USA TODAY International Edition
The man and the movie
We chat with Gordon- Levitt and review ‘ The Walk’
Like Philippe Petit, Joseph Gordon- Levitt has always been a showoff.
Although he never strung ropes between trees as a kid like his character in The Walk, Gordon- Levitt would do gymnastics on the playground to impress his classmates. Once, in fourth grade, the actor remembers attempting a backflip off a wooden fence — only to misjudge the distance and gash his shins on the way down.
“I was just laying there, wanting to have looked so cool, crying and crying. All my friends and whatever girls I had crushes on at the time were there,” says Gordon- Levitt, 34, sipping water in a hotel library in the Flatiron District. “But it didn’t really discourage me. In most circumstances in my life, I don’t think failure is something to be scared of.”
Walk is certainly a risky venture, both for the actor stepping onto a tightrope for the first time and as an art- house movie gunning for broad appeal and awards attention.
The $ 35 million movie, which traces the French performance artist’s life and high- wire trek between the World Trade Center towers in 1974, opened the New York Film Festival last weekend and has been near- universally praised for its technical achievements ( with 85% positive reviews on aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes. com so far), though earning some knocks for its hokey retelling. Like extravaganzas Avatar and
Hugo before it, Walk was shot entirely in 3- D, with more than 80% of the movie featuring visual effects, many of which are used to re- create locations such as ’ 70s- era Manhattan and the thenunder- construction twin towers. Elaborate digital storyboards were created to map out the climactic tower stroll, which is seen only in the last 20 minutes of the movie but was edited for eight months by 70 people in post- production.
The epic scale of the movie was only part of what appealed to Gordon- Levitt. “Usually, when you have a grand spectacle like this, characters can be lower on the priority list,” he says. But Petit was a “top- notch challenge for an actor to play. On the one hand, he’s talented, brilliant, magnetic and compelling; on the other, he’s losing his mind and is this horrendous, dangerous narcissist. That combination makes him fascinating.”
To prepare for the role, director Robert Zemeckis told him to watch towering biopics such as
Patton and Amadeus. Zemeckis says Gordon- Levitt was his “first and only” choice to play the artist, calling him a magnificent and physical actor who “will do anything you ask him to do and work diligently to make anything work, no matter how outrageous the request.”
After starring alongside Seth Rogen in the comedy The Night
Before ( out Nov. 25), GordonLevitt tackles another real- life figure: former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, whose life is dramatized in Oliver Stone’s Snowden ( 2016).
There are parallels between the two protagonists, GordonLevitt observes. Petit and Snowden were both “incredibly courageous, did something they really believed in and broke the law. Obviously, two very different things: One was just an art piece, and Snowden broke the law, but he also blew the whistle on others who were breaking laws.”
After leaking classified information in 2013, Snowden fled to Russia, where Gordon- Levitt met him and talked for four hours before shooting started. Observing him as a character and trying to understand his motivations, “what I found was someone who very much believed in what he did,” Gordon- Levitt says. “He’s a very patriotic person and really loves the United States and what it stands for.”
In conversation, Snowden “would almost never talk about his own self. He was very different from Philippe in that way. Philippe is the first to admit that he’s the quintessential, selfaggrandizing ‘ artiste.’ ”
The men also bonded over their left brain/ right brain relationships: Snowden’s girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, is a dancer; Gordon- Levitt’s wife, Tasha McCauley, co- founded a robotics company.
“We talked a bit about the two sides of a couple, between art and technology and an engineer’s mind vs. an artist’s,” GordonLevitt says. Snowden “wants logical reasons behind everything he says and does, whereas with Philippe, it’s not about logic. It’s about beauty.”