TOKYO: Oscar-winning director Robert Zemeckis takes movie-goers on a white-knuckle ride to the top of the World Trade Center — and to the edge of sanity — in his new film “The Walk.”

Thirty years after striking gold with “Back to the Future,” the American’s latest offering, which opens the Tokyo International Film Festival on Thursday, is based on the true story of French high-wire artist Philippe Petit’s death-defying walk between the Twin Towers in 1974.

“From a technical standpoint, every film that I’ve done in my entire career has prepared me to do this movie,” Zemeckis told AFP in an interview on Wednesday, the exact date (Oct. 21, 2015) in the future that Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly traveled to in a souped-up DeLorean fitted with a flux capacitor in the second part of the blockbuster trilogy.

“I wanted the audience to completely believe that (Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s) character was on that wire. That was the challenge for me: that there would be not a single frame where the audience didn’t doubt that they were really up there on that wire with that character.”