TV Interview with Grace Caroline Currey of the movie "Fall"

TV Interview!

Interview with Grace Caroline Currey of the movie “Fall” by Suzanne 8/10/22

It was really great to speak with this lovely young actress who stars in “FALL.” She is outstanding in this exciting movie. You don’t want to miss it; it comes out tomorrow, August 12.

You might recognize her from one of her many TV shows and movie appearances. She’s probably best known for playing Mary in the “Shazam!” movies. The second one comes out later this year. I can’t wait because I love superhero movies, and the first one was pretty good.

When she was younger, she played the young Natalie Wood in the TV miniseries “The Mystery of Natalie Wood”; and she played the young Melinda in “Ghost Whisperer”; and she played the young Victoria in “Revenge”! Those are some of my favorite shows. Now that she’s older, she can play so many different roles and has many movies coming out.

MORE INFO:

Grace Caroline Currey (Becky)

Grace Caroline Currey has been in back-to-back films across every genre. Grace stars as the lead in the Lionsgate adventure thriller, FALL, directed by Scott Mann and set to hit theaters August 12, 2022. Next up for Grace is her portrayal of Superhero Mary/Mary Bromfield in the Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment franchise sequel, Shazam: Fury of the Gods, set to hit screens December 21, 2022. Prior to that she starred in New Line’s popular Conjuring franchise, Annabelle: Creation. Grace brings her boyfriend home to meet the parents in the rom com, Most Guys Are Losers, based on the best-selling book, which was recently released in theaters. She has studied at the renowned Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London and was nominated for Best Actress at the Milan International Film Festival for her role in Badland, an indie feature with Vinessa Shaw. She is also a level 6 ballerina to boot!

From the Producers of 47 Meters Down

Dropping in Theaters Only on August 12, 2022

PRODUCTION NOTES

RUNNING TIME: 107 minutes

RATING: PG-1

SYNOPSIS

For best friends Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner), life is all about conquering fears and pushing limits. But after they climb 2,000 feet to the top of a remote, abandoned radio tower, they find themselves stranded with no way down. Now Becky and Hunter’s expert climbing skills will be put to the ultimate test as they desperately fight to survive the elements, a lack of supplies, and vertigo-inducing heights in this adrenaline-fueled thriller from the producers of 47 Meters Down. Costarring Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

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 cowriter 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 cancelled, 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’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, in which Tom Cruise’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 Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, Evan Hayes and Shannon Dill).

“The experience of watching Free Solo was a big influence,” Mann recalls. “It got me thinking about the psychology of the fear of heights as opposed to just a visual medium because in Free Solo you are with the character, you can hear him breathe and the reflectance of fear is where it’s at. There’s a psychological fear I think we all go through at heights. Even a lot of climbing videos on the internet tap into that well. It’s the reaction, the ‘Oh my God, oh my God’ that influenced how Fall would eventually play out. From an experiential point of view, you’ve got to put yourself through the eyes of the character, be with them, and then you climb it with them. So, you’ve done it together. What we wanted to get was a feeling of being raw and real at height and very human. So that was the backbone of it all.”

One of the things that makes FALL unique is its location. Namely, the real-life 2,000-foot-high B67 TV tower — the fourth highest structure in the U.S. “What we found was there were a lot of internet videos of daredevils doing crazy stuff, but they were usually climbing things like cranes,” explains Mann. “So, we said, let’s find somewhere that would be the ultimate place to get stuck, and we came across this tower in California. When you’re at the bottom looking up, the tower seems to go out into infinity, into the clouds. It is a marvel of architecture. And being in the desert, made for a very barren, difficult place to survive in the first instance, let alone 2,000 feet up.”

Initially, both the short script and Mann and Frank’s first draft of the feature version focused on a boyfriend-girlfriend couple stuck on the tower, but for the second draft they decided to center the story on two female friends, with Becky losing her husband Dan at the start of the film in a tragic climbing accident and being unable to cope. The character was inspired by a member of Mann’s wife’s family whose husband had died young. “It’s quite personal,” says Mann. “It was the first time someone my age, in my family, had died. And I’d seen her go through a lot of the things Becky goes through in the script; finding the strength and the will to live after such a world-changing loss. Also, Covid was rearing its head when we wrote this, and the world was going into this grief-stricken place that felt more relevant as we went forward.”

“Becky and her husband are adventuring types,” says Grace Caroline Currey who plays her. “They love to climb and push their limits and seek out extraordinary experiences, and at the start of the film we have a very different Becky to the one we meet post Dan’s accident. She’s consumed with grief, loss, a lack of self and a lack of desire to live, and through the film Becky finds her fight again and wants to live. Scott had mentioned she was largely based on his brother-in-law’s widow and how she survived him. They were this adventure couple, although he died of cancer.”

Becky’s best friend Hunter is a daredevil YouTuber who has her own reason to be devasted by Dan’s death. “Hunter is a vlogger,” reveals Virginia Gardner who plays her, “so I watched a lot of YouTube and Instagram influencer videos for some ideas on her larger-than-life influencer persona ‘Danger D.’ But we wanted to keep her grounded as well. And we learn there is more than meets the eye to Hunter.”

As with Becky, Hunter was also inspired by a real person, in this case one of Mann’s wife’s friends. “We used her as the basis,” he admits, “but it is a friend type that I see a lot, the adventurer who is always searching for something, but is not sure what. The idea was that Becky retracted, went internal and went into herself, while Hunter escaped and ran away. They’re two very different personality types who, typically, become best friends because they need each other’s dynamics, but, obviously, deal with death and trauma differently.”

THE BIG-SCREEN EXPERIENCE

From the beginning, Mann envisioned FALL as a movie, a film made for the big screen. “I wanted to do something that had genuinely theatrical potential,” he reflects. The idea with this was to really go for it.”

“This is a unique experience that you have to see in theatres,” says producer James Harris (47 Meters Down). “It’s like a ride. Vertigo is one of our biggest fears, and this film maximises it.”

Given that most of FALL takes place on a small, circular platform at the top of a 2,000-foot TV tower, Mann wrestled with the best way to make his movie. Initially, Mann considered using a version of the Volume — the ground-breaking curved LED screen backdrop on which digital environments are displayed — that had been pioneered for the first season of the Star Wars/Disney+ show “The Mandalorian.” “We looked at designing a ‘Mandalorian’ stage that you could look down upon, which would give you a depth background. But there are limitations to that technology which meant it wasn’t going to work out.” Plus, there was the budgetary issue. “It’s enormously expensive to do.”

The second option was to find a mountain where Mann could build the upper portion of the tower, then film the actors on it against a real background, which because of the height and positioning would make them appear to be thousands of feet in the air. “Then you’re able to look down and it’s only from certain angles that you see the ground is there,” he continues. “Originally, I wanted to do it next to a steep drop.”

This practical approach required his two leads to not only be able to climb for real, but more importantly, have a head for heights. During the audition process, Mann would show Becky and Hunter auditionees a sketch of the proposed tower built on the edge of a cliff, and tell them they would be up there for real. “In an effort to weed out the real ones from the fake ones, I would tell them, ‘You’re going to be really high up so bear that in mind.’ I tried to scare them into being serious about the fact they were going to be on top of a mountain. And that did weed out people who weren’t fit for the purpose. I could see it in their eyes, even though they said, ‘I could do that.’ I was thinking, ‘You can’t.’ The honest ones, like Grace and Ginni, were like, ‘This sounds f**ed up and terrifying, but I’ll give it a go.’”

“I read the script and thought it was really exciting and exhilarating and would require a lot of discipline,” remembers Currey, whose credits include Shazam!, Annabelle: Creation, and TV’s “Revenge.” “Scott told me how much he wanted to shoot practically which is the kind of stuff you hope to work on, something immersive, that really makes you feel like you’re there. He was gauging to see if I’d be able to cope with it, but I have a background in dance, so the technical nature of it really appealed to me. I did go through a phase where I did have a membership at a climbing gym, and I saw a lot of parallels between climbing and dance. I started nerding out about climbing and how excited I was at the idea of what he was proposing.”

“Scott made it clear it was going to be a very physical movie filmed on a real 60-foot tower. I told him I was so excited for the challenge and didn’t have a fear of heights,” says Gardner, who costarred in TV’s “Runaways” as well as the 2018 Halloween reboot. “It also was right in the middle of Covid so the idea of being so active and outside every