![]() ![]() The 1974 WTC coup might be Philippe’s most famous walk, but it’s merely the tip of a skyscraper-length body of work. The extroverted free spirit was expelled from five different schools. His charisma and physical agility were impressive, but his ability to follows instructions was not. He created a colorful, flamboyant persona as a street performer, juggling items from a unicycle while dressed in a panther-black body suit and magician’s top hat. “If I die,” he exclaims in the film with fearless, wide-eyed glee, “what a beautiful death.”Īs a child in France, Petit was already wire-walking to the beat of a different drummer – also teaching himself equitation, fencing, carpentry, rock-climbing, drama, drawing, and bullfighting. ![]() Was he ever frightened during his ballet between what was, at the time, the world’s tallest set of skyscrapers? Nah. Later, he scampers about a table of miniature buildings and diagrams, walking viewers through a step-by-step primer on the art of illegal wire rigging. At one point, he drapes himself in a curtain to simulate a sequence from the coup in which he crouched hidden beneath a tarp. Punctuating his enthusiastic conversation with bursts of laughter and flailing arms, this overwhelming tornado of a man takes the act of being interviewed to the level of stage performance. “Talking head,” however, is too limited a term to describe Petit’s force-of-nature monologues. “Man on Wire” uses this famous stunt as its centerpiece, while also providing background on its intense lead character through archival footage, reenactments, and talking head interviews. ![]() At 7:15 a.m., a black-garbed Philippe steps onto the wire and initiates a delicate dance of tightrope showmanship, which lasts almost an hour.ĭubbed the “Artistic Crime of the Century,” Petit’s WTC wirewalk became a widely publicized cultural phenomenon. The group rigs a wire between the towering building and its nearby twin. After over six years of planning, Petit and a team of fellow conspirators ascend 1,350 feet to the roof of a World Trade Center tower. “Man on Wire” presents Petit as the ringleader behind a master coup. During his first meeting with “Man on Wire” director James Marsh, Petit confessed to the filmmaker, “I have the mind of a criminal.” He then demonstrated how to kill someone using only a “People” magazine, before picking Marsh’s pocket. Where’s Al Pacino and Christopher Walken? How can petite-bodied Philippe Petit, a hyperactive Frenchman with freckles and carrot-top hair, possibly carry a film that does, in fact, involve illegal smuggling, the bypassing of security, and other activities typically confined to scarfaced, tough-guy villains? The movie’s opening image of shadowy figures emerging from a van – surrounded by Big Apple traffic and downtown high rises, screams Heist Film. Originally ran on on 07/23/08ĭon’t mistake “Man on Wire” with “Man on Fire.” You won’t find a gun slinging Denzel Washington in James Marsh’s whimsical, dreamlike documentary – only an impish Frenchman with a passion for walking wires. ![]()
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