Interview: James Marsh & Philippe Petit (Man on Wire)

Man on Wire, one of the most buzzed about docs has finally hit theaters – hard. The documentary is about a circus-inclined Frenchman, Philippe Petit, who dared flaunt the USA’s lax security standards at the Twin Towers to perform a death-defying tightrope act, dubbed “the artistic crime of the century”. Hundreds of people (and Port Authority police) watched this mesmerizing feat and now “Man on Wire” chronicles the painstaking preparation, guard-dodging, inside-jobbery that culminated with the successful walk. 

Director James Marsh became involved with the project after reading Philippe Petit’s book and being introduced through a producer friend. After doing a dark film like “The King” previously, Marsh was drawn to the film’s uplifting and inspirational (without being too cheesy) bent. Choosing to focus on the film’s uplifting vibes instead of the tragedy of the 9-11 attacks on the Twin Towers makes this documentary all the more poignant as Marsh told me he wanted to “give something back to New York City”.

After reading the account of the “artistic crime of the century”, Marsh immediately knew he had a “heist” film on his hands. He chose to stick with the traditional documentary format of intersplicing interviews with archival footage, but also shot live-action scenes with Petit and the other “perpetrators” in a recreation of the “crime”. “Traditional”, this documentary is not.

I met with James Marsh and the man straddling steel cable, Philippe Petit to discuss their inspirations and the making of “Man on Wire”. 

James Marsh

Catie Nastovici: So how did this project arise, after ‘The King’?

James Marsh: I didn’t come up with it – it was thirty odd years ago –  a wonderful story – [a producer friend] Simon had optioned the project and introduced me to it. I felt a deep connection to it and I felt I immediatedly had to do it, it was a great story. It’s a human drama, a comedy, a beautiful endpoint, a wonderful subject.

CN: So something more uplifting after ‘The King’?

JM: Ha, especially after ‘The King’. No, maybe possibly, but not consciously. It is nice to prove that you can do something different with a different approach with different emotions. It was very liberating to do something completely different. Before we starting shooting in October of 2006, I spent the summer with Phillipe, just talking and getting to know each other and we then shot the bulk of the film, the unconventional bits, in October before getting the interviews. The film took a year, start to finish, which is a bit short for a feature documentary. Going into it, I knew what the structure was going to be, that it would have the structure of a heist-thriller, and it’s quite complicated but should be effortless when you see it.

CN: Philippe, for you now. If you could not walk the wire between the towers, would that make a difference in your life?

Philippe Petit: I cannot answer that because I do not believe in the “if”. The uniqueness of my story is that it was almost unplanned – I saw one day two towers and I fell in love with them, so the question of ‘could I have not gone on those towers and walked them’ of course my life would have changed. If I, as a young man, would not have seen those towers, I would have been called on by another amazing structure but this was a moment in my life where I had to do something magnificent for myself.

CN: How did you finance this, personally?

PP: I had to find a way. It was my nightmare that the towers would be built and I had missed my opportunity. I spent eight months in New York making several trips to the towers, finding people to help me, borrowing equipment, getting to know the towers, so how did I finance this? It’s a laughable set of costs. I rented rooms, bought steel cable – which was a lot of money for me, and I had no money. So I did it the way I always did it in Paris, by passing my hat out and street juggling. But this actually was still not enough.

CN: James, how do you approach making a documentary rather than a feature film? Are there any specific challenges you faced?

JM: Watching the film, you notice it does have a story to it, unlike some traditional documentaries. As in Philippe’s book, it has a very captivating quality. So the first choice I made was to structure the doc like a heist/thriller with a few documentary conventions. It was very liberating to make a movie which was also a documentary so everything was true and the people are all telling a true story. That was the best choice I think I made for the film that it is more of a fictional narrative technique than a documentary technique.

CN: From your filmmaking history, you seem to be drawn to larger than life characters. Is that the case here?

JM: As a filmmaker, you are drawn to extraordinary things. This documentary, even now, I still feel drawn to the story and take delight in it. The planning and execution of this feat really began to obsess me more than the event itself – the criminal conspiracy. The film is designed to give you a sense of this adventure and perhaps inspire you as well.

CN: I felt the film had a playful, comedic aspect that went beautifully with the suspense. Was this achieved during the filming, the writing, the editing?

JM: The comedy comes in from the situations Philippe’s team found themselves in – hiding themselves in the tarp for hours on end, for one. Preposterous, two grown men under a tarp waiting for a guard to leave the room. And honestly, the way Philippe tells the story, you understand that he lived thourhg the comedy of it, and it’s really a comedy of errors. It’s a collective human endeavor which was destined to be comedic from the start. It’s about watching the team plan their adventure, see it through and seeing their best laid plans laid to waste. And I think each of the interviewees were incredibly funny and characters in themselves – there’s David the rock musician, etc. You can’t make this stuff up.  It’s based on real human experiences. I also think mentality is very interesting. The artistic mentality is very similar to the criminal imagination. I think one of the great beauties for me was seeing the artistic imagination at work – like trying to throw the wire across the gap between the towers. The comedy in the film is certainly born of the characters and the situations in the film.

CN: How were you able to make the film with archival footage?

JM: Some Philippe retained from those days and he began to make a film documenting the preparations, which he never finished, but I suppose we just did now thirty years later. He had these beautiful color archives of walking the wire but another aspect of the archive search was trying to find footage of the towers being built and the excavation but all of that was lost and destroyed so we had to piece together the remnants of what was built there.

CN: What that you left out from the doc do you wish you could put back in?

JM: There’s so many things! Dozens of stories, you should read Philippe’s book, there is just so much more. Something I truly wish I could have thrown in was how did the team support themselves in New York. And that Philippe was arrested once in the towers which was a huge set back but we wanted to tell the story as briskly and grippingly as possible. There was a wonderful story that on the day of the wire-walking, a friend’s wife was was, well, I’ll defer to Philippe at this point.

PP: My very good friend’s wife was very concerned about us at the top of the towers and she wanted to alert the police that something was going to happen and that maybe they should step up security. She didn’t say my name or that it was me but if this phone call actually went through it would have been the end of my project and the end of my time in New York.

CN: When you were up at the top of the towers, you say you had a dialogue with a seagull. Can you elaborate?

PP: Yes, there is an entire chapter of questions I asked the seagull written in my book. I remember dialoguing thinking we had a rapport between us, but the seagull must have been thinking ‘What is this ugly bird with no feathers? What is it doing in my territory?’

CN: In all this time wire-walking, have you ever fallen or come close to falling?

PP: No, I don’t come close to falling but if you observe the art of wire-walking, every heartbeat is you coming close to falling. That’s why it’s so beautiful, so magnificent, so novel because to me, you have to put your whole mind, soul and body on that wire. If not, you will fall.

CN: Did you feel there was a parallel between your film and the events of 9-11?

JM: To an extent, and not only in a creative way. The important thing was not to force them or push them together to make a cheap interpretation of 9-11 and what happened thirty years earlier. We’re very aware of that subtext in the film and when you see film you know what happens to those buildings but far be it for me to put that interpretation into the film.

CN: So you see it as more of a celebration.

JM: It really is. These buildings were alive, they shouldn’t be defined by their decline or death but by their history and their life. And I didn’t want to burn Philippe’s story with the one that happened thirty years later. Philippe’s is one of the best stories of the buildings – he transformed them into a wonderful, beautiful performance, transformed them into something they really weren’t. They ceased to become mere office buildings and became a stage, the setting for a miracle or a dream. So it was very clear to me that this would not be a film about 9-11. You trust the audience to complete that story in their own minds.

Magnolia Pictures opens Man on Wire in New York and Los Angeles on July 25th.