‘The Walk’ interview with Joseph Gordon Levitt

Now, Robert Zemeckis is bringing the same awe-inspiring tale to theatres but in the form of a feature film titled The Walk. But when Zemeckis finally gets to the walk itself, his excessive technical wizardry (he never met a scene to which he couldn’t add multiple layers of special effects) works wonders, putting the audience right alongside Petit for his heart-stopping, mind-blowing stunt.

There’s really only one reason to see The Walk, and that’s to see a dramatic recreation of Petit’s historic high-wire walk between the Twin Towers.

The screenplay for the movie was written by Robert Zemeckis and Christopher Browne and is based on the book To Reach The Clouds by Philippe Petit. I’m not sure who or what is to blame, but at times during Petit’s walk, which is often admittedly gobsmacking, Gordon-Levitt looked more like a digital dummy than a human being on the wire and the distant surroundings looked, again, painted.

If you’ve ever had a dream and risked everything to try to achieve it, then you are likely to feel an extra jolt of electricity course through your body when you see Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) step over the ledge of New York’s World Trade Center in the glorious new film, The Walk.

From his mentor, Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley), to his girlfriend (the fetching Charlotte Le Bon) to a few dude he meets in New York (James Badge Dale), Petit enlists a whole team to help him sneak his equipment to the rooftops and hang his wire under the cover of darkness. He trained with Philippe Petit, now 66, and his partner Kathy in an unused warehouse near their home in upstate New York.

The last 30 minutes or so are all about the walk. He’s resplendent in a goofy wig, jarring blue contact lenses, and a heroically silly French accent (a fluent French speaker, he sounds great when speaking the language, but far less so in English).

As the film’s notes point out, 12 people have walked on the Moon but Petit is the only one to walk between the WTC towers. It was an ingenious stunt that required meticulous planning.

That said, once the film gets to its terrific climax, it’s nearly possible to forget all the silliness that came before it. Because it’s thrilling, yes, but also because Zemeckis is successful in wringing out the emotion he’s so obviously courting.

There’s an obvious motivation for this kind of pastiche: In personality and actions, Petit is hardly a subtle person, so why not rise to that? The hardest part about wire-walking between twin towers wasn’t just the actual walk. But almost all the film’s creative energy is devoted to this one eye-popping sequence, so in many ways I wish he’d just kept it to that. From his earliest films like Romancing the Stone or Back to the Future, he has always made the movie-going experience fun…with movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her, Forrest Gump, The Polar Express and Beowulf, he has also shown an equal interest in making technological advancements with cinema and has been a pioneer of CGI for years. We leave the theater filled with that most evocative of feelings: exhilaration laced with sadness.