Back in January is was revealed Robert Zemeckis was working on To Reach For the Clouds, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt rumoured to star. The project is now coming together fast with the hope it will shoot this summer.
THR reports that Gordon-Levitt will indeed star and now he has some company as Ben Kingsley, James Badge Dale, and Charlotte Le Bon are set to join the cast.
The film will be based on the memoirs of Philippe Petit, who walked on a tightrope strung between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on August 7, 1974. Zemeckis is planning to direct from a script he is co-writing with Christopher Browne.
The actual tightrope walk won’t be featured until towards the end of the movie, with the bulk of the film looking at on how Philippe Petit and a group of friends meticulously planned what was later called the ‘artistic crime of the century.’ It took six years from conception to execution. Eventually in 1974 they snuck up to the top of the towers to string a 450-foot cable from one building to the other, using a custom-made 26-foot balancing pole. The heist elements of the story are (inevitably) being compared to Ocean’s Eleven.
A documentary about the event, Man on Wire directed by James Marsh, won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2009.