Discussing The Walk at the New York Film Festival on Saturday, Robert Zemeckis was quick to distance himself from James Marsh’s Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire.
Both films recount Philippe Petit’s daredevil trip on a tightrope between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. But it was Zemeckis’s big-budget 3D retelling of the event that opened the festivities in New York.
The Forrest Gump director said that he purchased the rights to Petit’s story 10 years ago, “way before Man on Wire was even made”. He said he was a fan of Marsh’s film, which was made in 2008, but said his goal with The Walk was to present Petit’s stunt in its full glory.
“That couldn’t be done in the documentary because there’s no moving picture of the walk ever recorded,” he said.
Zemeckis said he wasn’t initially aware of Petit’s death-defying act in 1974, but learned of it after coming across the children’s book The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, by Mordicai Gerstein.
Intrigued by the “little eight-page book”, Zemeckis said, he began his research into the story and found that “it had all the elements to make a compelling movie”.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who employs a strong French accent to play Petit, trained with the tightrope walker to believably play him onscreen.
“Philppe’s not one to do anything halfway, so he orchestrated this really elaborate workshop where it was just me and him all day long for eight days straight,” the actor said.
“He said: ‘By the end of these eight days you’ll walk on the wire yourself.’ I thought that sounded ambitious, but he’s such a positive thinker. He believed that I would and because he believed that I would, I started to believe that I would.
“When you believe that you can do something, that’s when you can do it.”
Gordon-Levitt said walking on a wire was “really fun, if painful”.
Zemeckis and Gordon-Levitt’s French co-star, Charlotte le Bon, praised the actor’s accent. Gordon-Levitt thanked the French cast and crew for being “really honest”.
“They wouldn’t sugarcoat it,” he said. “They’d just tell me I was making a mistake.”
Both Zemeckis and Gordon-Levitt said they had been to the top of the World Trade Center before the 9/11 attacks. Gordon-Levitt recalled the experience as being akin to “being in the sky.”
“It didn’t feel like being at the top of a tall building,” he said.
