Jacinta Leong On The Death-Defying Production Design Of 'Fall 2: Deadpoint'

"Fall 2: Deadpoint" may not be for the faint-hearted, but for anyone drawn to production design that swings big, it's essential viewing. A follow-up to 2022’s sleeper hit “Fall,” the sequel is likewise a tight-budget, high-concept survival thriller that will leave you white-knuckled by the time the credits roll. This time around, a new female duo—Jax (Harriet Slater), the grieving sister of the original film’s daredevil climber, and her new friend Luce (Arsema Thomas)—take on a new treacherous climbing challenge 

After finding her dead sister’s bucket list, Jax, with the encouragement from Luce, decides to travel to Thailand to summit the treacherous, fictional Mount Kwan to reach a legendary dragon statue that will "eat your fears." As the bartender of the nearest drinking hole warns the pair, the authorities have closed off access to the mountain, as the only way up—along narrow, dilapidated wooden planks—has resulted in too many deaths over the years. Jax and Luce’s only solution? Paying a non-native local guide named Jon (Tom Brittney) to guide them up it for a fee as steep as the mountain face itself.

For production designer Jacinta Leong, the challenge was to create a mountain that felt not only visually spectacular, but believable enough that audiences could imagine people actually attempting to climb it. With more than three decades of experience working as an art Director on the likes of “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Alien: Covenant,” “Pirates of the Caribbean 5,” “The Great Gatsby” and Marvel Studios’ “Shang-Chi,” Leong tapped into her long-standing design philosophy: physical environments can essentially become characters in their own right.

“I wanted to define each zone of the mountain and raise the stakes as they climbed higher,” Leong tells The Set Set. “When they're at the bar level, it's all green, and there’s plenty of living plants, and then as they climb higher, the plants die off, and it's not looking so nice. And then by the time they get to the bridge, there's no life; there's nothing nice about it at all.”

Shooting in Thailand was important to establishing the film’s sense of place, but Leong and her team constructed the lodge and bar from scratch, with the production leaning on their Thai colleagues to bring local knowledge and craftsmanship to the builds.

The bar was conceived as a lively, sociable stop for backpackers passing through on their way to the mountain. “I started with a hexagonal shape because the site that was chosen generally offered 360-degree views of the mountain,” Leong says, but budget constraints eventually meant reducing that footprint to half a hexagon. Far from compromising the design, the change of plans ended up improving it: changing the front to be rectangular instead allowed them to fit in the pool table, the site of Jax’s interactions with a particularly unfriendly local that bookend her journey.

One of Leong’s favourite elements of the bar was its full-height glass partitions with patterned glass panels that sits in the middle of the space. “I loved that glass pattern because it was authentically Thai, but also it was a great way for light to come through and refract, and it created all these wonderful colours,” she says. The idea came from seeing something similar at a traditional Thai restaurant in Bangkok, but also from some of the room dividers she recalls from her work on 1999’s historical drama “Anna and the King.”

If Leong was in any doubt that she had built an authentically Thai bar, those doubts were dispelled when tourists wandered past the hot set and asked when the establishment would be opening. “It’s certainly the biggest compliment to the design when tourists come up and ask when the bar opens,” Leong laughs.

From the bar, the film’s production design begins a literal ascent. To understand how all these individual set pieces would connect, the team built a model of the mountain approximately two feet tall to allow Leong to see “all those moments from the bar to the ladder to the planks that lead to the Devil's Elbow, which then led to the Dragon, the sculpture and the bridge,” Leong says. “That all had to be mapped out.”

Then, using a polystyrene model, they finalised the design, carving away at the landscape to experiment with its silhouette, a process that ultimately led to the mountain’s distinctive undercut. While the design is meant to be as close as possible to what you would find in Thailand, the plank walk itself was intentionally based on an infamous cliffside trail in China known as the Mount Huashan Plank Walk. Roughly 420 feet long, it hangs over a sheer vertical drop and there are adrenaline junkies out there who really do scale it for fun. “There’s footage of this guy with this 360-degree camera walking up there untethered. In some parts, the planks are only 12 inches wide,” Leong says. “So judging from that and other people’s photos and videos, we gauged a size for the planks that wasn’t too narrow or too wide. We didn’t want it to be unrealistic, but we also didn’t want to lose the audience if it was too safe.”

The production ultimately used a combination of new and salvaged timber, with the materials deliberately aged and distressed. Some planks were selected specifically for their rough appearance, while others were chosen because they could safely achieve the flexing effect demanded by the script. The higher the characters climb, the narrower the planks become, too. Most of the walkways were three planks wide; towards the top, Leong reduced them to just two. “Having that variety also makes it look like you're travelling through different areas where they've built it from the materials they had at the time.”