The filmmakers behind indie action-thriller “Fall” were
facing kind of a big freaking problem. Lionsgate wanted to pick up the
movie for U.S. theatrical release. But “Fall,” a vertiginous white-knuckler
about two young women who are in danger of plunging from the top of a
2,000-foot-tall radio tower, was rife with F-bombs which would result in an R
rating, cramping the box office take for the small-budget picture. The
producers of “Fall,” which had a production budget of about $3 million,
couldn’t afford to reshoot all the scenes in which the petrified tower-climbers
screamed “fuck” (along with various permutations). The solution? Scott Mann,
who directed and co-wrote “Fall,” turned to the artificial-intelligence dubbing
technology system developed by London-based Flawless, for which he also
serves as co-CEO.
According to Mann, the Flawless team in
post-production changed more than 30 F-bombs throughout the movie into
PG-13-acceptable epithets like “freaking” along with a few other lines of
dialogue. Flawless, founded in 2021, originally designed its TrueSync AI-based
system to provide a better dubbing solution for films translated into other
languages. Employing the same principles used to create “deepfakes,” TrueSync
alters the mouth movements of the actors to match the alternate dialogue being
spoken. Mann realized the Flawless engine could also be used to clean up the
F-words in his movie.
“For a movie like this, we can’t reshoot it. We’re not a big
tentpole… we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the time, more than
anything else,” Mann said in a behind-the-scenes video feature about the film.
“What really saved this movie and brought it into a wider audience was
technology.” “Fall” stars Grace Caroline Currey (“Shazam!”), Virginia Gardner
(“Marvel’s Runaways”), Mason Gooding (“Scream”) and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (“The
Walking Dead”). “When we were filming the movie, we didn’t know if we were R or
if we were PG-13, so I said the F-word so many times I think Scott wanted to
kill me in post when we were trying to get a PG-13 rating,” Gardner said.
Currey said she couldn’t tell which of her scenes had been redubbed: “As far as
I know, every movement my mouth made in that movie, my mouth made.
“Now we’re now stuck on this stupid freaking tower in the
middle of freaking nowhere,” Gardner’s character, Hunter, says in one visually
redubbed scene. “Fall” opens in theaters Friday, Aug. 12. The MPA gave the
final cut of the movie a PG-13 rating for “bloody images, intense peril and
strong language.” Mann and his team shot the film on large-format cameras for
Imax screens in the Shadow Mountains, in California’s Mojave Desert. To reshoot
the scenes with F-words would have cost millions of dollars and taken several
weeks, if not months. The Flawless team did the “neural reshoots” within two
weeks, during the final stages of post-production, according to Mann.
In “Fall,” best friends Becky (Currey) and Hunter (Gardner)
climb an abandoned radio tower to scatter the ashes of Becky’s late husband
(Gooding). But when sections of the rickety ladder break off from the
dilapidated tower, Becky and Hunter are left stranded. The women’s expert climbing skills and their friendship are put to the
ultimate test as they wage a desperate fight to survive the elements, vulture
attacks and a lack of supplies to get off the tower alive.
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