Walk the line
The man who walked between the Twin Towers.
AT 10AM, on the morning of August 7, 1974, Philippe Petit went to work. His commute couldn’t have been shorter; he simply picked up his 60lb balancing pole and stepped off the edge of the south tower of the World Trade Center on to a length of twisted steel no wider than the big toe of his left foot.
He proceeded to walk between the twin towers, 100 stories and a quarter of a mile up in the air, with no harness or safety net; then he turned on the wire and did it again.
He twirled, pirouetted and knelt on the wire, performing a kind of aerial ballet that only came to an end 45 minutes later when he finally leapt into the arms of the waiting, sweating NYPD. Below him, New York’s more earthbound commuters had been looking on, thunderstruck and spellbound: ‘‘Now I’ve seen everything,’’ said one.
Petit’s bravura achievement, dreamlike enough on the day, has gone on down the decades to acquire the patina of myth, inspiring a children’s picture book (The Man Who Walked Between the Towers), a novel (Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin ),a documentary (Man on Wire).
Now there’s a Hollywood rewiring in Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk, a vertigo-inducing 3D extravaganza starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit.
‘‘The wire serves as a great metaphor for life,’’ says GordonLevitt, attempting to pin down the story’s enduring appeal.
‘‘We all have those moments when we have the choice of going out on a limb or playing it safe, and life can often shine brightest if you grasp the nettle rather than shying away from it. Philippe’s story tells us that the reward is worth it.’’
For Petit himself, ‘‘it’s the kind of thing that fairytales are made of, no? This guy who is not a superhero achieves the seemingly impossible. Children smile at that, and so does the child in every adult. And with this film, you’re invited right on to the wire, to share in the joy and the marvel of it.’’
He disdains the ‘‘cheap tricks’’ of the circus tightrope walker (‘‘I discarded them when I was 18’’), and even the more rococo term ‘‘funambulist’’, from the Latin funis (‘‘rope’’) and ambulare (‘‘to walk’’) doesn’t quite cover Petit’s balletic arabesque-ing.
McCann says that Petit ‘‘reappropriates public space’’, while Zemeckis describes him as ‘‘a benevolent anarchist’’.
For Petit, ‘‘what I do goes beyond a stunt or an acrobatic feat. I like writing in the sky, creating a kind of performance art that’s akin to opera, theatre or movies.’’ Others have compared Petit’s ‘‘happenings’’ to the temporary spatial installations of the artists Christo and JeanneClaude, who have filled Central Park with billowing scrims of fabric or stretched huge silken curtains across canyons.
‘‘Yes,’’ says Petit somewhat circumspectly, ‘‘we’ve met several times in our lives, and our processes are parallel in some ways. Except’’, he adds triumphantly, ‘‘he doesn’t put his body on top of a curtain across a valley, and I do.’’
‘‘There’s obviously a lot to admire about Philippe, but he was also a madman,’’ laughs GordonLevitt.
‘‘You have to have that in your make-up to do what he did. In preparing to play him, I was looking at movies like Amadeus, featuring characters where the genius/insanity line is sometimes, well, a little hard to draw.’’
Petit rebelled early, burning through various passions – magic, juggling, fencing, bullfighting – before teaching himself to walk on a rope at 16 by stretching a bunch of them between two trees in a meadow on the family’s country estate and removing them one at a time, thus trying the patience of his father (a French army pilot) and academia (he was kicked out of five schools).
He was mentored by an irascible Czech funambulist named Rudolf Omankowsky, aka Papa Rudy (played in The Walk by Ben Kingsley).
‘‘I think, by focusing on the wire, I was creating a space that was truly for myself, where no one else could get to me,’’ says Petit. ‘‘There’s a purity of experience on the wire that you don’t get anywhere else, because you’re above the earth, a lonely little dot in the sky.’’
Petit’s first ‘‘coup’’ occurred when he walked between the towers of Notre Dame in 1971, and its ad hoc staging set the pattern for all his subsequent exploits. Three years and countless visits in touristic ‘‘disguise’’ to plot and strategise; a tight-knit crew of volunteer assistants enlisted to smuggle in several hundred pounds of cable and other equipment the previous night; the cable passed from one tower to the other by throwing a rubber ball across with a fishing line attached to it (for the WTC, a bow and arrow was used); and a resulting performance of traffic-stopping notoriety.
Petit has always claimed that he takes no risks in what he does, and also that you need no special athletic ability or sense of balance to achieve his feats; he’s also used to the snorts of incredulity such assertions provoke.
‘‘As far as risks go, my preparation is so thorough that nothing is left to chance,’’ he says.
‘‘The attention to detail, from all the research we’ve done on atmospheric conditions and prevailing wind patterns, to the construction of the rigging, protects me and allows me to be super-confident as I take my first step.
‘‘Of course it’s a dangerous activity, in that if I don’t put my foot in exactly the right place, I’ll lose my life. That’s why I take it so seriously. I will never throw the dice and simply hope that I survive.
‘‘Yes, you have to put in the hundreds of hours of practice, but it’s the passion, soul and spirit that makes the wirewalker. Though,’’ he adds wryly, ‘‘good arms and legs are a bonus.’’
PETIT says he found the whole package in GordonLevitt, who submitted to an intensive eight-day ‘‘wire camp’’ administered by Petit himself.
Over that time, he graduated from walking on a 2ft wire to a 12ft wire; in the film, he does the majority of the walking, with the more exacting moves undertaken by a stunt double.
‘‘I know 12ft is not exactly 100 stories, but it still seems pretty high,’’ says Gordon-Levitt.
‘‘At that height, my whole body seized up and got tight with fear. The funny thing is, your mind has very little to do with it; you can tell yourself that you’re wearing a safety harness, or if you fall that someone will catch you, but your body doesn’t register that.’’
Of course, the chief supporting role in The Walk is played by the Twin Towers themselves; they loom large behind Gordon-Levitt as he narrates Petit’s story in the film from a perch on the Statue of Liberty’s torch, and the film (and Petit’s achievement) is given an extra frisson by the knowledge of their eventual fate.
Never lauded – they were once described as ‘‘two slabs of architectural ennui’’ by Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker – Petit did more than most to imbue them with energy and romance, and, post-1974, he was given a permanent pass to their observation deck.
He watched the events of 9/11 unfold at a friend’s house and says that ‘‘you can’t compare my reaction when you know that thousands of lives were terminated that day, but, yes, I felt a personal, grievous sense of loss. Many people thought I had given them the element that was missing; humanity, a human scale’’.
Petit, now 66, has completed many walks since the World Trade Center, and says he has no intention of retiring.
Yet for all his artful qualities on the wire, there remains an artlessness to Petit that’s exemplified by the fact that he’s the only person who remains immune to The Walk’s status as the most spoiler-proof movie ever made.
‘‘When I saw it, I was on the edge of my seat,’’ he says, with a flourish. ‘‘I was praying, saying to myself, I hope this guy is going to make it.
‘‘That’s a compliment to the storyteller, no?
‘‘That’s what makes great art.’’
What I do goes beyond a stunt or an acrobatic feat. I like writing in the sky, creating a kind of performance art that’s akin to opera, theatre or movies.
Philippe Petit, pictured on set with Joseph Gordon-Levitt.