On Aug. 7, 1974, a confident young Frenchman named Philippe Petit walked a secretly rigged wire between the World Trade Center towers in New York, dazzling a waking city, inflaming authorities, and making gloriously real a goal he'd worked toward for six years.
But it's taken 34 years for a movie such as James Marsh's acclaimed documentary "Man on Wire" to come along and chronicle it. That's because Petit -- a man whose height-scaling pursuits understandably lead him to be concerned about control over his destiny -- had rejected all offers from filmmakers over the years.
"You cannot embellish it, you can only give justice to it," the 58-year-old Petit said of his achievement in an interview at the Palomar hotel during a recent visit to Los Angeles. "I wanted at least collaboration, you know? And that didn't happen until I met James Marsh."
Upon which the impish entertainer picked the director's pocket (Marsh was also along for the interview) and showed him how to kill someone with a copy of People magazine. "He's kind of a mischievous fellow," says Marsh, who felt the urge to tell Petit's story after reading the wire walker's eccentric and poetic 2002 memoir "To Reach the Clouds." "But we got on really well. We'd talk about movies all the time. I think he wanted someone who was willing to listen to his ideas about how the film should be. And that it was going to be fun."
Which doesn't mean they always saw eye to eye. Doing an interview for the documentary in a steam bath? No, said Marsh. Using the same Michael Nyman music Petit practiced wire walking to many years ago? Absolutely. In any case, Petit relished the idea of artistic discord: "To be fighting for your point is more interesting than agreeing constantly."
The idiosyncratic Petit, whose Gallic-accented English has a juggler's rhythmic grace, talks about his adventure-filled life -- including his rebellious rock climbing as a boy, his street-theater amusements and his mastering the pickpocket's trade-- in a way that is both disarmingly arty and casually arrogant. Self-taught as a wire walker, he sets himself apart from journeyman big-top daredevils by calling what he does "a unique theater in the sky" rather than a job. "They don't maybe love their wire, or talk to their wire," Petit says of others who perform aloft on a taut, thumb-thick stage. "What interests me is a purity. Remember the etymology. It's 'high-wire walker.' So I dedicated myself in creating walks. Go to the circus, to those people, and if you said, 'Show me some walking,' they would laugh at you. 'We tumble, we do pyramids, we do unicycle, but we don't walk. This is ridiculous.' So I think it is the most difficult thing to do on a wire, to do some amazing walk."
