USA TODAY International Edition
JOSEPH GORDON- LEVITT TAKES ‘ THE WALK’ ON WIRE
“You’d be surprised how scary it is 12 feet in the air. Your body still tenses all the way up.”
High- wire walking is just like riding a bike.
Or so says Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who mastered the art form to play Philippe Petit in The Walk ( in IMAX theaters Wednesday, nationwide Oct. 9), about the French daredevil’s audacious trek between the World Trade Center towers on Aug. 7, 1974.
“When you’re first riding a bike, you don’t quite understand how this bike will ever stand up with only two wheels, but then eventually something clicks,” says Gordon- Levitt, 34. “It sort of feels like that on the wire. Once you get a sense of how the pole works, you’re just up there like, ‘ Oh, yeah, I can balance on this.’ ”
The Walk is a decade- long passion project of filmmaker Robert Zemeckis, who heard of Petit’s feat after buying the children’s book The Man Who Walked Between the Towers for his daughter. Seven years after the Oscar- winning documentary Man on Wire, the 3- D movie follows Petit from his start as a Parisian street performer to his move to New York, where he staged the coup. With the help of accomplices, he sneaked into the twin towers and strung a tightrope more than 1,300 feet in the air, walking between them for 45 minutes until police urged him to step off.
To prepare, Gordon- Levitt learned to do magic tricks, unicycle and adopt a French accent. The most daunting aspect, of course, was the wire walking, for which he trained one- on- one with the real Petit for a week at a converted warehouse in Upstate New York.
Carrying a 45- pound balancing pole and wearing thin slippers, Gordon- Levitt started by walking across a 2- foot- high wire, before graduating to one 6 feet off the ground. Petit kept a “victory bell” for the actor to ring anytime he reached a milestone, whether that was keeping his balance for a period of time or successfully walking all the way across.
“He would say, ‘ See that! You made progress, ring the bell!’ ” Gordon- Levitt says. “He’s just such an optimistic guy and positive thinker. He never focuses on, ‘ What if it doesn’t work?’ or ‘ I don’t know if I’m cut out for this’ — that’s not even part of the equation.”
When it came time to shoot the film’s pivotal sequence in front of green screens, Gordon-Levitt was suspended 12 feet up with a safety harness. The harness didn’t help keep his balance, he says, but prevented him from seriously hurting himself if he fell ( which he never did).
“It’s not so high compared to what a high- wire walker would do, but you’d be surprised how scary it is 12 feet in the air,” Gordon- Levitt says. “Your body still tenses all the way up. The only thing that allowed me to get past that terror was just time spent with Philippe.”
In turn, the agitation only made his performance that much more authentic, Zemeckis says. “You could kind of see how sincerely thrilled and proud he was that he was doing this feat. Even though he was doing the 12- foot version, it was a joy to watch.”