Petit’s 1974 walk between the Twin Towers makes riveting film
 The 2008 Sundance Film Festival winner of the Audience Award & Grand Jury Prize for World Documentary was Man on Wire, the extraordinary film about Phillipe Petit’s August 7, 1974 walk between New York’s Twin Towers. Completely illegal, the wirewalk was a daring act of love—and a quest—for the young Frenchman. Petit went on to do many more walks, such as 1989’s Tour et Fil in Paris on an inclined 700-meter cable, linking the Palais de Chaillot with the second story of the Eiffel Tower.
Chattanoogans will get an opportunity to see behind the scenes of what has been called “the artistic crime of the century” when Man on Wire opens Friday as part of the Arts & Education Council’s Independent Film Series.
Following six and a half years of dreaming of the towers, Petit spent eight months in New York City planning the execution of the feat. Aided by a team of friends and accomplices, Petit was faced with enormous challenges: He had to find a way to bypass the WTC’s security; smuggle the heavy steel cable and rigging equipment into the towers; pass the wire between the two rooftops; anchor the wire and tension it to withstand the winds and the swaying of the buildings. The rigging was done at night in complete secrecy. At 7:15 a.m., Petit took his first step on the high wire 1,350 feet above the sidewalks of Manhattan. After nearly an hour dancing on the wire, he was arrested, taken for psychological evaluation, and jailed before he was finally released.
“Most people living in New York know about Philippe’s walk,” director James Marsh, is quoted as saying. “It is truly part of the folklore of the city and more poignant now that the towers are gone. But I immediately knew that the fate of the World Trade Center had nothing to do with our film. Philippe’s adventure should stand alone as an amazing true-life fairy tale, set in an era usually remembered as squalid and corrupt.”
The film caps a long collaboration between Marsh and Philippe Petit, involving many trips by Marsh to Petit’s home in the Catskill Mountains. Petit had been trying to create a way to capture the experience on film for 30 years, meticulously collating a vast archive of documents, film footage, and personal memorabilia.
“I had always seen the film as a ‘heist’ movie,” said Marsh. “We soon discovered that there was an amazing group of supporting characters involved in the plot. The testimony of Philippe’s accomplices allowed us to create multiple perspectives on the execution of this criminal enterprise with its many setbacks and conflicts. They had all been waiting 30 years to tell their part of the story.”
The first thing Petit said to Marsh on meeting him was, “I have the mind of a criminal.” “He then went on to show me how he could kill a man with a copy of People magazine,” the director said, “and, before we parted, he picked my pocket. Here was an extraordinary individual who viewed the world in a unique way.
“His story is really the oldest story there is—the hero going on a journey, or quest, to test himself and achieve a seemingly impossible objective. As a teenage wirewalker in France, before the World Trade Center was even constructed, Philippe was dreaming up a reckless scheme to break in to those un-built towers, rig a wire between them and to dance on that wire for the delight of passers-by. Each one of these tasks looked impossible and the last one seemed like a death wish. In fact it was quite the opposite. As his girlfriend Annie points out in the film, ‘He couldn’t go on living if he didn’t try to conquer those towers…it was as if they had been built specifically for him.’”
“I set out to make a film that would be a definitive account of this mythical quest. I hadn’t anticipated that it would become a fundamentally human drama that, among other things, turned out to be a comedy of errors, a love story, a story about friendship and its limits and a satire on authority and arbitrary rules.”
The film’s materials point out, “[It’s hard] to imagine now a group of French-speaking bohemians breezing through JFK airport with suitcases containing shackles, ropes, knives and a bow and arrow, then hanging around a major New York monument with cameras and forged ID cards waiting for their chance to break in—and actually getting away with it. But in the words of [Petit co-conspirator] Jean Francois: ‘It may have been illegal…but it wasn’t wicked or mean.’”
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