Traversing the Towers In a Moment of Joy

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Petit on Being Arrested Atop the Towers

Philippe Petit discusses his famous walk on a wire between the Towers at the World Trade Center. The walk, the morning of August 7, 1974, is the subject of a new documentary "Man on Wire." He is sitting next to the film's director, James Marsh.

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They did just that. Petit made news around the world, and when he was released by the authorities, the same day as his arrest, the city embraced him. His impish, shrugging explanations -- including "When I see two oranges, I juggle. When I see two towers, I walk" -- were a break from the unhappy preoccupations of the day. Richard Nixon resigned two days after Petit tiptoed into the public imagination and by the time the president boarded his helicopter on the White House lawn, even he had the world's most famous aerialist in mind.

"I wish I had the publicity that Frenchman had," Nixon said in farewell remarks.

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As famous as Petit was, he never cashed in the way insta-celebrities do today, though he didn't lack opportunity. He lives today in a Catskills village outside New York City, but if his tastes ran to Fifth Avenue co-ops, that's where he'd be living. In the months after Petit's World Trade walk, companies knocked into each other trying to entice him into an endorsement, an appearance, a commercial. MGM made an offer, reportedly in the seven figures. When a friend answered his phone and said the makers of Sweet'N Low were calling with a proposal, Petit said, "Hang up on them. I am strong and high." Burger King offered him $100,000 to wear some kind of Whopper costume and wire-walk over Eighth Avenue.

"I had learned a new epithet the day they asked me to do that," says Petit. "A New York epithet."

A sort of anti-Evel Knievel, he turned everyone down.

"I could have become rich in 12 days if I wanted to," he says, with so much defiant pride you'd think Burger King had just called back. "But I just couldn't do it. Then they'd add zeros to the number they were offering and that just made me mad because I am a self-taught artist and I can't be bought that way. I cannot sell my art cheaply. I have never done a commercial in my life and I never will."

You get the sense that Petit has a very particular idea of who he is and what he does. He's inclined by nature to quibble with the premise of your question, as politely as possible, and he seems braced to be misunderstood or mislabeled. Please don't refer to his walks as "stunts," merci beaucoup, and do not call him a daredevil. He prefers "poet in the sky," a term that captures, if nothing else, the purity of the man's motives.

Which, as "Man on Wire" makes clear, are hard to question. Petit starts to learn to wire-walk at the age of 16, on his own, and develops his act on the streets of Paris, passing the hat to sustain himself. He performs atop Notre Dame in 1971 and stops traffic when he shuffles across a wire on Australia's Sydney Harbor Bridge. These, it turns out, seem like limbering-up exercises when he spots a story about the as-yet-unfinished towers, which he reads about in a magazine in a dentist's office in France. Immediately, he is recruiting friends, all of whom are apparently hypnotized by Petit's determination. Only one says, "You're insane."

Nutters, however, rarely plot with such care. He and his friends hunt for ways to hurl a string from one tower to the next, experimenting with soccer balls and settling, finally, on that aforementioned bow and arrow. (The thin cord attached to the arrow is used to drag over a series of larger ropes, and finally, the cable.) Petit takes a handful of trips to the United States to study the towers and their denizens, filling notebooks about the work habits of the guards and the topography of the buildings, with details such as how much the structures sway in the wind. Masquerading as a journalist, he interviews management and construction workers and is given a tour of the roof, a photographer pal in tow. He visits several times a day for months.

A group of foreigners, quietly casing the towers, amid thousands of unwitting commuters -- it's heartbreakingly familiar, and it gives this movie a poignant subtext that nobody will miss. "Wire" is a perfect Tribeca entry because the destruction of the twin towers inspired the festival, and it's hard to imagine a more fitting tribute to those buildings than a look at the daring and whimsical act they inspired, just as they were being born.