Towering achievement

James Marsh’s fascinating documentary
Man on Wire recreates Philippe Petit’s
illegal tightrope walk between the
World Trade Center’s Twin Towers

LOOK, SKY WALKER: Petit in Sydney

by MARK SLUTSKY

As audacious stunts went, it was hard to beat. In the wee hours one day in 1971, Philippe Petit and a band of friends snuck into Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral, where they strung a cable across the building’s two towers. When the sun came up, Petit walked across the wire for astonished Parisians (and was subsequently arrested).

Pretty impressive—but there was more to come. Two years later, Petit walked between the towers of Sydney, Australia’s Harbour Bridge (and was again arrested). Then, in 1974, in the culmination of a plan that took years to devise and rehearse, Petit and a ragtag group of accomplices infiltrated the towers of the World Trade Center and strung a cable across in secret. Petit did a 45-minute performance for stunned lookers, 110 stories above the ground. Then he was arrested.

Ballsy, indeed. Courageous. But there was something more than sheer bravado about Petit (although there was plenty of that, too). There was a reason why the media called the WTC walk the “Artistic Crime of the Century,” “artistic” being the operative word. To Petit, his performances were—and still are—that: performances, artistic spectacles, something more elevated, if you’ll pardon the pun, than mere publicity stunts. Petit is a fascinating character, playful, charismatic and seemingly capable of anything—when he was taken into custody in Sydney, Petit managed to steal the arresting officer’s watch right off his wrist.

He’s written several books himself about his exploits, but the amazing story of the WTC walk was just begging for a visual treatment, and it’s come in the form of the doc Man on Wire, directed by James Marsh (Wisconsin Death Trip). Constructed from interviews with the participants, a wealth of archival footage and some judiciously deployed re-enactments, Marsh tells the story of Petit’s most famous walk like it’s a heist movie—even if you know the outcome, it’s still thrilling.

Making miracles

Marsh, speaking to the Mirror over the phone from London, describes Petit’s unique character: “I’ve never met anyone quite like him myself. There’s a kind of cheek to what he does, as well as a beauty to it. And it’s illegal, and he transforms these environments in ways that are just like a dream, almost. He conjures up some kind of miracle, and then they’re gone.”

STILL IN AWE: Marsh

Some of the details seem miraculous indeed—or like they’re out of a fairy tale. How to get a 450-pound metal cable across the gap between the two highest buildings in the world? Use a bow and arrow, of course! “It’s a very simple, elegant solution to a quite amazingly difficult kind of problem,” says Marsh. “The problem is this: you have to get a very heavy steel cable across this chasm without anyone seeing you do it. In one night. The solution they come up with is breathtakingly simple. It’s medieval, you know, literally.

“What I loved about making the film is there were so many details that, when you read them first, seemed absolutely preposterous. How could that have happened? All the most preposterous ones completely checked out. Everyone agreed that this all happened. There’s no question. You see it in the footage; they’re trying to do it in France with the bow and arrow and they get it to work. It’s one of those sort of pleasing things that you just can’t make this stuff up, you know?”

So much of the story seems so improbable, so impossible, really—and yet it all happened. “I think, ultimately, the sort of moral of the story, if you like, is a very simple one,” Marsh says. “It’s one I never thought I’d buy into, which is if you really want to do something that badly, you can do it. It always felt phony to me. It’s a kind of Hollywood moral that could never happen in real life. But this story proves that it kind of does.”

Poignant parallels

One thing that Marsh doesn’t show, and is in fact very careful in avoiding, is anything having to do with the Twin Towers’ fate some three decades later. He doesn’t have to; who doesn’t know that story? It shades Man on Wire regardless. “There was never any temptation in my mind to confuse these two things, the destruction of the towers and what Philippe did,” says Marsh, who lived in New York for years. “But there are, of course, very many kind of odd and uncanny parallels to it, both in the sort of plotting of it and in the imagery of it as well. But that’s all after the fact. I felt very clearly that it shouldn’t be a part of the film, that the audience can definitely work that stuff out for themselves on whatever level they want to.

“You feel like now that there’s some distance between us and the terrible events of September 11th—why not just make a film about the life of those buildings, and this particular event that’s ultimately full of joy and some real comedy and drama?” he continues. “Why not allow people for 90 minutes to look at these buildings in a very different kind of way for once, because everyone’s memory is so stained and tainted by what they now know—and not the least mine. But for me, it was great to see them going up, rather than coming down.”

Transcending time

There’s so much footage and documentation of the preparation for the big event that you almost don’t notice it, in the film, when the actual tightrope walk across the towers is shown only in still images. It’s an incredibly effective way of conveying this moment where time seemed to freeze. But there’s also a good story behind it.

As it turns out, getting the cable across was more difficult than expected, and Petit’s collaborator Jean-Louis Blondeau spent hours pulling the heavy cable across the gap and tautening it. He, of course, was the one meant to man the camera they’d brought up. “His arms were so destroyed by this, he literally couldn’t pick it up,” Marsh says. “Even the first few stills he took are out of focus because he was shaking. By the time he got the strength back to shoot the film, the police had arrived on Philippe’s roof and were about to come to his roof, so he had to flee, so we didn’t end up getting any footage.

“In a sense, the film might have benefitted from that. Because had there been footage, of course we would have seen it 100 times already on YouTube and god knows what else, and it may not have felt quite so mysterious. I always find the whole thing, even now, very mysterious. And just to see it captured in these frozen moments that are really quite transcendental. A photo makes you look very carefully, whereas a film just gives it to you.”

As much time as he’s spent with Petit’s story, Marsh seems to be still in awe of Petit’s fearlessness and sheer artistic daring. Marsh makes Petit’s act of stepping onto the tightrope seem almost ineffable. “I can’t conceptually understand it, and therefore I have to kind of view it as a miracle, literally, as something that’s beyond my understanding in a way, that someone could do such a thing and be unafraid,” he says. “He was happy. He wanted to be there and you see this—my favourite moment in the film is an out-of-focus photograph where he’s smiling. It’s like life is so intense at that moment. It’s like any kind of achievement like that: you live in a way that you never lived before, and he’s doing it for all of us in a way. He’s going somewhere where I couldn’t go, but someone can go there, and he did it.

“There’s something about that that still amazes me, even though I talk about it so much and I made the film, and I have all that kind of familiarity with it—it still hasn’t gone away, those first few steps and how that feels.”

MAN ON WIRE PLAYS AT THE FESTIVAL
DU NOUVEAU CINÉMA ON THURSDAY,
OCT. 16, 9:20 P.M. AT EX-CENTRIS AND
FRIDAY, OCT. 17, 5 P.M. AT CINÉMA
IMPÉRIAL. IT OPENS IN THEATRES ON
MONDAY, OCT. 20.