­ed in [mak­ing] any­thing in India, I said, you’ll nev­er want to make this par­tic­u­lar project. But they said yes.”

The stakes of the sto­ry hinge almost entire­ly on the two leads, Jas­si and Mithu, and their Romeo and Juli­et-style juve­nile love for one anoth­er in spite of great gaps in lan­guage, dis­tance, wealth, and fam­i­ly expec­ta­tions stacked against them. The film oper­ates as a deeply effec­tive melo­dra­ma for most of its run-time, fea­tur­ing two unknown actors (the sweet­ly expres­sive Pavia Sid­hu as Jas­si, the edu­cat­ed and head­strong young woman who vis­its her Indi­an fam­i­ly from Cana­da, and Yugam Sood as Mithu, a poor local boy who meets her quite by chance on a sum­mer vis­it to India).

The actors actu­al­ly found romance on-set, too, Tarsem shares. Yugam Sood is a real Kabad­di play­er from the area who ​“spent six months learn­ing Eng­lish,” while the Cana­di­an-born Sidhu’s ​“Pun­jabi was bro­ken’, which they worked into the cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences of the plot. It’s only in the final act, when Jassi’s extend­ed, well-off Cana­di­an émi­gré fam­i­ly decide to go to des­per­ate mea­sures to retrieve their lovesick daugh­ter – insist­ing that Mithu is ter­ri­ble to her and even hav­ing his impov­er­ished fam­i­ly threat­ened – that things careen into a sick­en­ing tragedy. ​“We shot 90% of it chrono­log­i­cal­ly, so it worked like mag­ic but became very hard for them to go through [cer­tain] areas,” he explains. The film is still seek­ing UK dis­tri­b­u­tion at present, but Tarsem is look­ing ahead, too.

“I was always a guy who only looked at one project at a time and nev­er con­sid­ered the next thing,” he tells me, by way of explain­ing the long ges­ta­tion peri­ods between his fea­ture film work. ​“But a direc­tor friend of mine tells me I should always have more mush­rooms on the bar­bie. So now I’m try­ing that, and there are a few projects in India, com­mer­cial films, heart-on-sleeve action, that I’m inter­est­ed in,”

Giv­en the enor­mous inter­na­tion­al and main­stream suc­cess of Indi­an block­buster RRR last year – anoth­er film with a sense of free-wheel­ing ambi­tion and remark­able visu­al flair – the con­cept of a Tarsem action film made for wide audi­ences is quite excit­ing. ​“I don’t real­ly get the ​“this is a film for them, this is one for me” thing,” he says. ​“I don’t do that. I love the com­mer­cial shit. I just enjoy mak­ing films. I think if you can’t see me in the film that I make, in the DNA, then you’re pay­ing too much for me. So I just think if I go out there, I want to put every­thing into it.”

He gives me a hug as I head for the door, and I get the sense that there’s lit­tle this film­mak­er does that he doesn’t, indeed, put every­thing into – his near-child­like joy in visu­al sto­ry­telling, his per­son­al­i­ty, and some­times all his mon­ey. Regard­less of what you make of his work, it’s hard to find a bet­ter def­i­n­i­tion of an artist than that.

Dear Jas­si screened at the BFI Lon­don Film Fes­ti­val 2023 and will be released in the UK in 2024.