A nerve-shredding, knuckle-whitening, vertigo-inducing action thriller, FALL tells the terrifying tale of climbers Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner) who ascend the abandoned 2,000-ft B67 TV Tower in the California desert as a means of moving on from the death of Becky’s husband Dan (Mason Gooding)in a climbing accident a year earlier. But when the tower’s external ladder gives way, the two best friends find themselves stuck on a platform at the top. Too high to use their cell phones to ring for help, the pair must find a way down. Or die trying.
FALL began life as a short film idea hatched by British-born, L.A.-based writer-director Scott Mann (Heist) and his regular co-writer Jonathan Frank (the tournament) in response to a production company’s call for experiential shorts.“They were looking at experiential shorts, action thrillers, and we pitched this,” recalls Mann. “We got so excited about the idea of the fear of falling and the horror of heights, that it almost wrote itself for 25-30 pages. They wanted to make it, but then the whole thing shut down.”
With the short film series canceled, Mann and Frank decided to expand their idea into a feature, on spec, and see if they could get it set up somewhere else.“We’ve written specs before, but this was the most fun to write because the two of us kind of lived it and acted it out as we went on, trying to think what we would do in the situation that the girls find themselves in,” continues Mann who built a paper version of the platform at the top of the tower so he and Frank could perch on it, “to figure out what to do and really play on the horror and tension. We wanted it to be the ultimate fear-of-heights movie, so we looked at previous films and wrote the script accordingly.”
Among those cinematic references were Martin Campbell’s 2000 survival thriller Vertical Limit, Brad Bird’sMission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol, in which TomCruise’s Ethan Hunt scales the outside of the 2,717-foot Burj Khalifa Tower in Dubai, and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin’s incredible Oscar®-winning documentary Free Solo which detailed Alex Honnold’s quest to climb El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without ropes(2018, Documentary, Feature–Elizabeth ChaiVasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, Evan Hayes, and Shannon Dill).
FALL will open on 1200+ screens across the US from August 12th. Find a theater near you: https://fandan.co/3cYz8zu
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