On 7 August 1974, 25-year old Frenchman Philippe Petit walked out on a wire suspended at 1,350 feet between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre. It was a spectacular and entirely illegal moment of beauty. Petit spent 45 minutes walking along the wire, making the crossing on eight occasions. He had no safety net or harness, only his own self-taught skill.
The previous night Petit and a team of friends and acquaintances had broken into both towers of New York's iconic building and set up a stunt which seemed impossible in so many ways. The operation was planned like a bank heist - all fake IDs, disguises and false identities.
In his riveting documentary 'Man on Wire', acclaimed filmmaker James Marsh tells Petit's extraordinary story, from the moment of inception through to the event itself. He spoke with Steve Cummins about making the documentary, the gift of the story and why no film footage of the actual walk exists.
Read the 'Man on Wire' review.
Steve Cummins: You would have obviously been pretty young when Philippe accomplished his great "coup"?
James Marsh: Yeah. I have absolutely no infant memory of it at all. I encountered the story when I moved to New York in the mid-Nineties. I can't quite pinpoint when it was, but it was just one of those stories which you heard. It's a sort of New York folk tale and you know it's obviously very impressive when you think about it.
When you first encounter it, though, you feel that you're just dealing with one of these stunts people do in big cities. However, once I read Philippe's book, I saw something completely different.
You know what Philippe did there was an artistic performance whether you like it or not, and in order to do that performance he of course had to construct this elaborate kind of criminal plot, and so the film responded to the book and the book offered itself as a sort of gripping thriller.
That's how I then tried to tell the story: to tell Philippe's story at least until the point where 'the bank robbery' is completed and instead of something being stolen, something is actually given to the city of New York early that morning.
SC: You mention criminal plot, Philippe really delights in calling himself a criminal.
JM: Yes, he does, and some of the humour of the film, if it indeed is humorous, is that we're dealing, not with hardened criminals, but with dilettante criminals, artists if you like. But some of the solutions for the problems they face are truly imaginative. I mean, the business of getting this heavy cable from one building to another is a really difficult problem, and their imagination solves it.
They come up with a sort of medieval solution, which is a bow and arrow. But some of it is really funny because they passionately want to do this, they all do. Everyone involved is invested in doing this break-in, this crime and yet things go terribly wrong once they get into the towers.
But it's all for something that's, on one level you could say is completely pointless, but on another is just the most brilliant thing which you could do, which is to create a beautiful moment in the world. And what's better than that, you know?
SC: There's a great cast of characters who took part in the whole event. I mean, it must have been gold for you. Some of them you couldn't dream up.
JM: There really is. That's why there was never a thought in my mind to make the film anything other than a documentary, even though I push some of the documentary conventions very far.
People like Barry Greenhouse, Philippe's great friend Jean-Louis Blondeau, his ex-girlfriend Annie, and the Americans who get involved; it's just like a caper movie. So why not tell it that way? Why not enjoy it and have some fun with the way they styled themselves?
You know, they went in with disguises; they did all this reconnaissance, taking photos of the roof, anchor points and positions for the wire. And that's how the film precedes. I mean, if it has a fault - and you could say it has many faults - you could say that it's obsessed with details; because the whole thing was such a detailed undertaking.
It felt to me that I really enjoyed those details, and enjoyed the process by how this happened. In a perverse way I also really enjoyed all the things that went wrong!
SC: One of those things which went wrong was the bow and arrow, which didn't work and caused great difficulty.
JM: Yes, it didn't work of course, and they almost lost the arrow. They also lost control of the wire into the void in the middle of the night and that was such a big thing. I think the film flags it as best it can, but that was a huge, huge problem.
I mean, there were so many points where they should have been caught and that was another one of them. You know, you can't walk on a wire that's like a 'U' in the middle between the buildings. That's a huge problem, and again they somehow pulled it off.
There's a point just before that when both Phillippe and his friend Jean-Francois are in the south tower and they're creeping past a guard. Both see the guard looking straight at them, and they somehow get away with it.
So, they make their own luck and miracles can happen and there's [sic] so many things that should have prevented this from happening, but didn't for some reason or another. So it is a sort of fairytale almost, and the film I think has elements of that in its telling.
SC: Philippe, as a personality, is quite hyper, energetic and passionate. As a documentary maker you couldn't really ask for more in terms of a narrator.
JM: You couldn't, and it's his story and he gets to tell it the way in which he wants to. It's not very conventional. Usually in an interview you have this kind of formality and there's a kind of discipline in place, that people kind of stay in their seats, but he wasn't about to do that. What you get is something all the more energising, which is someone running around the room acting it all out for you.
That makes it all the more funny, and endearing. But also it gives the whole film an enormous kind of energy which suffuses all around it. So, of course, I was given two amazing gifts.
Firstly, a wonderful story which works brilliantly as a film narrative, and secondly, a brilliant central character who is real flesh and blood. What's interesting about the film is that it's the kind of thing you go to the cinema to go and see.
You know, you go to the cinema to see a special effects-driven Hollywood blockbuster, to see something amazing, and in 'Man on Wire', you see something that is amazing but it's all real. It's a sort of death-defying amazing kind of miraculous performance, but it's all done by someone that you know very well by the time he's up there.
You know that he's flesh and blood and you feel for him - I think in a different way than if he was some kind of CGI superhero.
SC: You mentioned gifts, another must have been the amount of archive footage which Philippe had of the preparation for the walk.
JM: Absolutely. When I saw that I was just jumping around with glee. There was [sic] these nine rolls of unprocessed colour footage which, as you say, is an absolute gift because it shows you the people at that time actually solving some of the problems that they had to solve.
More importantly for me though is that it gives you the whole spirit of how it was done. That spirit is hard to describe but you can see it when people are passionately arguing over a model they've built as to how to do this, and figuring out in the meadows as to how they're going to fire the arrow. It's amazing footage, and I think that it is the emotional centre of the film, if you like.
SC: At that time, was Philippe actually planning a documentary?JM: Yeah, he was. He wanted to document it as best he could. I mean, he's naturally a very theatrical person and you can take that as far as you want. I mean, he does like the sound of his own voice and himself on film. He's a performer, so he began to document this.
However, they gave up quite quickly because he realised... I mean, he's sensible. He's a dreamer and sometimes appears to be a mad man, but he knew he couldn't trail a film crew around and pull this off. So quickly after this little sequence in France he got rid of the film crew.
He thought 'I've got to get on with my 'crime', and I can't get sidetracked into making this film about it'. So nothing is too obsessive on detail with regards that.
You see clearly that he wanted to document the whole thing straight off, but he gave up on that idea because it was just too difficult to accommodate a film crew into what he was doing.
SC: Why didn't he film the actual walk?
JM: Well, there was a whole story behind that. Of course there was a film camera on the roof with Jean-Louis on the north tower, but because of this problem they had with the wire, Jean Louis had spent literally four hours pulling up this very heavy steel cable. He cannot pick up the camera. His arms are too compromised by what he has done, and so he picks up his stills camera because he could rely on that. It's lighter and he's a stills photographer.
But even those first pictures are kind of blurry and shaky because he's trembling so much. So by the time he gets his strength back the police have swarmed the building and he has to run for it. So no film was shot, and it could have been shot.
The first time you hear this you think: 'Oh my God, why the hell didn't you just give me five seconds?' However, as the project moved forward, I began to see this as another gift in an indirect way because, had that footage been shot, it would have been seen thousands of times and some of the magic of it would have been diminished just by repetition.
So what we have is these breathtaking stills, and the film just stops for a moment and asks you to behold the fragments of the walk which we do have. Up to that point, the film kind of gallops and gallops and gallops and it's relentless as Philippe is running around doing this and that. Then suddenly we're there and we have to all take a big breath and ponder what this is all about, and the beauty of it.
And in fact those stills, I think, give them to you very well. In fact, to hear the commentary and the perception from those who were most invested in this idea; to let them tell you what they felt and what they saw, felt absolutely right.
SC: Finally James, for years Philippe had resisted attempts to get his story up on screen. How did you convince him that you should tell the story?
JM: Well, I think the timing was very good on one level. As you say he had resisted doing anything with the story for 30-odd years. So I came along at a time when he was sort of thinking: 'Well, maybe I should do this now.'
He had just written his book and the book was the thing that I had most responded to. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I went along and met him and said to him: 'Look, we're going to have to collaborate here. It's your story and I want you to tell it the way in which you want to tell it.'
So I think he responded very well to the invitation to be a part of the telling of the story, which indeed he is as you see in the film. He's a big part of it. He liked that. I mean, we had our moments in the course of making the film, but nonetheless I respected his contribution as best as I could. So that was an important word I used with him, 'collaboration'.
He wanted to be involved and see what was going on, and at certain points there were passionate disagreements. That was inevitable.
He's a strong character and I'm as stubborn as he is. Nonetheless, at the end of it, we had enormous respect and affection for each other and I think the work benefited enormously from that input and the disagreements and discussions which we had.
I think also, of course the story is different now because of the destruction of those buildings and that's not a reason to make the film or not make the film. But it definitely changes how everyone is going to see it and perhaps that adds a dimension to the story it didn't have.
I say this without any cynicism: the story has changed because of what happened. It means something different now, and in some respects it has a different impulse behind it. That's not to say that the towers coming down made the film viable in any way, but it's just a fact we have to deal with.
I would much rather they were up, trust me, and people were still alive than my film being different. But that's just the world in which we live in so that adds another element or impulse as to doing it now.
