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" What&amp;#039;s going on on Twitter? The morning after Robert Zemeckis&amp;#039; death-defying drama The Walk premiered\u00A0at the New York Film Festival, the Internet is breathlessly catching up. The director&amp;#039;s 3D rendering of Philippe Petit&amp;#039;s 1974 high-wire walk across the Twin Towers made an impression. Those in the audience didn&amp;#039;t wait to catch their breath\u2014tweets were torpedoed out from inside the theater for cinephiles, history buffs, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt obsessives to toil over. As we pour ourselves coffee, I mention the fervor to Zemeckis. He is unaware. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not an Internet guy, but I know we&amp;#039;re all in relation to it,&amp;quot; he tells Esquire. The creative force behind Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, and many of Hollywood&amp;#039;s most technically astounding blockbusters is not joking when he says social media is a blur. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re just like, writing &amp;#039;The Walk,&amp;#039; and all these Twitter things appear?&amp;quot;\u00A0 I lead him down the black hole of Twitter search to pull up a few reactions. &amp;quot;I guess it must give people a feeling of power that their thoughts just go into the ether,&amp;quot; he wonders. &amp;quot;Back in a day before the Internet, that&amp;#039;s what we in the movie business used to call the office water cooler.&amp;quot; Zemeckis makes water-cooler movies. He still does, even if the modern water cooler is now\u00A0an office pit stop. It means he&amp;#039;s a little stubborn. Modern multiplexes rarely sees a movie like\u00A0The Walk. The dramatized account of Petit&amp;#039;s stunt is spectacle sans action, more like a World&amp;#039;s Fair exhibition or those early IMAX documentaries, wowing with big sights and bright sounds. That&amp;#039;s Zemeckis&amp;#039; playground. Movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her, Contact, and Cast Away all pushed visual boundaries without resorting to shootouts or superpowered clobbering. His trilogy of motion-capture animated films\u2014The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol\u2014luxuriate in dream logic. Even his Back to the Future trilogy is tempered, an experiment in plopping everyday characters into extraordinary places. Really, Zemeckis only pulled out the stops when Back to the Future III crescendoed with a train chase. A contemporary\u00A0Back to the Future would need eight of those. Zemeckis stresses: It wasn&amp;#039;t easy in the &amp;#039;80s and &amp;#039;90s to get those movies made\u2014just maybe a little\u00A0easier.\u00A0Each one of his movies\u00A0involved\u00A0jumping\u00A0hurdles and fielding notes (except for, surprisingly, Contact, his adaptation of Carl Sagan&amp;#039;s book\u2014the studios begged him and Jodie Foster to make that movie). In the end, only Robert Zemeckis understood why a Robert Zemeckis movie would work.\u00A0&amp;quot;Every other one was an endless battle,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Because the business is fear-driven. Everyone is terrified.&amp;quot;  Fear was just one hurdle for Zemeckis&amp;#039; biopic. The director spent\u00A010 years developing, writing, then directing The Walk, a movie he first imagined for motion-capture\u00A0animation. &amp;quot;I had this idea I could put the sensors on the real Philippe and have him recreate the walk. He is extremely unique in his ability to do this.&amp;quot; Zemeckis&amp;#039;\u00A0appreciation for Petit pushed him to realize his film in live-action, photo-real effects putting the audience right besides the tightrope walker. He would still invite Petit to record his balanced steps in motion capture, giving The Walk unparalleled authenticity. Critics often knock Zemeckis for being a sentimentalist and a sensationalist. He calls his stuff\u00A0entertaining. When I compare\u00A0Gordon-Levitt&amp;#039;s performance and The Walk&amp;#039;s light-footed sensibility to Who Framed Roger Rabbit (a compliment), he points back to the real Petit, who so deeply respected the circus of life, the art of entertaining, that he bowed to an audience 97 stories below him. To live up to the film&amp;#039;s centerpiece, Gordon-Levitt and Zemeckis exaggerated this lust for life. Petit loved to climb, so why not have his movie counterpart address the audience from atop the Statue of Liberty? He could be showy with his destiny, the World Trade Center, towering above him. &amp;quot;I love seeing actors act and do stuff,&amp;quot; Zemeckis says. For the director, big performances have the same power\u00A0as big special effects. &amp;quot;You put a smile on people&amp;#039;s\u00A0faces because, oh, this is really kind of cool.&amp;quot; From atop Zemeckis&amp;#039; grand vision, the microcosm of Twitter looks like a small thicket of chatter. He worries about how his prospective audience could lose themselves inside it, mistaking a steady stream of industry news and gossip as anything resembling his finished products. Recently, one of his new scripts hit the desk of a savvy reporter, who broke it into a million pieces for the Internet to devour. Zemeckis doesn&amp;#039;t hide his frustration. In fact, he&amp;#039;s pissed. But he hopes his movies are big enough, entertaining enough, that even an iPhone-obsessed culture can divert its\u00A0attention, at least for a couple hours. In this way, the director is like Philippe Petit\u2014obsessed with showmanship, driven by a style that&amp;#039;s losing its place in the world, and daring enough to give it a try. Pettit put his life on the line. Zemeckis put up\u00A0his career and someone else&amp;#039;s six-figure budget. Zemeckis is hesitant to buy into my comparison, until he pictures it as obsession. &amp;quot;Something can happen where...\u00A0this piece I have to write. This I have to write. I think that is a universal theme for anyone who has any form of creative expression, which I think is everybody.&amp;quot; That would make a great tweet.        "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/interviews/a38665/robert-zemeckis-the-walk/>