As the Academy-Award winning director of some of the most popular and successful films of the past 30 years – including the Back to the Future trilogy (1985-1990), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Forrest Gump (1994) and Cast Away (2000) – Robert Zemeckis is no stranger to technical challenges.
But his latest film, The Walk – which opened the New York Film Festival on Saturday and is releasing in the UAE on October 1 – might be the most ambitious of his career. It recreates French daredevil Philippe Petit's (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) clandestine high-wire stroll between the rooftops of the Twin Towers at New York's World Trade Centre in 1974 (the subject of the award-winning 2008 documentary, Man on Wire).
In doing so, Zemeckis was determined to create an immersive spectacle for moviegoers unlike any experienced before – giving them the chance to feel, to some extent, what it was like to walk among the clouds.
What was at the core of the story that attracted you?
What speaks to me is the idea of this artist who will risk everything to create his art. That, I completely relate to. That, I completely understand – that thing that happens when you just must do this at all costs. You have to achieve this thing. What I [also] love about it is that it’s just a magnificent fable. It’s just got all the great things that you love in telling stories. And it resonates very powerfully now because the towers don’t exist anymore. It can never happen again. So it’s really only a fable now.
You’re known for pushing the technology envelope with your films. This one looks like you’re doing it again.
One of my favourite quotes from any filmmaker is François Truffaut’s when he said: “A really great movie is the perfect blend of truth and spectacle.” And that’s what I think we go to the movies for. We go to see a story that is rooted in human truth and the human journey. But we also go to see spectacle. That’s what movies do better than any other art form. Sometimes that spectacle is a close-up, you know – it’s not always a visual effect. So it’s not just big stuff. Sometimes it’s the power of a performance. That’s spectacle, too.
Nevertheless, there’s a lot of big stuff in this film.
Yeah, there’s a lot of big stuff in this film [laughs]. That’s one of the reasons to make it – to be able to do something that’s unique.
That would be recreating Petit’s walk?
It’s a magnificent challenge that I had to sink my teeth into. It is this magnificent moment at the end of the film, which is the culmination of this man’s dream. When you see the choreography of what he did on the wire, it’s an adventure in itself because he was on the wire in real life for 45 minutes.
The reason, if you’ve read his book or if you’ve heard him speak, what happened was the police showed up on both towers. So there was nothing for him left to do but perform. There was no way to arrest him. There was no way to stop him. He was [in the middle] and if he went to either side, it would have been over. And so he had to choose what he was going to do. That’s a drama in itself. If you’ve ever seen a wire-walking act, there’s only one perspective. It’s you looking up, right? But how magnificent to put the audience on the wire. No one has ever seen a performance on the wire looking down. Now, if you’ve got a fear of heights, you’re not going to be comfortable watching a lot of this movie [laughs] – but that was another thing that I loved about it.
What was it like working with Joseph Gordon-Levitt?
I just felt when I first met Joe that he completely understood the heart and soul of this character. If you look at Joe’s body of work, he’s very much the consummate showman. He’s one of the few young actors who not only [can] perform, but can also at the same time entertain.
The movie sounds a lot like a caper film – how Petit and his crew managed to pull off this stunt.
It’s a caper film, but nobody is trying to steal anything or destroy anything. It’s a caper of love. And the movie is a love letter to the Twin Towers. They’re very much present in the film as characters. So it’s also a celebration. In the tragic history of those buildings, this is one glorious and human moment that happened. And I think that’s something that’s important to remember.
artslife@thenational.ae
