HIGH CRIME

In 1968, under the lights of his dentist’s chair, Philippe Petit got wind of a pair of giant towers under construction in New York City. An idea was born. “When I see three oranges, I juggle,” he once said. “And when I see two towers, I walk.”

Philippe Petit spent the next six years thinking about how he might walk between the twin towers, and then, in 1974, he decided outright that he’d actually do something about it. Eight months of meticulous and occasionally humorous planning ensued. After all, this was a crime he was planning, so criminal tactics would be required. He faked ID cards and mimicked the construction workers’ dress to gain entry for reconnaissance missions. Once he claimed to be a journalist from an architectural magazine wanting to speak with the workers on the roof; he conducted the interview, and made some useful observations. He also went up in a helicopter to take pictures so he could build an accurate scale model of the towers. Nothing could stop him. “He couldn’t go on living if he didn’t try to conquer those towers,” his girlfriend said. “It was as if they had been built specifically for him.”

The resulting performance has since become known as the “artistic crime of the century”, and James Marsh’s new documentary, Man On Wire, brings it to life through the testimony of the co-conspirators and the spectacle of the act itself. In the meantime, the policeman sent to the roof to bring him down reveals Petit to be less a walker and more a dancer, an artist who he was later obliged to throw into jail:

“I observed the tightrope 'dancer' - because you couldn't call him a 'walker' - approximately halfway between the two towers. And upon seeing us he started to smile and laugh and he started going into a dancing routine on the high wire... And when he got to the building we asked him to get off the high wire but instead he turned around and ran back out into the middle... He was bouncing up and down. His feet were actually leaving the wire and then he would resettle back on the wire again... Unbelievable really.... Everybody was spellbound in the watching of it.”

Read James Marsh’s own thoughts on both the man and the film here in the director's statement of the press section.