'The Walk' comes to the big screen with innovative photorealistic techniques

Robert Zemeckis's new film recreates from scratch, with the help of digital techniques, the entire world of New York in 1974, as it would be seen hundreds of meters high, between the two mythical buildings that have disappeared.

Twelve people have walked on the Moon, but only one man has traveled, or will ever travel, the immense void that separated the two towers of the World Trade Center.

Robert Zemeckis, the veteran director of cinema gems such as Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Return to the Future, Polar Express y The flight, once again uses the most advanced technology at the service of an emotional story that revolves around the characters. The challenge, which features innovative photorealistic techniques and the magic of IMAX 3D, is a true experience to enjoy on the big screen, an opportunity for viewers to viscerally feel the sensation of being among the clouds.

The film from TriStar Pictures in association with LStar Capital stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ben Kingsley, Charlotte Le Bon, James Badge Dale. Directed by Robert Zemeckis.

Producida por Steve Starkey, Robert Zemeckis y Jack Rapke. el guion es de Robert Zemeckis & Christopher Browne, basado en el libro Alcanzar las nubes, de Philippe Petit.

Leading the cinematography was Dariusz Wolski, ASC with Kevin Baillie as visual effects supervisor.

Oda al World Trade Center

On August 7, 1974, the day before Richard Nixon announced his resignation, Philippe Petit, a French tightrope walker, surprised New York City with a ride on a cable placed between the towers of the nearly completed and partially occupied World Trade Center. Center. Passersby without a second to lose stopped suddenly and looked up. They saw the impossible: a man dancing high above, seemingly in the air.

Now, forty years later, Zemeckis puts viewers in Petit's shoes. The film offers moviegoers the opportunity to go where only one man has or will ever go: 110 stories in the air, on a cable, walking between the towers of the World Trade Center.

A 3D perspective

Zemeckis acknowledges that “when I discovered this story, I thought, ‘My God, this is a movie that A) should be made no matter what, and B) should absolutely be presented in 3D. When you see a tightrope walker, you always have to do it looking up. You never get the perspective of what it feels like to be on the tightrope. Our film follows Petit's story and, in the end, puts you on the wire, walking with Philippe, and, by presenting it in 3D, it will be spectacular and very emotional."

“I was amazed by the passion of Philippe's dream and how he managed to fulfill it. In a way, he has certain similarities, for me, with a producer who wants to make a movie. But, underneath all that, there is that exciting story of a great plan, and the tension to execute what Philippe calls his 'coup'. In the end, he makes me and others cry, something similar to what I experienced when I read Forrest Gump,” says producer Steve Starkey.

The film not only shows who he was before and how he came to find himself on that cable (his youth, the man who became his father figure, etc.), but also, for the first time, moving images of the ride itself, not only from the observers' point of view, but also from Petit's. “The only documentary evidence of the walk is a few photographs,” explains Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays Petit in Zemeckis' film. “The photos are incredible, but it is not the same as seeing and feeling it happen. For me, making a film where you can really get into Philippe's character as he lives that moment, with all the hopes, fears and imperfections that led up to it, is something exceptional. Having the opportunity to witness that in a movie and being up there with the character, seeing what he saw, is a totally different experience.”

In a similar way to what he already did in “Forrest Gump”, by using the protagonist's particular voice to reinforce the narration of that film, Zemeckis has Petit himself narrate moments of The challenge to bring some perspective, especially to your innermost thoughts while on the wire. The slightly surreal use of the Statue of Liberty (like Petit, a French gift to the United States) for this purpose helps give a certain fable-like quality to this film for all audiences. “It's a true story,” says Zemeckis, “down to the smallest detail, but it also has a ‘once upon a time’ feel to it – a lost time and place – and I wanted to combine the literal with the figurative.”

Visual effects

As befits such a production, visual effects supervisor Kevin Baillie was involved very early on. The challenge . “I have been part of the project for six or seven years now,” he recalls. “Robert and I were working on Christmas story, but I already had a great idea for a movie about a crazy French tightrope walker who tried to walk the tightrope between the Twin Towers.”

The project was especially interesting for the visual effects supervisor because of the tremendous challenge it entailed: the entire world of New York in 1974 would have to be created from scratch, as it would be seen hundreds of meters high, between two buildings that are no longer there. .

“We have to do everything, from the lobby of the World Trade Center to downtown New York in 1974. The production design department recreated the roof of one of the towers on a gigantic set. It was a huge and absolutely amazing set, but the city around it, the fog that swirled around the towers, the towers themselves that rose above the city, all had to be created completely digitally, from photographic references. Obviously, these buildings no longer exist, unfortunately, but they had to seem totally real and 1000% present, because they are the emotional heart of the film. It was not until very recently that technology has evolved to the point where this, although complicated, is possible. And only in the cinema. Curiously, for example, we found that different people remembered their color differently, because it changed depending on the angle at which the sun hit them. We want to honor and do justice to those buildings, because of those memories, but also because what Philippe did among them was beautiful,” explains Baillie.

Thus, The challenge It transports viewers to a moment in time when the towers, or at least the perception of them, were given a new orientation. “At first, no one liked the Twin Towers. While they were being built, everyone in New York thought they looked like filing cabinets. After this ride occurred, people loved the towers. They had personality. When Philippe Petit walked among them, they suddenly became poetic and underwent a transformation.”

“The towers are very present in the film as characters,” adds Zemeckis. “This was one of those human and glorious moments. “It’s important to remember that.”

Throughout his legendary career, Zemeckis has made films that have taken advantage of the most advanced technology to put it at the service of history. For Zemeckis, the latter is the most important thing; Technology is a tool, like any other technique, that the filmmaker can use. “The secret of any magic is knowing how to combine,” he proposes. “Every great magician uses more than one technique to create the illusion. The filmmaker's job is to do that too, to use all the tools we have and not stop combining them, so that the audience can't discover the trick."

Recreate the World Trade Center

“We couldn't shoot between the two towers of the World Trade Center, of course, because, unfortunately, they no longer exist, but we were able to replicate them in such a way that I think it is a tribute made with enormous affection for those buildings,” says Joseph Gordon -Levitt. “Bob became obsessed with the buildings, with all the details, and, in that aspect, he remembered Philippe, because Philippe became obsessed with those buildings in 1974, when they were still being built. He could tell you all the different elevators. He could tell you the dimensions, the height and width, and how far apart the towers were, from corner to corner. “It was very emotional to see Bob carefully and lovingly rebuild those buildings.”

Recreating the towers was the biggest production challenge that production designer Naomi Shohan and visual effects supervisor Kevin Baillie faced on The challenge. Ultimately, his work is a combination of a huge set on a set and months of digital recreation.

The first challenge was deciding what to build physically and what to create digitally. “We had to calculate what square footage of the rooftop set would allow us to get the most shots, knowing that there would be plenty of shots,” Shohan recalls. “We wanted to be faithful, more than faithful. We wanted to pay tribute to the towers, their scale. “If you are not familiar with the place, it is impossible to appreciate the enormity of the task.”

Using the original plans for the World Trade Center, Shohan designed and built a huge 12x18 meter corner of the south tower, where most of the action takes place, as the story follows Philippe during the coup. Although the film crew also had to film what was happening in the north tower, they could manage with just one corner, as the two towers were almost identical, so Shohan could simply change the decoration of the roof and make adjustments as necessary. so that it looked like the opposite corner.

Shohan's team built a structurally sound rooftop, something that became necessary since, due to space problems, the most practical place to recreate the 110th floor (a key location, where Philippe and Jeff hide for hours) turned out to be just below the rooftop set.

In the end, Shohan and his team basically recreated a quarter of the 60x60m roof of the World Trade Center. With creative camera angles, that was often enough. However, to recreate the rest of the rooftop, the towers and 1974 New York, seen from the air more than 400 m above the ground, Baillie and his visual effects team at Atomic Fiction had to take on the project.

For the tower, Baillie and his team had the original plans for each floor of the World Trade Center, as well as countless photographic references. However, he and his team had to face an unexpected challenge. “The tower itself is a deceptively complicated thing to make look real,” explains Baillie. “It is so geometrically simple, with those straight lines that reach to the ground, that if you make it perfect, it turns out false. We had to create the entire thing and then figure out the right amount of flaws and imperfections to introduce, like slightly misaligned panels, or checking that the distance between panels isn't staying perfectly uniform. “We also created about 30 floors of interiors, so if you looked closely you could see desks and chairs inside.”

Even more complicated for Baillie and his team was the historically accurate reconstruction of New York in 1974, seen between the two towers from more than 400 m high. “New York in 1974 looked very different than it does today,” Baillie notes. “We took a helicopter and flew over New York for two days to collect real reference images of what the city looks like today, but in the end, what you see in the film is 100% digitally recreated.”

Baillie and his team used as reference all the material they could find from the period, from Internet images to archival photographs of books and libraries, original plans and much more. “There is a very good website, with a slider bar that, if you drag it to 1974, every new building since 1974 is marked on the map in blue,” Baillie says. “He served us some chop. Ultimately, most reference photos are nothing more than that, reference, and our artists used them to recreate the surrounding buildings completely digitally.”

For the most part, Baillie's team ran the calculations for each of the buildings to make them as accurate as possible. “Even with buildings that did not have plans, we at least had measurements of how tall they were,” Baillie continues. Even the details – such as the size and configuration of the windows, for example – are based, whenever possible, on that documentation, and with the few buildings that no longer exist and for which there were no ideal photographic references of the time, there were than “extrapolate intelligently.”

Baillie's model is designed primarily to be viewed only from above, that is, from Petit's point of view during his walk. However, since Zemeckis planned to show a few shots from below – such as from the World Trade Center plaza – these areas of the model are complete and ready to explore, as if you were taking a walk through the city. .

In the end, recreating the city structures and towers was a task that took Baillie's 15-person “construction team” three months to complete – four man-years – after which a team of more than 100 artists spent five months to integrate that digital world with the green chroma key footage filmed on the set. “There were definitely moments when things got very emotional, both for me and the team,” he recalls. “When reviewing the reference photographs, we saw many images from 9/11, because they are clearly the most recent images that can be found of the towers. So I think we felt a great responsibility to show the towers in a way that was sincere, but at the same time served as a tribute.”

“The other emotion we felt was pure excitement,” Baillie continues. “I really felt it, after finishing filming, when I spent two days in a helicopter flying over Ground Zero at just over 400 m high. We were flying exactly where Philippe was walking along the wire. He makes the hairs on your neck stand up, just thinking about it. I was in exactly the same place where that guy took his walk, without any security system; Looking down, I was stunned. It was great to live that experience, because of the reference material that we were able to capture, but also because of the emotional sensation, the impression of the height and the danger that it entails. So we were able to make sure that every shot we included in the film conveyed that same feeling. Frankly, I don't think the images we have in the film would have been as good if I hadn't been there to experience what it felt like."

A visual challenge

In addition to recreating the World Trade Center and New York City, visual effects supervisor Kevin Baillie had to handle many other responsibilities to make The challenge It would be as perfect as possible.

For the ride sequence itself, Baillie points out that, as impressive as Gordon-Levitt's feat of learning tightrope walking was, the visual effects were able to lend a hand in two ways. “On the simplest of things, Joe did the ride himself, which was amazing,” she says. “For some of the more complicated things, like when he lies down, or when he puts the pole on his back, the wire was placed on a 6m long green steel beam. When you see the recorded images themselves, he is walking on a surface 15 cm wide, with the wire in the middle of it, but, after erasing all the green, it seems that he is directly on a wire.

Naturally, the real Philippe Petit had years of preparation to perform this feat, while Gordon-Levitt had only eight days. So he did not have the necessary ability to perform certain more technical maneuvers on the wire. For these, the film team employed a double, Jade Kindar-Martin, who is one of the country's most accomplished tightrope walkers – a guy who married his wife on a tightrope and who, by absolute and fabulous coincidence, he trained with Rudy Omankowsky, Jr., son of Papa Rudy, who taught Philippe Petit. “We took a photo and got both Philippe and Jade on the phone with Papa Rudy, Jr., who was excited that we were making the movie,” Starkey recalls. “Jade continued the preparation of Joe that Philippe had started before filming. On Saturdays, they came and continued practicing, and Joe ended up learning to cross the tower.”

Kindar-Martin also performed wire stunts that were beyond Gordon-Levitt's ability. The visual effects department was there to ensure that his performance fit perfectly with Gordon-Levitt's. “There were a few really complicated maneuvers that only a true tightrope walker can do, like kneeling on the wire and waving, or the most complicated turns, or juggling lit torches on a tightrope,” Baillie acknowledges. “No matter how talented Joe is, there are things he can't do. Jade, the double, was in charge of performing them and then we changed her face. We scanned Joe's face in 43 different poses, so we could record all the muscle movements his face is capable of. “We were able to imitate the gesture of concentration and determination that Joe would have if he were executing that maneuver on the wire.”

The challenge It was filmed in 2D and the experts at Legend3D were in charge of converting it to 3D. Although not so long ago 3D conversions carried a very negative stigma, Baillie declares that now: “I will never make a film any other way. It's an incredible process and I think it's better than shooting a movie with two cameras, because you can adjust the depth to help viewers feel the specific emotion that the director is interested in. You don't have to stick to reality, you can do what the human eye does, anyway, which is filter information to create a modified version of reality that your eyes then transmit to your brain.”

The film was conceived as a 3D film and Baillie says the entire team took great care, from pre-production to post-production, to make decisions that would look good in 3D. “For example, we used a wide depth of field for focus, keeping everything in focus as much as possible,” explains Baillie. “Bob was also delighted to be able to use long, wide shots, rather than quick cuts. Normally, a movie can have a little more than 2,000 shots, but The Challenge only has 826. And Bob did it on purpose, so that viewers would have a chance to absorb and explore that 3D environment they are seeing.”

Making of

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbSdx412okM[/youtube]

Trailer

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9aeEZ6COP0[/youtube]

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