Director Jeff Zimbalist chronicles the dangers of love on top of the world in Skywalkers.
Before Russian daredevils Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus met and fell in love, they had independently elevated their shared obsession — the gravity-defying pastime known as rooftopping — to a dizzying art form. Summiting the tallest buildings without any kind of safety harnesses or other protective gear, Nikolau, who’d practiced gymnastics since she was young, and Beerkus, a talented climber and cameraman, would photograph themselves perched in the most precarious of places, gazing out over city skylines from vantage points that virtually no one else had ever reached.
The dazzling new documentary Skywalkers: A Love Story chronicles the rooftoppers’ romantic and creative partnership and the tumult they face as they prepare for the most ambitious climb of their lives: summiting Malaysia’s Merdeka 118 super skyscraper, all the way to the top of its 160-meter spire. Not only do Nikolau and Beerkus intend to ascend the heavily guarded building on December 18, 2022 — the same night the World Cup final is set to be played — they also aim to execute a difficult overhead lift atop a small piece of scaffolding once they reach the building’s highest point.
While the couple’s acts of extreme derring-do are captivating, Skywalkers co-director Jeff Zimbalist — the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning director of such acclaimed documentaries as Favela Rising, The Two Escobars, Bollywood: The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, and Pelé: Birth of a Legend — was most interested in capturing the inner workings of the relationship between Nikolau and Beerkus, and the incredible trust they must place in one another as they pursue ever more challenging quests.
“The story took all sorts of unexpected twists and turns, climaxing in this heisty ninja mission climb,” says Zimbalist, who had spent his younger days rooftopping in western Massachusetts. “Throughout all of that, there was constant conversation about what genre this [film is]. Is it a thriller? Is it a heist film? Is it a survey of what rooftopping is? What we kept coming back to is we don’t just want this to be a film about the fear of falling from heights; rather, we want this to be a film about the fear of falling in love.”
Zimbalist recently sat down with Queue to describe how the film, seven years in the making, came together through a combination of archival footage and two hundred hours of original material shot across six countries.
An edited version of the conversation follows.
Angela Nikolau
Gina McIntyre: What were the origins of Skywalkers: A Love Story?
Jeff Zimbalist: I had done some rooftopping myself in my teens and early twenties before I even knew that the activity had a name. I just called it trespassing. In the early 2000s, I discovered that other people were doing this, trespassing onto the roofs of the highest buildings in their cities around the world and doing amazing photography and drone work up there. So I put on my journalist cap and started tracking the rise of this movement, thinking, I’ve got to find a story in that world that resonates as deeply as this experience did for me when I was doing it.
Something like 15 years later, Angela burst on the scene, doing things her own way, bringing fashion into it. It becomes an art form in her hands. I called Angela, and then she introduced me to Ivan, the best rooftopper in Russia. At the time, he had a lot of followers; he’d been able to turn it into a real career. It was from that introduction that I was like, Oh my God, we might be
able to do a love story on top of the world. We might be able to use extreme climbing as a metaphor for romantic trust. We began production probably a year and a half after that, in 2017.
How did you develop a rapport with them so that they would feel comfortable allowing you into their lives?
JZ: I think the key was just sharing those vulnerabilities ourselves. I hired Maria Bukhonina, who’s Russian and was able to move to Russia and live and travel with the skywalkers. She became a producer and co-director on the film. We had two cameramen, Renato [Serrano] and Pablo [Rojas], who both are Latin American but happened to be living in Russia and spoke fluent Russian. They would spend every day with Ivan and Angela. Over a long period of time, [they were] seeing that we weren’t going anywhere, which I think is particularly relevant for Angela because she has abandonment challenges, as the film points out. Psychologically, that becomes a big part of her journey.
Angela Nikolau
What safety precautions were taken to protect both Angela and Ivan as well as the crew?
JZ: Our top priority was [making sure] that they didn’t do anything riskier than what they might be doing anyway because there was a production happening. We did not want to encourage or incentivize them in any way to push their luck further than they were already doing. The main rule was that we would only go up so far on these buildings with them. We were allowed to film them trespassing, but once we got to the main roof before a spire or a crane, we had to stop there. When they get on the spires or cranes, the danger factor is exponentially higher. They know each other and they can read each other’s [body] language, but we had not practiced with them, so having cameras around could be distracting and put them in further danger. Luckily, they’re great photographers. They were able to get amazing coverage when they went up without us to these heights; [it’s] just gorgeous spectacle.
Was there an especially frightening moment for you during production, when you either feared for their well-being or worried that you wouldn’t be able to capture the dynamic between the two of them?
JZ: I had a fear throughout that, as with any cinema verité project, there would be no finish line. There would be no climax — that we’d have an amazing world and amazing characters, but then what? I didn’t know if we had a movie until Merdeka. And then, obviously, the climb itself was during the World Cup final. That World Cup had two overtimes and a penalty shootout. That’s the longest World Cup match they could possibly ever have [to complete the climb while building security was distracted]. But then, spoiler alert, they were trapped. We thought they were caught, that the whole thing was over. Then your head starts going, Okay, we’ve got to get them out of there and make sure everything’s okay — and then secondarily [you wonder], What does that mean for our movie? So yeah, it was a thrilling ride in terms of highs and lows throughout.
Angela Nikolau
It is incredible to think about them being exhausted and dehydrated and then still pulling off that amazing stunt that you see at the end of the film.
JZ: Totally. And that was a surprise for me because so much of the narrative was about [Angela and] will she or won’t she trust Ivan [to support her during the lift]? But what ended up happening in the Merdeka was that they switched roles a number of times, where one became the rock
for the other. In times of weakness, the other would step into the role
of strength.
You really do see the dynamics of this relationship play out over time. Unlike a lot of fictionalized narratives about a romance, this is so grounded and real, but also, quite literally, set in such a heightened world.
JZ: When at first I was like, Oh wait, we could have a love story here, that was my thinking. There’s a danger to romance. It crushes us. It breaks our hearts. It breaks our hopes. Here, that danger is material. If the love falls apart, if the trust falls apart, it’s life or death. That felt like such a potent way of taking this amorphous sense that we all have in our romance and externalizing it and making it tangible instead.
