"The Walk", starring Joseph Gordon Levitt as the French high-wire artist, Ben Kingsley, Charlotte Le Bon, James Badge Dale, takes the viewers back in the history when Petit walked between the Twin Towers.
"As I was making this film... Many times I talked to my colleagues and I said, 'You know, I think this is the culmination of all the visual effects movies I've done. I've everything that I've learnt in doing all these films is being put into use in some way, in the making of this film'," the director said at the recent Summer of Sony event in Cancun, Mexico.
"...It's not just a caper story. It may have been, but it is a magnificent caper story," says the director.
The biggest challenge for Zemeckis was to recreate Twin Towers, which were destroyed in 9/11 terror attacks, as they were in the 1974 and the research involved seeing "every photo that was ever taken of the towers in the 1970s."
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The French high-wire artist was just 24 when he pulled off the stunt by shooting a wire between the two towers secretly before walking on them with a pole.
"... Not a single image, moving image of him on the wire was able to be recorded. No one in 1974 could scramble a motion picture camera fast enough to record his walk. So that allowed us to put this in sort of a fable state."
Petit closely worked with the filmmaker on the movie, which comes after an award-winning documentary on the artist.