Diksha Sundriyal
If you have a fear of heights, then ‘Fall’ will certainly give you nightmares. The film follows the story of two friends who are adrenaline junkies. After a recent tragedy, the girls decide to climb a 2000ft. tower. While the climb to the top is easy, it is coming down from it that becomes a challenge. Stuck at such a height, the girls have to face many challenges and find a way to get help. Directed by Scott Mann, the film creates such a nerve-wracking premise that makes the audience just as anxious as the characters.
Every time the girls take a risk to try something for their escape, the audience is on the edge of their seats, wondering if this time they will fall and meet their ends or if luck will favor them and they’ll survive. It also makes one wonder if anyone would ever be brave (or stupid, depending on your perspective) enough to climb such a height. If you are wondering whether ‘Fall’ is inspired by a true story, then we’ve got you covered.
Is Fall Based on Real Events?
‘Fall’ is an original story written by Scott Mann and Jonathan Frank. The idea for the film came to Mann while shooting for Dave Bautista-starrer ‘Final Score’. “We were filming at height, and off camera, we got into this interesting conversation about height and the fear of falling and how that’s inside of all of us, really, and how that can be a great device for a movie,” he told Radio Times.
This thought was further magnified when Mann watched the Academy Award-winning documentary feature ‘Free Solo’. “That was probably the single most inspirational piece. I remember hearing a radio clip of ‘Free Solo’ and being terrified by just listening to it on the radio. Watching the documentary and studying it from a filmmaker’s perspective really pulls you into the personal power of it,” the director said, in conversation with Fort Worth Report. A similar scene in Tom Cruise’s ‘Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol’ also made the director ponder upon the psychology behind the fear of heights and decided to emulate it on the screen.
To create a film that makes the audience acrophobic, the director decided to film it with minimal CGI. The film was shot on-location where a real tower, though considerably lower, was built on a location that allowed the camera to capture the illusion of a much greater height. “I think the key to it was finding these actual towers that exist in America, that exist in the desert there, it was just like that is the perfect location, the perfect kind of character to be at the center of this nutty thing. We looked at buildings, we looked at different things, and mountains and whatnot, and ultimately we came across the tower. And we just realized there was so many of them out there – and the height of these things, they’re all 2,000 ft and above. And it got us excited,” Mann said.
Calling every day on the set to have been “like a Bear Grylls Adventure”, the director revealed that filming at a great height came with the challenges posed by nature. “We had all these things happen to us with lightning, hurricanes – we had our set blown down one time,” the director added. However, instead of looking at it as a hurdle, the filmmakers turned it into an opportunity and ended up incorporating these elements into the film.
While the tower and its height were the real villains of the story and could have been enough to scare the audience, the director wanted the viewers to have an emotional investment in the characters and be really concerned about what happened to the girls. With the world in the grips of the pandemic, grief, loss, and death became the themes of the story, making the experience much more personal. Considering all this, it looks like while the film might be a fictional tale, the filmmakers have done their best to make it as realistic an experience as possible.
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