Revisiting the View From the Top

James Marsh is terribly afraid of heights.

Which turned out, actually, to be something of an advantage for a documentary filmmaker making a movie about a wire walker's 1974 dance between the rooftops of the World Trade Center buildings.

First, because the wire walker, a wily, elfin man named Philippe Petit, found it hilarious.

Second, because Marsh was able to infuse the film, "Man on Wire," with his own terror at the prospect of stepping onto a steel cable strung 1,350 feet above the streets of New York. He spent almost the entire budget, in fact, on one special-effects shot that shows what Petit would've seen when he was up on the wire had he decided to look down.

"If you suffer from a fear of heights . . . the film really puts you through it," Marsh says. "I still need months of therapy to get over it, I'm sure."

Vertigo is just one of the layers of tension coursing through this 94-minute film, which claimed the Grand Jury Prize in world cinema documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. Fear of death, of failure, of frayed friendships all seep onto the screen. Most of all, in this telling of what's become known as "the artistic crime of the century," there is the fear of getting caught.

Marsh had been aware of Petit's high-wire walk at the World Trade Center as a sort of urban legend, but it wasn't until he read the Frenchman's book, "To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers," that he became "utterly captivated by this real-life fairly tale."

The filmmaker's intention was to present the story in the style of a heist film. (Think "Ocean's Eleven" with subtitles, juggling and unicycles.)

"The story was amenable to it because what you have is this sort of criminal conspiracy and people putting on disguises and snooping around the buildings taking photographs and manufacturing false paperwork, false I.D.," the director says. "Yet the end result is something beautiful. It's a kind of gift to the city. So it's a brilliant inversion of the normal crime story -- when you find that the objective isn't to take something, but to give something."

Of course, Marsh first had to persuade Petit, who now lives in Upstate New York, to let him do it.

The first phone conversation did not go well. The first meeting was only slightly better, Marsh recalls, but after four hours, during which the director promised it would be a true collaboration, Petit agreed.

Then, by way of a goodbye hug, the wire walker picked the pocket of his documentarian.

"That then started a year-long, often quite mischievous, sometimes very antagonistic, collaboration," Marsh says.

To re-create the endeavor, Marsh rounded up Petit's old friends and cohorts who helped him scheme and plan for years to pull off the risky stunt. (The wire walker first envisioned his performance after reading an article about the planned construction of the World Trade Center while sitting in a dentist's waiting room. The buildings weren't even built, but Petit, then in his early 20s, was immediately fixated on walking between them.)

The recollections of Petit's close friends flesh out the intensity of the planning and the danger surrounding the walk. And in Petit's barn, Marsh found old video footage, which had been tucked away in boxes for decades, of the crew in the midst of preparation.

But it is Petit's retelling of the adventure that sets the film on edge.

"He's absolutely compelling," Marsh says. "And it's a story he's told, of course, many times, but we tried to do it so that he really got in the moment -- almost like an actor getting in touch with his feelings and all the emotions that this story generates."

The British director, who got his start at the BBC, says he has been surprised and delighted by the reaction to his film, which has been scooping up awards at festivals around the world.

One viewer, though, was not immediately taken with the finished product.

"He was shocked and taken aback by it and didn't much care for it," Marsh says of his subject's initial reaction to the film. But Petit watched "Man on Wire" several more times, sometimes with enthusiastic audiences, and eventually came around.

"It's amazing to see that everybody loves this film," the wire walker, who turns 59 on Wednesday, said in an interview. "It's beautiful to see everybody inspired, everybody in love again with the twin towers."

People do love the twin towers again, Marsh says, but they also come to love the man crazy enough to dance on a wire between them.

"I've met quite a few unusual people in the course of what I do, but he's really the most exceptional of all of them," the filmmaker muses. "One of the things that really defines him is this lust for life -- it's a real daily joy he has in being alive. And it's very infectious."