JGL gets very, very high in The Walk.
In 1974, Philippe Petit trod a wire suspended between the Twin Towers.
Total Film hangs out with high-rolling director Robert Zemeckis and his star Joseph Gordon-Levitt as they recreate the historic “coup” in The Walk...
The strangest thing about the 45 magical minutes French performance artist Philippe Petit walked a highwire strung illegally between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center was not that they happened. It was how quickly everyone forgot. Until James Marsh’s Oscarwinning documentary Man On Wire (2008), Petit’s beautiful “coup” of 7 August 1974 was barely a footnote in Big Apple lore, and one inked with bitterness. Petit and his co-conspirators betrayed each other. In photographs reprinted in his 2002 book, To Reach The Clouds, Petit blacked out his “false” friends’ eyes “to confuse the gods. Perhaps they will not recognise you.” The world moved on.
Some 30 years later, director Robert Zemeckis stumbled across Petit’s story in a children’s book. He’d been looking for a movie project that demanded to be made in 3D, so he interviewed Petit extensively about the obsession that had gnawed away since Petit first glimpsed the not-yet-built towers in a Parisian dentist’s waiting room magazine. When Man On Wire came out, Zemeckis, like Petit, refused to alter his course. He knew The Walk could do something the documentary couldn’t. “We wanted to put people up on the wire,” says Zemeckis now. “That was the goal.”
Petit, to put it lightly, is not known as an easy collaborator – he had to be dissuaded from playing himself in Man On Wire’s dramatisations, and his book contains suggested camera movements for an imaginary director to follow. But Zemeckis was undeterred. “I love Philippe because he risks everything for his art,” he says.
“His passion and his unrelenting desire to create his performance is something that I can relate to as a filmmaker. He would stop at nothing, he had to do this, and that was something that I understood about him very, very intimately.”
Based on Petit’s life and book, and co-written with Christopher Browne, Zemeckis’ coup is a sunnier prospect. But he still likens the job to “running in front of a locomotive”, a phrase borrowed from Francis Ford Coppola and echoing Petit’s mantra in the film: “It’s impossible, but I’ll do it.” The first step was training lead actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the circus arts. The teacher? Petit himself, of course.
wire work “It was a riot from the beginning,” says GordonLevitt. “Philippe set up this elaborate, eight-day workshop, just me and him working closely together all day, and he told me, ‘By the end of these eight days you’ll be able to walk on the wire by yourself.’ And I said, ‘Really? That sounds ambitious.’ But he believed in it, and he’s the kind of positive person that when he says something, he makes it happen.”
Gordon-Levitt also learned magic tricks and juggling, getting close enough to Petit to capture the cartwheeling cadences of his excitable French accent. The finished film even has the actor rocking red hair and (CGI’ed) blue eyes. “Well, it wasn’t the first time,” says Gordon-Levitt, most likely referring to Looper’s extensive face-fiddling. “I love transforming... and this role is just about as transformative as any I’ve done. The eyes are one of many things that helped that along.”
Petit also offered two words of advice that could almost be The Walk’s tagline: don’t fall. “When I was first learning to walk the wire, I was doing it on a wire that’s only a couple of feet in the air,” says Gordon-Levitt. “And you’d try, and lose your balance, then fall off and get back on. And one thing he told me was: ‘Don’t fall. You never fall; when you’re ready, you can step off the wire, but you don’t fall.’ And this is an example of how he explains things in really positive ways to change his and anybody else’s mentality towards accomplishing something.”
As it builds towards the coup, The Walk whizzes us through Petit’s formative years in Paris, often in jaunty, jazz-inflected black and white. We meet Petit’s photographer/second-in- command, Jean-Louis (Benedict Samuel), his teacher, Czech tightrope master Papa Rudy (Sir Ben Kingsley), and his lover/accomplice, Annie Alix (Charlotte Le Bon), who at one point Petit piggybacks across a highwire.
“I’m not afraid of heights so I was really excited about that,” says the French-Canadian actress ( The Hundred Foot Journey). “They took it off afterwards in post-production, but there was a safety wire holding my waist, so I could basically do whatever I wanted without falling... Maybe I’m a superhero or Jedi, I have no idea, but I wasn’t afraid at all, I was just worried about Joseph’s back!” Perhaps she should have been more worried about his backside: a later scene sees Gordon-Levitt strip completely nude. “I was very naked,” he laughs, “but it was kind of freeing to be at work naked. After getting over the awkwardness, it’s like, ‘Hey, why don’t we all come to work like this? It might be more relaxed.’”
For the role of Professor Rudolph Omankowsky Sr – or Papa Rudy – Kingsley pulled a Czech accent from his “memory bank of tones” and learned tightrope knots from a trainer who’d been taught by Papa Rudy’s son. “He was very generous,” says Kingsley, “He just said, ‘You’ve got him.’ I was very grateful.” Rudy provides the emotional anchor to Petit’s ambition, just as his rigging know-how would stabilise Petit’s wire during the coup. Gordon-Levitt thought of Rudy as the “Doc Brown to my Marty McFly”. After shooting, he presented Kingsley with a huge pair of brass balls for a TV awards ceremony. Judging by what he’d been through on set, perhaps it should have been the other way round...
walking tall
Just like Petit, the film comes to life during the World Trade Center walk, a vertiginous sequence rendered in lovely, lurching 3D. Although the Towers up above, and the Manhattan sprawl below, were recreated digitally, Gordon-Levitt really did cross a tightrope between two studio structures, albeit with a safety line to appease the insurers. “I was up on a wire that was about 12 feet in the air,” he says, “which doesn’t sound very high, and certainly it’s not compared to a real high-wire act, much less 110 storeys in the air like Philippe really was. But I was surprised: when you’re up there it feels really high, and my whole body would tense up in fear to begin with.”
As Petit/Gordon-Levitt treads blithely between the towers, it’s often impossible to tell what’s real and what’s movie magic. To Kingsley, it doesn’t matter. “The actor has to understand the very centre of his role. The very centre of Joseph’s role is balance – he has to physically appreciate that in his body. Whatever movie tricks you add to that, they’re merely additions; the fact is the actor has placed that gesture at the centre of his performance, and that’s genuine. No CGI can replace that.”
Zemeckis is still more pragmatic: “Movies are all illusion. The trick, of course, as any really good magician or illusionist knows, is that you have to mix it up. So some of it’s real, and some of it isn’t real; some of it’s planned and some of it isn’t planned... it’s all part of the show.”
“It’s a culmination of everything I’ve done in my career”
Another part of that process involved subtle changes to Petit’s story. The book has him hearing the voice of “mad movie director” Werner Herzog mid-walk – which would be enough to put anybody off their stride. You can probably see why that didn’t make the cut. And the real-life Annie was more shabbily treated by Petit, so Zemeckis discouraged Le Bon from meeting her. “Their relationship ends in a very dark place,” says Le Bon. “Bob didn’t want my vision to be tainted with something negative.” Not that she minded her character being somewhat sidelined. “I wanted to work with Joseph and Robert. It’s my second big American movie, I wasn’t in a place to say, ‘No, the part’s not important enough, I want Annie to walk between the Twin Towers!’”
“It’s a movie version of his story,” says Zemeckis of the differences between film and book, “and movies are always sort of – how can I say this? – they’re illustrations, or emotional renderings, of reality; it’s sort of the difference between a painting and a photograph. Even though movies are photo-real, as far as storytelling is concerned, they’re more of a rendering of the story in trying to capture – which I think we did – the emotion of Philippe’s story and Philippe’s walk...”
Perhaps The Walk needs a happier ending because the Twin Towers themselves have such a tragic one. “I think with any tragedy it’s also worth remembering the beautiful moments and the positive memories, too,” says Gordon-Levitt. “That’s the case with anything that you’ve lost.” Says Kingsley: “Fact is always more remarkable than fiction, far more remarkable. If we were to create a beautiful fictional story as a homage to the disappeared Twin Towers, that would be a beautiful story to tell. It is, in fact, true. So we present our portrait of a remarkable moment...”
If James Marsh made Man On Wire to “rebuild the towers”, Zemeckis has gone a few steps further out on the line, not just rebuilding them, but recreating a view that only one man has seen – will ever see – for the rest of us to share, and to remember. “It’s a culmination of everything I’ve done in my career from a technical standpoint,” Zemeckis says with pride. “It all came into play to put the walk up on-screen. Everything I’ve done for the last 30 years has brought me to this point.”
The Walk opens on 9 October.
Robert Zemeckis