The Walk , based on Philippe Petit’s tight rope walk between the Twin Towers has been a passion project for director Robert Zemeckis for a long time. The film, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ben Kingsley, opens on October 9.
In Cancun, Mexico, the director talks about what attracted him to the story, the special effects to recreate the feeling of vertigo and joy of bringing this story on screen. Excerpts
What was it about this story that inspired you?
It felt like it was a story that should be made into a movie. It is a story that lent itself to a cinematic experience like no other story did. My idea was that we should be able to experience what it would be like to walk on a really high wire, see it and feel it just like the artist who was performing the act would. It was an idea that I thought would be done beautifully as a movie.
You mention how this story lent itself to a cinematic experience. What about The Walk resonated with you personally?
Well, Philippe is an amazing man. I guess what I love about his adventure, or his work of art is, I identified with the artist in Philippe. He was so passionate about doing this. I felt that it’s a story probably everyone will identify with, the lengths that an artist will go to, to create his art. He is so passionate about what he’s doing and he’ll stop at nothing to do it. I think that’s what I identified with.
What was the main challenge to create The Walk visually?
The main visual challenge was recreating the towers exactly the way they were. We did amazing amounts of research. I think we’ve seen every photo that was ever taken of the towers in the 1970s. We also wanted to give the feeling of depth and get a sense of being up there with Joe. So we also did some things with atmosphere and we did things with performance capture. I won’t give away too many secrets. As I was making this film, I said to my colleagues, ‘You know, I think, this is the culmination of all the visual effects movies I’ve done. Everything that I’ve learned in doing all these films is being put into use in some way, in the making of this film’.”
The Walk is also a thrilling caper movie. Comment
That was the other thing I loved about Philippe’s story. Not only did he have this dream to do this outrageous performance art, he had to pull off this physical caper. It wasn’t a caper about stealing jewels or money or a painting. No one was going to get shot or killed. And yet it had great suspense and it took an amazing amount of ingenuity for these accomplices to pull this off. And then when, they accomplished the caper, he had to perform. I thought it was such an amazing and unique story that I couldn’t resist, trying to figure out a way to turn it into a movie.
What did you do to suggest vertigo in the minds of the audience?
I worked really hard to do that. I spent a lot of hours looking at films and standing on the ledges of high places. I spent a lot of time talking to my camera man, Dariusz Wolski, and my visual effects supervisor, Kevin Baillie. We studied what lenses we should use, what foreground elements we should use, what sort of atmosphere we should put in. How we could create the sense of real depth. I felt that was an important character in the movie. And the audience had to really feel that they were up there on that wire. I spent a lot of time and energy and had a lot of fun creating this illusion.
How much did the 2008 documentary, Man on the Wire, inspire the film?
The documentary is obviously really good. It won an Academy Award.
We knew that the documentary was in production, when we were designing our film, because Philippe was involved in both projects.
The documentary is great because it gives you an ability to hear what the real characters were thinking when they were doing this. And it talked a lot about the details in the caper.
But what the documentary wasn’t able to do for obvious reasons, is actually put this magnificent performance that Philippe did on the screen for people to see, because that in itself is, the emotional core to the story. The caper is really exciting and suspenseful. But the ultimate performance kind of arcs the movie in my opinion, into a place that is very, very different and very emotional. There is no footage when Philippe was on the wire for 45 minutes back in 1974. Not a single moving image of him on the wire has ever been recorded.
No one in 1974 could scramble a motion picture camera fast enough to record his walk. So that allowed us to put this in sort of a fable state. We were able to present The Walk with very close collaboration with Philippe, the way it actually happened. And make it as special and as spectacular as we could.
