Tightrope film banks on fear of heights
Director Robert Zemeckis took great pains to get the sensation just right
Imagine standing on the edge of a very tall building. There’s no handrail, and as you crane forward, all you see beneath you is a clean, 100-metre drop to the pavement.
What’s making you nauseous isn’t the thought of the fall, but the empty space itself, which contains none of the visual cues that your brain normally uses to gauge how well you’re balanced. And that makes your brain worry that you’re not actually balanced at all. And as it tries to get the measure of the situation, adjusting your posture to see what’s gone wrong, you start swaying forward into that empty space, until your lack of balance is no longer an optical illusion.
The medical term for this is “visual height intolerance,” though it is often wrongly called vertigo. But for Robert Zemeckis, the Oscarwinning director of Back to the Future, Cast Away and Forrest Gump, the sweating and swaying means something else entirely. Fun.
The Walk, Zemeckis’s latest film, turns visual height intolerance into an art form. It’s a 3D dramatization of one of the most famous high- wire stunts in history: Philippe Petit’s 1974 crossing between the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, which he completed without a safety harness, a net, or permission.
The film begins in Paris six years before the stunt, with Petit, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, making preparations for what he calls “the artistic crime of the century.” But gripping as this stuff is, it’s all in service of the walk itself, which begins with Gordon-Levitt standing on the South Tower’s observation deck, 415 metres above the ground, and stepping into thin air.
“Because you can be in an airplane at 35,000 feet and look out of the window and not get creeped out,” Zemeckis, 63, says, “but you can be on a 10-foot ladder and look down at your feet on a rung, and think ‘I could fall and break my neck.’”
Petit’s World Trade Center walk took place the year after Zemeckis graduated from the University of Southern California’s film school, but the young wannabe director missed it: he’d won a writing gig on the cop show McCloud, and had so immersed himself in work that “I was oblivious to everything that was happening in the world at that point, including the stunt.”
He uncovered the story while reading about the Twin Towers in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. He went in search of footage, but couldn’t find any, because none exists.
“Philippe was on that wire for 45 minutes, and in the entire City of New York, no one was able to scramble a motion picture camera in that amount of time and record a moving image of him,” he marvels. There are photographs of Petit on the wire, shot by an accomplice and widely seen, most recently in the Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire. But no piece of cinema shows Petit’s coup in motion. So Zemeckis decided to make one.
He met Petit in 2006, and talked for hours about how he pulled it off, and why. The how was complex, the why proved inexplicable.
It’s easy to see how his 1978 debut feature, a comedy about six young Beatlemaniacs called I Wanna Hold Your Hand, led to the blackhearted satire of Used Cars, which so impressed Michael Douglas that he insisted Zemeckis, then 28, should direct the swashbuckling rom-com Romancing the Stone.
That film was so successful that a script Zemeckis and his then-writing partner Bob Gale had been shopping around since the early 1980s was snapped up by Universal. It was about a teenager who travels back in time and is seduced by his mother.
No one thought Back to the Future would work. Disney passed on it “specifically” because of its incestuous plot, says Zemeckis with a twinkle, while the other studios thought it was “too soft.”
Zemeckis becomes testy when asked about the much-discussed prospect of a Back to the Future remake. “Oh, God no,” he groans, when I ask if he’d ever consider signing off on it. “I mean, to me, that’s outrageous. Especially since it’s a good movie. It’s like saying, ‘Let’s remake Citizen Kane. ... What folly, what insanity is that?”