Philippe Petit è un funambolo autore di imprese memorabili. Il capolavoro di James March, Man on wire, descriveva la sua storia come un thriller, sino al momento in cui, una mattina d’estate del 1974, tese un cavo tra le torri gemelle e passeggiò in solitaria, sospeso nel vuoto.
Il film, premio Oscar, avrà una nuova versione fiction, con Robert Zemeckis alla regia e Joseph Gordon Levitt come protagonista.
Non si sa ancora chi scriverà il soggetto, ma il progetto adatterà il romanzo scritto dallo stesso Petit e tradotto in italiano come Toccare le nuvole.
E’ un grande soggetto. Ma c’è già un film straordinario che lo racconta, mostrando le immagini del vero Petit e delle sue imprese incredibili. A cosa serve un remake in cui gli effetti speciali ricostruiranno non solo la corda ed il protagonista, ma anche le Twin Towers?
One late-summer day, a feat of unimaginable audacity was perpetrated on the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The year was 1974. A hundred thousand people gathered on the ground to watch in awe as twenty-four-year-old high wire artist Philippe Petit made eight crossings between the all-but-completed towers, a quarter mile above the earth, over the course of nearly an hour.
Petit’s achievement made headlines around the world. Yet few who saw or heard about it realized that it was the fulfillment of a dream he had nurtured for six years, rekindling it each time it was in danger of expiring. His accomplices were a motley crew of foreigners and Americans, who under Petit’s direction had conspired, connived, labored, argued, rehearsed, and improvised to make possible an act of unsurpassed aerial artistry.
In this visually and verbally stunning book, Petit tells for the first time the dramatic story of this history-making walk, from conception and clandestine planning to the performance and its aftermath. The account draws on Petit’s journals, which capture everything from his budgets to his strategies for rigging a high wire in the dead of night between two of the most secure towers in the world. It is animated by photographs taken by two of Petit’s collaborators, and by his own wonderfully evocative sketches and unquenchable humor.
Stanze di Cinema 