Tarsem Singh may be best known for directing 2000’s critically lambasted shocker The Cell but new epic The Fall is, without doubt, one of the year’s most ambitious, and visually daring, fantasy releases. Six years in the making, the movie, which is set in the 1920s, tells of a suicidal stuntman who bonds with a child patient in a hospital by spinning a number of whimsical, fantastical stories. Calum Waddell caught up with Singh at the annual Edinburgh Film Festival for the following exclusive interview…

Do you consider The Fall to be a fantasy movie?

I think that fantasy is a very broad term. If it is a fantasy movie then it is definitely a one-off kind one (laughs). I don’t know of any other fantasy movie which took six years to make or which looks like this - although, at a stretch, I think that you could compare it to something like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen or The Princess Bride.

However, I have heard from critics that the style of acting in this movie is much more realistic than what you normally see in the genre. Of course, this invalid man has to use a series of stories to entertain an injured child and you can call these fairy tales, or fantasy, but eventually he begins to include people that she knows in these stories and, at that point, I would say that this becomes a lot closer to The Wizard of Oz. It is a mix of fantasy and realism.

There are no A-list stars in this movie, unlike in your most famous film, The Cell…

Well, this film was actually written years before I made The Cell. That was just a big popcorn movie and when it came together I thought “this could be a Bollywood film in Hollywood!” But so many people hated The Cell – they told me “this sort of stuff does not belong in a horror picture.” I thought they were missing the point (laughs). I mean, I always thought, “If you are paying to see a film in which J-Lo plays a shrink then have I got a bloody trip for you!”

Some people told me it was totally unrealistic. I answered, “What part of J-Lo playing a shrink is real to you?” It is just popcorn! I had fun doing it though - and there is still enough of my original vision in The Cell for me to remain happy with it. But Variety had their knives out for The Fall because I was “the guy who did The Cell.”

I was actually wondering if working with the notoriously diva-like J-Lo is what convinced you stay away from working with celebrity names…

I have actually seen J-Lo recently and she has calmed down a lot now but, no, that is not the reason for not having big stars in The Fall (laughs). I wanted to cast a leading man that people did not know in this. I thought that big stars would draw the audience out of the plot. And the young child actor had to be a new discovery. She took a long time to find and the role was not gender specific – it could have been a boy or a girl.

You shot most of the movie in sequence. Was that not difficult?

Sometimes it was actually a blessing in disguise (laughs). For example, I remember that our leading girl - Catinca Untaru - had her front teeth missing. That was on the first day of the shoot. Now if you were not shooting in sequence you would be screwed! In fact, if this was a studio film they would tell you to go home! But instead I changed the script. I wrote this aspect of her into the story. She also didn’t speak any English so I had to teach her from scratch. As the movie went on her English got better, and her teeth began to grow in; plus she started to fall in love, very naturally, with the storyteller played by Lee Pace… Just like her character!

Now, all these things happened over a 12 week period. But, rather tragically, her English was in an Indian accent because I was the person teaching her it! We had to stop that and bring Romanians in and they would speak to her. I didn’t want her to begin sounding like me… but I think that was the only major challenge (laughs).

Can you speak about working with digital effects? Both The Cell and The Fall are, to a great extent, special effects films…

I love digital effects but only if you can do them in a world that is acceptable to the audience. It can be Star Wars or it can be The Fall but it has to be like that - very mystical - and then you can do anything. But it is a double edged sword because if you cannot get digital effects perfect then it can turn a whole movie to shit. You can be sitting there thinking “hey that looks false” and right away you are pulled out of the film. So in The Fall we used as many matte paintings as possible and the CGI was used to brush things up a little. The next project I will do, however, is going to use a lot of CGI, just like The Cell did.

Is it true that your next project is a horror movie called The Unforgettable?

No. I was offered that project a year and a half ago and I turned it down. I know they announced I was attached but this was not the case. I had to turn down everything that was offered to me because I was totally focused on getting The Fall completed. Only now am I looking at new things and my next project is called War of Gods and it is a big action epic. I think I will turn into a bad Fassbinder now and turn out two films a years (laughs).

This movie took a long time to get out there but it was a monkey on my back that I needed to exorcise. However, the critical response has been really good in Europe and in Spain we won the Best Film prize at Sitges so that makes it all worth it.

The Fall opens in UK cinemas on 3 October 2008.