"The Fall" of Alexandria Trivia Quiz

Answer: Oranges

Thieves burned her house in Romania and killed her father, so now Alexandria and her family travel around picking fruit. The priest at the hospital knows that she throws oranges at him and gives her one when she claims that she doesn't do it.

Tarsem allowed Catinca Untaru (Alexandria) to improvise much of her dialogue. In one extra, he tells the writers that the actors will essentially be writing the dialogue because a six-year-old is "not going to buy a word you've written."

Answer: Her note to Nurse Evelyn floats into Roy's room.

She throws her note to Evelyn out the window, but the wind blows it into Roy's room instead. She goes in to take it back from him and he starts talking to her. Catinca hadn't met Lee Pace (Roy) before shooting this scene and was shy around him at first, which is why she stands by the door for part of the scene.

Answer: Alexander the Great

Roy starts their relationship by saying she's named after "the greatest warrior who ever lived" a telling her a story about him. Out in the desert with his soldiers, with only a helmet full of water, Alexander pours it all onto the ground to show that everyone is equal. She thinks the decision is stupid, since each soldier could have gotten "a little bit." She'll be a great critic one day.

Director Tarsem says that many of the actors in the desert scene were drunk while shooting. Their drunkenness passes for dehydration.

Answer: Elephant

The Masked Bandit can't swim, so when Darwin spots an elephant on a nearby island, they can escape. It turns out elephants like to swim. Going by real world locations, the heroes and the elephant swim from Fiji to a lake in Kashmir, though in-story, it's a short swim to nearby land.

Answer: Birds

The Mystic says in his language that when Governor Odious destroyed his people's lands, he saved the birds by putting them in his stomach. Later on, they fly out of his mouth. The crew tried actually putting a bird in the man's mouth, but it bit him, so the effect was done with CGI, one of its few uses in the film.

Answer: Touch one of his toes

Roy was left paralyzed from the waist down after doing a movie stunt involving a fall. He wants Alexandria to touch one of his toes without him watching to see if he has any feeling left. He gets it wrong, but she says he was right. Roy can tell she's lying about it, and when he continues the story, possibly as punishment, he kills off the Blue Bandit.

Answer: Hospital orderly

Leo Bill plays both parts. Many of the actors in this movie play dual roles, as Alexandria imagines people she knows as characters in Roy's stories. A doctor plays Alexander the Great in Roy's first story. The one-legged stuntman is Luigi, orange pickers are the Indian and the Mystic, the ice delivery man is Otta Benga, Nurse Evelyn is Sister Evelyn, X-ray technicians become Odious's soldiers, and the priest is...the priest.

DVD commentaries say that Walt, the hypochondriac patient, was originally supposed to be Odious, but Sinclair, the actor Roy's girlfriend left him for, ended up becoming the villain instead. In the Bulgarian film this is based on, "Yo Ho Ho", the Walt analogue does play the villain in the fantasy.

Answer: During the funeral for the Blue Bandit

When Alexandria asks why Roy uses that Spanish accent for the Masked Bandit, Roy says it's because the Bandit is based on her father (even though her father's Romanian). She replies that her father's dead and she wants the Bandit to talk "normal, like you." The Bandit then turns into Roy for the rest of the movie.

He also changes from Spanish to French (albeit with no accent) when Alexandria points out that the Spanish Masked Bandit has vowed to kill every Spanish thing. The Spanish/French/Black/Masked Bandit wears his brother's blue cape after this.

Answer: She brings him a bottle with only three pills in it.

She sees the "E" of "MORPHINE" as a backwards "3", so she dumps out all but three pills, assuming that Roy wants only three. Three is enough to fall asleep, which is what he tells her he wants the pills for, but not enough to kill himself, which is what he actually wants to do.

This plot twist came about when Catinca, not being fluent in English, misread "E" as "3". Tarsem liked her mistake and added it to the film.

Answer: Googly googly

Otto tells Alexandria about these magic words to use when she's scared. She gives a few of Otto's mannerisms to the Mystic, even though the two characters are played by different actors: Julian Bleach plays the Mystic while Ronald France is Otto. The Mystic tells the Bandit of this secret chant during the wedding.

The production company is called Googly Films, so this would be like Indiana Jones saying "Paramount" when confronted with snakes.

Answer: A man's face

The priest's hair, face, and collar all match the mountain and sand setting perfectly. This was all done practically--the differently-colored sand that matches the collar would have had to be placed there by hand. There's a similar type of fade early in the movie between a butterfly and a reef.

It's here that Alexandria inserts herself into the story to save everyone. She calls the Masked Bandit her father and dresses like him. The fantasy sequences were shot after the hospital scenes. Catinca was missing her front teeth while filming the real world scenes, but they'd grown in by the time they shot the fantasy ones, so the Bandit says he couldn't recognize her at first because of her teeth.

Answer: Walt

"You're not really sick, Walt! They're feeding you sugar!" He asks Alexandria to steal Walt's pills so he can overdose. Turns out they were placebos, and Roy starts screaming and throwing things. Catinca got so scared when filming this scene, since she hadn't seen Lee Pace act that angry before, that she wet herself on camera and refused to come back to the set for three days. Tarsem couldn't get her to shoot the scene again, so this shot is used in the film.

Answer: He kills off most of the characters.

She tries to get more pills for him but falls, leading to a bizarre dream sequence involving staged movie stunts, her father's death, butterflies, and head surgery. When she wakes up, Roy is so sad about everything that he starts pointlessly killing off the heroes, even as she cries. She connects Roy to the Bandit so strongly that, while the Bandit's drowning, she says, "Don't kill him...I don't want you to die."

Odious mentions that the water he drowns the Bandit it is "only waist high". This primarily shows that the latter could easily get up if he wanted to but, like Roy, has no will to live. However, there's another meaning. If Roy were in this situation, he wouldn't be able to stand and the water would be over his head.

Answer: No one

It looks like the Bandit is going to do it when he comes out of the water and punches Odious once, but Alexandria doesn't want any more fighting and insists that the Bandit comfort his daughter instead, which he does. At least four characters personally vow to kill Odious (while Darwin and the Mystic are wronged by him, they never vow to kill him), yet none of them do--he falls on his own sword. His line "I'm not feeling very well" is a reference to the idea that Walt was supposed to be Odious in the fantasy story.

Tarsem says that the Bandit was originally going to beat Odious severely, but Catinca was upset at the simulated violence, so they cut it down.

Answer: Silent movie stunts

Alexandria's mother tells her that Roy recovered and went back to doing movie stunts. She thinks that every stunt in every movie is done by Roy, even the ones obviously done by Buster Keaton. She also thinks that Wallace got into stunt work when she sees a monkey sawing a rope in one of the films.

Catinca had been told that Lee really was paralyzed so that her performance would be more genuine. When it came time to film the fantasy scenes and he told her that he was only pretending and really could walk, she became convinced that her kindness towards him cured his paralysis.