Director Zemeckis walks the Tinseltown wire

Like a ship's signal lamp or a Beatles album played backward, the movies of the Hollywood filmmaker Robert Zemeckis will throw off a pattern if you pay close enough attention.

They involve a repeating character: a dreamer with a quixotic streak. It's a person who has a slightly sideways view of the world and the dogged belief that others will soon share it too, if only he's given the chance to convince them.

Shades of the archetype can be found in Christopher Lloyd's Doc Brown from Back to the Future, in Jodie Foster's stargazing Ellie Arroway from Contact, in the group of clever star-seeking young women from his debut, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, even in Tom Hanks' Chuck Noland from Cast Away.

And the character can be experienced in full throttle in Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Philippe Petit, the real-life wire-walker swaggering with ambition both physical and metaphysical in Zemeckis' new movie The Walk, set in the 1970s. While every seemingly sane person tells Petit he can't pull off his goal -- to walk netless on a tightrope between the tops of the World Trade Center's twin towers -- the French daredevil pushes on, assembling a ragtag, (slightly) less-skeptical team.

This archetype remains the same throughout the films even as the character is folded into radically different settings, almost like the hero of Forrest Gump. Which is fitting, because that's a Robert Zemeckis movie too.

Not for nothing does a person like this end up in a Zemeckis movie, and it hardly takes a Chuck Noland-degree of ingenuity to decipher the reason: The character is a stand-in for the director himself.

"There is an autobiographical component to everything Bob does," said Alan Silvestri, the composer who has worked on nearly 20 movies with the director. "The idea of being driven by it, by being committed to one's art even if there's collateral damage."

Or as Tom Rothman, the head of Columbia Pictures/Sony, which is releasing The Walk -- and who has made three movies with the director -- says, "The metaphor is so good it almost seems not true. Bob is Philippe."

Zemeckis, who resists interpreting his work like Marty McFly rebuffs the advances of an oblivious parent, cops to a certain identification with the archetype. Sort of. Maybe.

"I think I'm the last person who can make that determination," he said.

The last person? Really?

"I do present a question to my team before every movie: 'How are we going to do this in a way that hasn't been seen or done before?'" he admitted.

Much exists outside the envelope for Philippe Petit. Or, more accurately, above it. Petit, as fans of the 2009 Oscar winner for best documentary, Man on Wire, will recall, was a brash and talkative young French street performer. Cast out by confounded parents, he begins exploring ways to dazzle audiences with feats only the deluded would attempt, particularly those featuring public spaces, heights and thin wires. Soon he's upping the landmark ante.

Browsing a dentist's-office magazine, Petit comes upon the under-construction World Trade Center in New York. In a flash he's off to the States, assembling a team for a gonzo mission that will allow him to sneak up to the roof and, through a series of clever work-arounds, affix a wire 110 stories high for him to walk between the buildings.

Though a whimsically shot character study of a man who fervently worships the God of Big Plans, The Walk's lasting impression is likely to be its final 25 minutes. That's when Petit attempts the famous walk in all its vertiginous glory, and viewers get to see the world from Petit's perspective. That the movie, presented in Imax 3-D, was made for about $35 million (in Montreal, with a bevy of Zemeckis' trademark effects trickery) will only, well, heighten the feat.

It will also continue Zemeckis' run as the most improbable of mainstream filmmakers. At 63, the Chicago native has remained prolific despite reaching an age when many of his contemporaries have slowed down; he has released seven studio features in the last 15 years, all while steering away from the franchise films that now dominate major companies' slates.

As with a select few directors -- James Cameron, past collaborator Steven Spielberg -- he also has a sensibility that seamlessly combines art and entertainment, a great populist in a time when movies are rigidly separated into popcorn and vegetables. His willingness to discuss his work mostly in technical and not thematic terms also harks back to old-school figures like Hitchcock and Eastwood, born of a similar reticence.

Notably, Zemeckis has faced a fair share of arrows: of an industry that has sometimes remained unpersuaded; of fans who wondered about some of his perambulations (particularly his detour to three films made in motion-capture, a technology he has embraced with Petit-like zeal, beginning with The Polar Express in 2004); and, maybe most significantly, of critics who either think he relies too much on technology or continue to see him as a shiny commercial filmmaker with few complex philosophical ambitions.

Before they set out to make The Walk, Gordon-Levitt wanted to know what the film was about, in its bones. So he asked Zemeckis. The director thought for a moment and then, Gordon-Levitt recalled, said to the actor, "'It's about putting your faith on the windowsill.' Actually he said 'putting your ... on the windowsill.' And I loved that he did that. How many filmmakers will tell you that's what their film is about? How many would say it like that? But that's Bob. A lot of people who are that intelligent give you all these cues about how intelligent they are, by how they speak or what they say. Bob doesn't. He ducks under his intelligence."

Zemeckis -- an avid pilot who lives and works in the Santa Barbara area -- told Gordon-Levitt to watch 1970's Patton to prepare for the role; it would, he hoped, help him understand a character who determinedly goes his own way. (Films of a certain classic American vintage are favorites; the works of Billy Wilder and Frank Capra are among his templates.)

Bob Gale, a lifelong friend who wrote the Back to the Future movies with Zemeckis, recalls that when they were undergrads studying cinema at the University of Southern California, "everyone was doing these dark films. And Bob just said, 'That's not what I want to be doing.' He wanted to make movies in Hollywood. Personal movies, but for the studios."

Needless to say, that combination can take its toll. Paramount threatened to shut down Forrest Gump several weeks before shooting for cost reasons. Even more famously, Zemeckis fired Eric Stoltz more than a month into shooting Back to the Future and replaced him with Michael J. Fox, rallying his collaborators -- including Spielberg -- to convince Universal this was a perfectly safe move.

The course grew most choppy with the motion-capture phase. Before a triumphant return to live-action with Flight in 2012, Zemeckis had directed Beowulf and A Christmas Carol, while also creating a studio of young animators to work on motion-capture films. Then, during a regime change at Disney, the effort abruptly ended.

"I think his lowest professional point came when we had to take 400 talented people we had hired and tell them it was over," said Jack Rapke, who began as Zemeckis' agent and has long served as his producing partner.

Zemeckis, whose next movie is a live-action World War II romance with Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard (he says he may yet return to motion-capture as the technology improves), has an existential explanation for carrying on.

"I kind of go to -- what's the best way to describe it? -- like a white-out state when I feel I need to make a movie. Nothing can stop me. It sounds arrogant, but it's not. It's like Philippe -- it just happens in my gut."

MovieStyle on 10/09/2015

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