Many steps led to ‘Walk’
LOEWS Lincoln Square premiered an IMAX version of “The Walk,” a film about Philippe Petit’s 1974 highwire stroll between the Twin Towers. The master planner for the new World Trade Center, architect Daniel Libeskind, tells me Petit told him: “As soon as I did it I knew I’d be famous the rest of my life.”
Says him: “9/11 I was in my studio in Berlin. My family were Holocaust victims. That very day the Jewish Museum I’d worked on for years was opening. But, of course, we couldn’t. Not for three days. These iconic mythical buildings were like Romulus and Remus. I said, ‘I’m not staying. I’m returning to New York.’ ”
Libeskind’s wife, Nina: “Two days before was our daughter’s bat mitzvah. With planes grounded nobody could leave. We had 25 people staying with us.”
Betsy Gotbaum, the evening’s planner, plopped me alongside a gent I didn’t know. However, I know a good suit when I see it so I ran my hand over him. It was the film’s director, Academy Award winner Robert Zemeckis, who, after I removed my hand, said: “I worked hard on this film 10 years.
“I was 20, in film school, when Petit made that walk. I then read a book about it, fell in love with the idea, did research and decided to do it in 3D. Shooting took one year. But due to tax incentives we made New York in Montreal and filmed nothing here.
“The scenes of dizzying heights were computer generated graphics. It’s digital painting by computer. A computer artist moves the cursor like a paint line and then you put light on it.”
Yeah, sure, OK, understood. Back to the only real world I could understand, I asked who’s his tailor. “Zegna.” With this great film’s profits I figure Zemeckis could go for a matching vest.
Then the Alan Aldas, Public Advocate Letitia James and I were stuffed into a small elevator to rise to the IMAX theater. Instead it dropped and we had to climb. By floor 5 I lost track of everyone. The Aldas must still be walking up.