I see two towers and the article says one day those towers will be built. Here I am, young, 17-years-old, with a bad tooth in one of those uncolorful waiting room of a French dentist.…nd, suddenly, I freeze because I have opened a newspaper at a page and I see something magnificent, something that inspires me. One day, years before it was executed, he had a dental emergency and saw a rendering of the Twin Towers (pre-construction) in a newspaper in the waiting room, prompting his dream to one day walk between the two. The backstory for Petit's infamous walk is this: He was a French street performer prior to the daredevil act. But here's a fun fact: The idea for The Walk was actually conceived before Man on Wire was released. (The title, it turns out, came from three words found on the police report.) The film was a beautiful love letter to the Twin Towers, featuring interviews with Petit and his accomplices, and aerial footage of pre-9/11 New York City.īecause of that film, some wondered if Zemeckis's dramatization was even necessary, or if it could hold its own. The 2008 documentary Man on Wire, directed by James Marsh, won the Academy Award for his retelling of the day's events. (Check out Vox's review, which says it'll give you "dizzying vertigo.") So how does the Hollywood depiction compare to the real-life events? (Warning: spoilers up ahead.)įirst things first: The Walk isn't the first film about Philippe Petit's "coup," as he called it. In 2015, filmmaker Robert Zemeckis honored the feat in a film called The Walk, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit. The hullabaloo was over a Frenchman named Philippe Petit, who was walking on a high wire more than 1,300 feet in the air, suspended between the tops of the Twin Towers of the old World Trade Center. On Wednesday, August 7, 1974, people in Lower Manhattan stopped in their tracks to watch a strange event in the sky-not a bird, not a plane, and certainly not Superman. This post was originally published in September 2015.
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