Man on Wire Storyville

In the middle of the night, I have almost like a nightmare.

I wake up and I had forgotten to nail shut the crate.

So I go there and it was raining.

I must have wake up the whole neighbourhood, you know?

It was not closing the box, it was nailing the coffin.

I am nailing the coffin, I see it as that.

Why, why this expression?

Why this thought? Well, maybe death is now looking

through the golden frame of this dream

and now reality is going to maybe choke me to death.

So now I am Tuesday the 6th of August.

'The Secret Service did maintain surveillance.

'They did so for security reasons and I will not go beyond that.

'I have never obstructed justice. And I think too that I can say...

'that in my years of public life,

'that I welcome this kind of examination,

'because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook.

'Well, I am not a crook. I've earned everything I've got.'

Everybody was getting more and more nervous

and finally we're all ready and said, "OK, let's go."

So we jumped in the truck.

We're not going to die,

we're going to, to live.

I was going to be on the crew in the South Tower.

We were going to go at closing time

with a big hamper with all the gear in it and there were going to be some guys in the North Tower

dressed for business with much less gear, an architect's tube,

and I believe that was holding the bow.

Electricity was between Jean-Louis and Albert,

I can read it in Jean-Louis' face, he doesn't trust Albert.

I had a bad feeling, there was something wrong with this guy.

He's not on the same track that we are.

Fear was in the air.

I assumed, that even in the best possible situation,

that we were all going to be arrested.

There was no doubt of that.

I can't imagine how they didn't feel the same way.

I felt that the horizontality of driving through the streets of Manhattan suddenly became slant.

I was on the ramp. I was being engulfed by the monster.

It was suddenly not a dream anymore.

It was tangible.

Once upon a time...

Now that's how you start fairy-tales, and actually my story is a fairy-tale.

DRILL WHIRRS

Here I am, only 17 years old, with a bad tooth, in one of those

uncolourful waiting rooms of a French dentist.

It's lit with a little 40-watt bulb and you have old ladies

and people, you know, sheepishly looking at magazines, quiet,

and suddenly, I freeze, because I have opened

a newspaper at a page and I see something magnificent, something that inspire me, I see two towers.

And the article says, "One day, those towers will be built..."

They're not even there yet.

"..and when the are, they will become the highest in the world."

Now I need to have that. This little tangible start of my dream,

but everybody is watching, but I need that page

and so, what I do is, under the cover of a sneeze - Ah-choo! -

I tear the page, put it under my jacket and go out.

Now of course I would have a toothache for a week,

but what's the pain in comparison that now I have acquired my dream?

Usually when you have a dream,

the object of your dream is tangible, it's there, it'S quixotic

but it's there, nagging you, you know, confronting you.

But the object of my dream doesn't exist yet.

Annie, who knows me better than everybody.

Annie, who was at my side during my discovery of the wire,

whose large green eyes move me.

When we embrace, we look like two kids

plotting our next piece of mischief.

I started as a young, self-taught wire walker.

To dream of, not so much conquering the universe,

but as a poet, conquering beautiful stages.

One day he said, "I really would like to put a wire on Notre Dame."

And at first I thought it was a joke but, in the meantime, I knew,

I knew that there was something a little bit real about it.

Then we started to talk more and more about it,

and then we started to plan it.

It took about a year to find the right way to do it.

You can imagine you wake up in the morning in a city

and all of a sudden you see a high-wire walker between Notre Dame - it's a dream.

That's what really attracts me, it's the challenge part of doing something

that's supposed to be impossible, and in the meantime doing something

that's so beautiful that doesn't, not only doesn't hurt anybody,

but gives something to somebody.

Now we were horizontal again, we were driving in a subterranean garage of the two towers

and we were going and knew the plan.

We were going to the freight elevator of the South Tower.

The whole plan was in the making.

The basic plan was very simple.

We had ID cards, so it was just a matter of just, kind of, pushing our way through.

Once we'd gotten in the buildings, it was pretty smooth sailing.

If I die...what a beautiful death.

To die in the exercise of your passion.

We broke into the Sydney Harbour Bridge pylon one night

and carried all this equipment in, put a tightrope up,

disappeared in the morning and then sat down on the street

and watched Philippe walk backwards and forwards.

The fact that the wire walking activity is framed by death,

it's great because then you have to take it very seriously.

It's a little half a millimetre of mistake

or a quarter of a second of inattention and you lose your life.

This was the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the traffic was backed up,

the police came, of course, within minutes.

When he was taken away, I mean, the first thing he did was he picked the policeman's watch.

Philippe manages to take the guy's watch off his wrist

and hide it in his pocket.

THEY CHEER

These twin towers are trotting in my head, elles trottent dans ma tete, I'm galloping in my brain.

As I'm back to Paris, slap in the face, very much double-page -

the twin towers are built!

But right now the picture tells me that those beams are not still covered, the things are not painted.

I see workers, I imagine, maybe for a few more months or a year, who knows,

it's in construction and I can sneak in.

The plan was for me to bring all my equipment to the 82nd floor,

which was Barry's hiding place -

there was one in each tower, the same floor -

put all the equipment there,

using the freight elevator saying, "Delivery for 82nd floor,"

and Barry will be there to receive, OK?

At the time, I was an assistant director of research

at the New York state insurance department.

We'd just moved in and I was on what was then the highest occupied floor in two world trade centres.

I knew there was going to be a team in each tower and that the stuff was going to be delivered to me

and that it was going to be carried up,

it would have been 28 floors.

The operator of the freight elevator

had not completely heard the foreman shouting, "82nd floor,"

and it was clearly on our delivery bill and on the package.

He asked to the group, "What floor again?"

"Right there." I said, "This is it,"

and I said clearly, "104."

"OK, whatever. Watch your hands."

And, cling! The gate clanged shut.

Now, we are in a plywood box.

I'm in a temporary freight elevator going all the way up.

It's dark, it's travel to heaven and the darkness becomes grey

and I see a square of grey that becomes lighter.

I see a square of light, it is the sky.

We are getting there and we are arriving just a few floors below the roof,

with all our equipment.

Annie came to my office and told me

that they had by a great stroke of fortune

gotten on the freight elevator and saved themselves 20 floors

of carrying up all that equipment.

Now I find myself in a deserted floor, 104,

and the first thing we do is unpack and take the equipment out.

Suddenly I hear a guard coming.

I just look and I see over there a tarp.

So I just grab Jean-Francois and I throw him underneath

and I hear Jean-Francois yell.

What? We're going under it. Yeah, we had to hide under a tarp.

The man starts saying, "Hold on, my leg, hold these, where can I go..."

I kind of like, right on the spur of the moment said, "You know, man, I can't do this."

He's like, "OK. Go ahead."

"Go, go, quick..." I think, "Who was the more happy, was it Donald or I?" Anyway, bye-bye.

Unbridled glee.

I'm so happy to not have to do this.

I'm running down the stairs, 110 flights.

It's like those dreams where you never touch down.

It was so beautiful.

So here we are under the tarp, frozen to death.

I don't have to mumble to Jean-Francois, "Don't move."

He feels it in our body...connection.

Now the guard comes, has he seen us?

WALKIE-TALKIE CHATTER

Has he heard us? Has he seen the tarp move?

But the guard comes and leans against the structure and he seems to be a foot away.

I hear the crackling of his walkie-talkie and I hear he takes

a cigarette and the sound of the lighter and of his first puff, the burning from the cigarette.

-HE MIMICS PUFFING A CIGARETTE

-He seems to be almost leaning on my ear.

We are frozen, we don't breathe.

We wait for 6.30.

We start to climb.

We saw nobody in the stairway. There is nobody on this roof, it seems pretty safe.

All of a sudden we heard somebody coming from the stairway.

So we were scared like hell. So we ran to the hiding place and we jump in the hiding place.

We hear some steps, we hear the walkie-talkie noise.

The noise was very confusing.

Sometimes you don't hear the guy for ten minutes, so you think he's gone.

All of a sudden you hear him coughing or you hear the walkie-talkie noise

like he's right next to the hiding place, so we could not talk.

WALKIE-TALKIE CHATTER

We started to write little notes.

We kept saying, "You know, now, let's wait a little longer?"

It was uncomfortable

but once you understand that you don't have a choice, you try to settle in and just wait.

At that point we're in suits, in business suits.

Being in a business suit with heavy equipment,

hiding behind a pile of boxes, there's no explanation.

It we were caught at that time, that was it.

What if the guard is still around?

What if he is toying with us?

Waiting for us to make the slightest movement before he pounces on us.

We must wait.

To ease the torment, I returned to my memories,

the gold and mud, years of dreaming.

Months of organising...

I dive back into the past

for a long while.

That it will indeed serve for the purposes intended

and it will truly promote not only harmony in the States,

but harmony and communication between the nations of the world.

It was in January of 1974, I climb on the roof of my little house

and I scream, "I am coming, America!"

The minute I got out of the subway, climbing the steps,

looking at them, I knew that they were no dream.

I knew that my dream was destroyed instantly.

Impossible, impossible, impossible.

It's clearly impossible, not only to walk across, this probably I'd hardly thought of it,

but to bring almost like a tonne of equipment secretly, to rig a wire for hours, to guy-line it,

it's clearly out of human skill.

Something in me pulls me toward touching it.

That's when he spoke to me about his project.

He said, "I want to string a wire between the two World Trade Center towers."

I said, "OK. Sounds wild."

I mean, I'd never met a high-wire walker before.

I had no idea what...

nor did I entertain the idea at the time of what the consequences of anything happening would be.

It just sounded like a really fun adventure to get involved in.

So I took it upon myself to say, "Let's work on it."

The first occasion we went up in the elevator. We basically took the elevator to 86th floor.

When we got off there was a guard there.

He said, "What are you doing here?"

So obviously we couldn't continue.

We took the elevator back down again and then we realised, well, he actually said, "Let's just walk up."

We proceeded to climb up the 110 flights to the top.

We are at the top of the world.

I see two slabs of concrete barely inhabited with some construction, no fence, no net, no nothing.

I am frozen to death.

I see the other tower and I imagine the void

and if I were to run on this slab, I would just fall to another life.

And slowly I thought, "OK, now it's impossible, that's sure. So let's start working."

We took pictures of all these things, thinking perhaps that might be

where the cable would be tied or maybe it's a cable we could use.

He wasn't sure how he was gonna rig it at that particular time.

I decided, in the staircase, to draw a little fresco

as if I needed some tangible proof

to show me that I was going through different steps and approaching

the impossible of actually finding myself on that wire.

I even rent a helicopter at some point.

Jim Moore was with me taking pictures of the roof,

the equipment there for making a model for measuring.

But I also wanted a little bit to see if it was possible.

He wanted to get higher than where he was gonna be when he walked on the wire.

It was a way of tricking his mind into

not feeling fear by being higher than where he was gonna be when he actually did the walk.

One day I received a postcard with the World Trade Center.

I'd never heard of the WTC at the time and he had drawn a little wire on top of the towers.

I thought, "Of course, that's why these towers are there." I mean for Philippe.

So I go back to France.

The minute I arrive, I didn't even go home. I run to Jean-Louis, my old friend.

I said, "I have a new idea."

This we knew that legally we could not do it.

I mean, nobody knew Philippe Petit, nobody knew us.

you go there and you ask, "Can I put a wire on top of the World Trade Center?"

They said, er, "Get out!"

So I try to get some information from Philippe.

So OK, you have been there, you told me you have been ten times on the top, but what did you get?

What do we have as information? "But I have pictures, look.

"We can put the wire, I don't know where to put it, but we'll

"find out with the pictures."

I started to do a little recap in my head and I found that we had nothing.

He's not driven by the impetuous feeling of dancing between the towers.

He's driven by "I'm going to help Philippe. I don't want him

"to kill himself and I don't want to be caught there and we want to succeed, we don't want to fail."

So for plenty of reason that are actually noble and understandable,

he becomes almost, we're fighting a lot on,

"You don't have enough elements, Philippe, to build up a serious plan."

So now I go back and this is the second visit to America.

Now I spend my time spying the Twin Towers.

With all my might, I go day and night, I note things,

I fill the exercise books with all those notes and little doodling

and I look at what commercial that he could go underneath for freight delivery.

I go in, I find ways at lunchtime to disguise myself.

So it's important. I'm so much into taking notes as a spy around the towers,

I don't see it as a construction site.

I don't see one nail sticking out of one plank.

So right there the big nail goes through my sole. Three days in bed.

So here I am with crutches thinking I am incapacitated.

No, no, no, no, it's the opposite.

It's wonderful! Human being with crutches - the universe is his.

The guards, you know, help me.

"Can I help you? Let me hold the door."

People, you know, "Sit down, take your time." Nobody asked me for ID.

Nobody says "what are you doing here?"

I have... It was fabulous.

So then now, even though my feet is about to be repaired, I use the crutches a lot, OK?

You would see the man leaving his crutches and running around to measure something

and coming back and being with crutches.

One time we went up there and it was very, very windy

and I actually wasn't sure why we were going up there.

I barely had the courage to get out of my little trap door.

And Jim, hanging on I don't know how, managed to take a picture of me hanging onto a post

at the very roof of the tower with my body almost horizontally.

The wind was blowing me away.

So what if?

That was very scary. That was maybe one of the first times I've realised how crazy it was up there

with that kind of condition and the height and what we were involved in.

What happens if I'm up there and I rig it and something happens?

I just started thinking about those things when it got closer to the actual event.

I basically said, "No, I can't help you rig.

"I can't be part of that team that goes to the top."

Here we are underneath the top of the World Trade Center,

-under a tarp.

-PIN DROPS

Each time we would hear a noise, it was very hard to tell if it was a cardboard board

flapping in the wind, or a guard coming, or a walkie-talkie.

I drill a little hole with a paper clip and I enlarged this hole

in the canvas with the conic end of a ballpoint pen.

And then with one eye, I was able to see a little bit of the ambient light

going on to the figure of my watch.

What time is it? Is it dark outside? Oh, I heard noise.

Let's try to go out of the tarp.

We kept on hearing more and more noise from the roof,

like voice, like machines.

Sometimes far away, sometimes very close, but really like

somebody was working on the roof.

"Gee, they're working at night. What if we are stuck?

"There's no chance it will happen."

The longer we waited and the longer we hid,

the less time we'd have to do what we had to do to get up there.

There was tension.

I thought we were both out of our element, that neither of us really should have been there.

There's something that I don't trust in this guy.

He's not deeply concerned by the thing.

Why is he here?

When I finished university I flew to Paris and I caught up with Philippe

and he showed me this extraordinary diagram and photograph

of this building being constructed in New York.

This is a big one now, a big one.

I looked at this huge tower, or towers,

and Philippe was just so enthusiastic about doing this,

so I became, I guess, one of the first members of the team.

Merde!

I intend, on the giant meadow, it's a giant field, to reproduce not two roof of the World Trade Center,

I don't have the money for that, but just the outline and practise.

ANNIE IN FRENCH:

Even if I miss, it doesn't matter.

'We had, I guess, a little bit of a boot camp or a training camp.

'Essentially, we spent time there conceiving, designing,

'trying to work out how to make this thing work from every aspect.'

ANNIE IN FRENCH:

So I asked my friends

to make the cable dance, and here is Mark the Australian, Jean-Louis and me.

And we would jump up and down on these wires.

We'd try and bounce Philippe off of the wire.

The World Trade Center was extraordinary because it was 200ft between the towers,

so how do you get a tightrope from one tower to the other?

Look what you will see.

You like that?

We have to find a way to throw something and then you can pull a little string

and then a bigger string and then a rope and then eventually the wire.

At some point, I mean I thought even of a little aeroplane, radio-guided.

Football and baseball - yeah, we have to learn how to play baseball for two months before we can do that.

No, no, no.

And at some point, Jean would come up with a really silly idea.

I don't even let him finish his sentence.

He says, "Philippe, what about a bow and arrow?"

We drilled a very small hole in the end of an arrow

and we attached a monofilament or a fishing line wire to the arrow

and the whole idea would be that Jean-Louis would send the arrow from one building to another.

And then, of course, whenever we tried it, it just didn't work.

It's pretty useless. A proper one or make a proper one.

'In the end, we designed a spool that had a conical shape on it

'so that the monofilament would unravel and go very freely through the air.'

Just right. Exactly.

As a child, I loved to climb everywhere.

I let the psychiatrist decide why. Maybe I wanted to escape my time.

Maybe I wanted to see the world from a different perspective and I was an explorer at heart.

Who knows and who cares? But I was a little climber

and nobody, not my parents, not the teachers, nobody could stop me.

I heard about wire walkers.

I was told how they are magnificent men and women walking in thin air

and I thought, "Well that's nothing. With my ropes I do that."

HE SPEAKS FRENCH

ANNIE IN FRENCH:

Oh, no. Cos it's not...

Mark said if somebody opened the door in the stairs

and see a very serious man taking big... It is no good.

No, listen.

In the stairway, we can be discovered by anyone,

-so we have to be a combination of a workman and an office man.

-I think this is perfect.

This is perfect,

and this is no good.

IN FRENCH:

ANNIE IN FRENCH:

JEAN-LOUIS IN FRENCH:

ANNIE IN FRENCH:

Since long before, Annie has been angling for an invitation to New York

using tenderness, blackmail, threats, insults and tears.

But I need absolute detachment, complete freedom.

I must be a castaway on the desert island of my dreams.

Philippe and I travelled to New York together.

I remember looking out through this hazy airplane window and seeing in the far distance the Twin Towers.

We had come all this way

and this was what we were here for.

Metropolis - France's number-one journal of urban planning.

We are preparing a feature profile of the workers

who are presently constructing the World Trade Center in New York.

Our credentialed reporter, Philippe Petit, kindly requests your co-operation for this article.

He told me he was a French journalist.

It wasn't normal for me to say, "Show me your credentials".

He was going to write a story about the World Trade Center

for the French newspapers and he had two photographers with him.

I thought that was pretty good publicity.

You completely trust the building yourself.

Is it safe?

Like tumble down or fall down or something? No, I'd say...

'Here was this sort of long-haired Australian

'and this very volatile Frenchman who couldn't speak great English saying we were journalists.

'We enlisted Jim Moore, and he was the cameraman.'

It was interesting. We were standing there,

saying we were something we were not and getting away with it. It was wonderful.

When you are working here and when the weather changed, you can not work any more.

If we start doing a day up here and the weather gets bad, we have to finish the day.

-So it happens in life to go there on the top, bad conditions?

-Oh yeah.

Would you be scared of that?

-No. Not really.

-'I remember Jim would act like he was taking a photograph of a worker

'and at the same time, he'd put the camera down

'and take a photograph of a pylon or anchor point or something like that.'

The towers were not corners facing corners.

The were askew, which was a problem for me

to decide where to put my wire.

So, in principle, that's a cable across the two roof.

I decided to attach the cable to what I believed was the strongest beam at the top of the roof,

then I'm going to tie the wire to here on the South Tower.

A cable between two buildings of a long length, it sways, it goes up and down.

And there is an almost invisible move which is a torsion on itself.

So, what we devise, is a...

It's called a cavaletti in the circus parlance.

It's actually a guy-line that is perpendicular to the axis of the wire and it goes down to the ground.

Even with permission, we couldn't go a quarter of a mile to the ground, plus I needed a pair.

Here's one. And here's two.

We know they cannot go down.

So the solution was asymmetric rigging, which is like this.

Here's the first attachment. Each cavaletti had two legs - a short one and a long one.

This is what I decided was the best for the situation.

And now I am preparing for le coup.

We are going to do it.

I arrive Saturday and the coup is due on Monday.

He is more and more ready for the coup,

but the coup itself is not ready and I was very frustrated about that.

I knew we had to act quickly and I knew we had nothing.

Jean-Louis wants to know, "Have you done this that I asked you to do,

"and what is my answer about when the guard and..." I don't satisfy him with my answer.

So he attacks my non-preparations when actually, I feel that I have prepared immensely.

I think the longer we were there, the longer I was cognisant

that it was a very ambitious pursuit, what we were doing.

'We just weren't ready.'

..means the more we must have to put the screw...

'I never doubted Philippe's talent, his prowess on the wire.

'It was the unforeseen things that really worried me.

'America's a very litigious society.

'Involuntary manslaughter.

'Assisted suicide.'

I didn't want to be liable for the death of a friend.

We could clearly see that we were not ready.

Everybody could see it but Philippe.

And at that time, we gave up.

Obviously with the Australian not there, obviously the whole thing is a total debacle.

And I told him, "So, Philippe, what do you think now?

"It's May 30th. We're supposed to do the coup today.

"Do you think we can do it like that?" And he said, "No."

He said, "No, it's clear that it's impossible."

I said, "No, it's not impossible.

"It is possible. We are very close to it."

If you want something, nothing is impossible.

"I'll be back, I'll be back."

We prepared and we do it.

I saw him in the lobby.

It was just someone who didn't belong there.

Like someone... It was just a wrong juxtaposition.

It just was very, very odd.

"Philippe!

"It's wonderful to see you!"

His name is Barry. And he has seen me street juggling in Paris.

We started talking and he told me about all this wire walking that he did.

And I think I sort of said, "If you're thinking of doing the World Trade Center, forget it."

But he sort of draws you into his world.

I guess I was the kind of guy who was not averse to doing things that were slightly...

..not totally legal.

Barry calls me. He says, "Philippe, sorry to tell you, but the security

"around the World Trade Center has changed and now we are all forced to carry an ID.

"But I happen to have mine freshly unsealed from the envelope

"and it will not be too much trouble to abandon it in your hands for a few hours."

He did this incredibly artistic, perfect job

of copying it and getting an ID card with his own picture on it.

One day he called me and said, "I have found two or three American guys, crazy,

"they are great and they are ready to help."

I meet two American young men, Donald and Chester.

We met with Petit and I had a friend named Alan Welner, who I went to high school with.

He was always up for an adventure. Always. I think Petit knew also that this guy was a quality guy.

Certainly smart, certainly aware of himself and knowing his limits.

The ideal accomplice.

He was pitching it, he was presenting it,

he was desperately proposing it, in a way that you would sell a timeshare or something.

I knew he was a nut, or a conman or something, but he seemed harmless enough.

I didn't really take it seriously at that point.

I need to practise a little bit on the wire.

I need mostly to show my two or three American friends how to hook the cable, how to help Jean-Louis.

That's when I saw him on a cable.

I had never seen concentration like that.

And I think I never have to this day.

And his face became this ageless mask of concentration.

He became like a sphinx.

It was amazing.

He did it beautifully and calmly and he did it,

literally, with his eyes closed. It was just what he does.

Everything he told me was true.

ANNIE IN FRENCH:

I don't remember right now when we fixed the date, but we had figured it for August 7th.

Jean-Louis arrives and I go and pick him up at the airport.

And it is Jean-Francois and of course I remember Jean-Francois.

He's all smiles. He doesn't have any questions.

He just will follow. He's here to help.

# When I was a boy I dreamed of Philip Marlowe

# He took me as his partner... #

ANNIE:

# He gave me his fedora

# Gave me shotgun fever... #

'I met the first two guys.'

One of them was a musician, the other one, I think, was a carpenter, I don't know what.

And they really looked like losers.

Sorry, but...

HE LAUGHS

When I saw these guys, I thought, "My God!"

# ..loves me. #

It was likely I probably had been smoking pot.

Yeah. Likely as all hell.

I smoked pot every day for 35 years.

There's no reason to think I didn't smoke that day.

And when Jean-Louis met Albert...

he has intuition. I can read it in Jean-Louis' face.

He doesn't trust Albert.

You know you have this feeling with people, and sometimes it's wrong,

but you can't help it, anyway.

We shook hands, said hello.

They didn't speak English, I spoke no French.

So there wasn't too much to say.

Just, "Nice to meet you, good luck, let's do what we have to do."

When I felt that the whole floor finally was silent and the darkness is there, I venture out.

Imagine staying three hours on a beam, you cannot walk. You need re-education.

A normal human being staying completely unmoving on a beam for three hours cannot walk.

After a while, I said, "We cannot wait any more."

I told Albert, "You know what? You should go, because if I go, if I am caught,

"there is no way we can do the rigging

"cos I am the only one who knows about Philippe's habit and how to do it."

So he goes on the top and comes back five minutes later.

I'm sure I said, "OK, let's go. Let's just get this done."

So I said, "Great."

We don't know where this noise comes from, but let's go.

And now we moved and we go for the most important equipment.

I mean, a wire walker needs a cable to walk on.

Now we are walking to a tiny little construction staircase, very narrow.

He's in front, I am in the back.

I see a nightmare - a policeman.

The policeman has his eyes open and he is looking at me.

I decide to hold him.

But hold on, he is pushing me.

The same way I am holding him, the same way he is pushing me.

What is happening?

There is no way we can turn around, so let's play this game.

We were very silent because we didn't have shoes on

and when we arrive on the top, I whisper, "Did you see the guard?"

"Of course I saw the guard. I was trying to alert you by pushing you, but why did you resist?"

I said, "I was trying to resist to have you turn around and for me..."

The most beautiful moment is when I see a shape, two silhouettes on the other tower

and I recognise immediately in the darkness, it is the silhouette of Jean-Louis and Albert.

They made it.

When I saw them on the roof, I was so happy.

And the impression I got, I remember that all the time.

You go on the roof, it's all dark,

and there's this red light for the planes that's turning, it's like a metronome.

Giving you an idea of timing going by.

There was peace and immensity and in the middle of all this madness, I suddenly had hope and joy.

So I put, like a bat, actually,

I put Jean-Francois upside down in that little staircase opening. Just his head showing.

So imagine what the guard must have seen if he were awake.

He would have seen a human being head looking at him upside down.

The first thing I did, I prepare my bow.

Prepare the arrow and prepare the fishing line and wait for them.

So there was a signal for Jean-Louis to say, "I am ready to shoot."

And there was a signal for me to say, "I saw your signal.

"I am ready. And I'm going to count to 10 and then you will shoot."

But there was no signal for "I am not ready."

I had not thought of that.

And I was not ready!

Finally he gives this big signal.

"I am ready."

I have been waiting for so long that when he finally gives the signal,

instinctively, I took the bow and I aim at him.

And he was almost at the edge of the building.

I go hunting for the arrow.

Nothing!

Out of frustration, I take my clothes off and I think that I will feel the line on my naked skin.

With a defeated heart, I climb down to the edge

and I feel a dancing fishing line caressing my thigh.

The arrow was actually balancing precariously

on the very edge of the building's corner.

A little blow - and it was breezy - would simply make it fall.

The first thing we did after a few little ropes getting bigger and bigger and stronger

was to bring a burlap bag.

And this bag was carrying the very important item

of the communication - the interphone.

Little tinny toy intercom was connected

and we hear Philippe's voice on the other end.

That was an important moment. Now the four of us are together.

The work is truly going to begin.

The guard leaves and Francois can hardly talk, his head has been upside down for so long.

But we go back. We rush and get our shoes and now we bring the equipment like mad people

and I put a little trap in the staircase.

And that will be like an alarm - somebody is getting on your roof!

By the time everything was perfect, I mean, it was not even midnight.

It was a normal rigging.

That means, within three hours, everything would have been perfect.

Now we are ready to pull the wire. Philippe has a wire ready.

The nylon rope is in our hand. We are ready.

At some point, I gave probably too much cable.

All of a sudden, I see the wire going...

Tremendous noise. I thought, "My God, what's going on?"

We almost lost the wire.

-INTERCOM BUZZES

-Eee!

-So I called Philippe.

"What's going on?" He said, "Yeah, we could not hold it," which is...

very unfortunate!

The fact that I didn't speak French,

so I couldn't hear the details of what was going wrong, was probably just as well.

So we had to pull probably more than 100 metres of wire.

I don't remember how much we gained with each attempt.

Maybe we worked hard for one minute, two minutes, three minutes, four minutes,

and got a tiny bit of this endless cable up there.

Within, I don't know, half an hour, it became almost impossible.

Here we are in big trouble.

Somebody is coming on the roof.

Jean-Francois hears also and he hides immediately.

I see him, he's like a dead animal.

As a child, have you ever played hide and seek in a park and take refuge behind a giant tree trunk?

And a policeman comes to the roof.

And then your companion comes, circles the trunk, he walks, you walk, he stops, you stop.

The man starts turning around this obstacle in the centre of my tower

and I turn around on the side diametrically opposed.

This little pas de deux could go on forever, until one of you turns around and bumps into each other.

This is exactly what happened.

He turns, I turn. He stops, I stop.

He goes on, I go on.

Now, of course, if he would have turned around, oops. Hide and seek.

Albert was starting to give up, to argue,

to say, "No, I don't want to do this anymore, it's not possible, we're not going to do it."

It was clear we weren't going to get this job done, but there was no arguing with him. It was useless.

He was just gonna go ahead regardless.

It's impossible, impossible, that he thought we were going to be able to rig this before daylight.

Imagine, after these months of preparation, all that,

and finally being on the roof and having to stop

because the wire is like that!

At dawn, I assumed the jig is up.

We did the best and now let's get out of here.

It was a misty day and I thought, "Eee, that sucks."

And it wasn't windless, either.

There was a little bit of air that morning.

You could see, when the cable was up there,

it all looked very, very slack.

I pulled like crazy, like crazy, like crazy.

Finally I got the wire.

For some reason, the last metre was the one that came the easiest.

Despite the abandon of his co-accomplice,

Jean-Louis in his last communication almost was,

"Philippe! I did it, I did it, I've got two clamps. We did it, the cable is anchored!"

All of a sudden, we see this black spot

coming down off the top of the towers.

We didn't know what the hell it was. "Oh, my God, what is that?"

I saw this thing falling down

and I couldn't believe it.

I said to myself, "That's it, you've been fooling yourself this whole time.

"He went straight down with the first step off the roof.

"He might be dead."

On the top of Philippe's roof, there was the big wheel of the machines.

So as soon as the elevator would move,

we would see the wheel starting to turn.

I scream, "La roue, la roue!" to Jean-Francois. "The wheel, the wheel!"

Because I see the giant wheel starting in motion and I know my fate has been written now.

Time is no longer smiling at me.

At that time, I was very worried.

I think the first time I was really scared.

"Oh, my God, he's exhausted, like I am."

Maybe not as much, but for what he has to do,

it's really not a good thing!

The wire is the worst wire we ever did.

I was really scared.

And I had to make a decision of shifting my weight

from one foot anchored to the building to the foot anchored on the wire.

This is probably, I don't know, probably the end of my life, to step on that wire.

On the other hand, something I could not resist,

and I didn't make any effort to resist, pulled me up on that cable.

And death is very close.

I start walking as a wire-walker who is studying his cable.

Instead of doing an entire study of the cable for the whole length,

seeing the first cavaletti and keep walking,

seeing the middle, which is so soft and treacherous,

seeing the second cavaletti and how it is... No, I only go to the first cavaletti and I know enough.

Now I'm gonna perform.

I saw his face changing.

He was very tense, and all of a sudden there was something, like a relief, in him.

And from that time, I thought, "That's it, he's secure, that's good," and that's...

I sit down on the wire on one of my crossings, and I did something that amazed people -

actually looked all the way down,

to look at something that I will never in my life see again.

So I can tell you, and just probably it's a lie, but to me it's not,

I heard the crowd, I saw the crowd, I hear their murmur.

Beyond anything you could ever imagine.

It was just mind-boggling.

The awe of the event and the overwhelming largeness of the scale of the situation

took my mind into a place where I really wasn't that concerned about him.

It was magical.

It was just profound.

Officer Miles and I observed the tightrope dancer -

because you couldn't call him a walker -

approximately halfway between the two towers,

and upon seeing us, he started to smile and laugh.

They don't know how to react to a daydreaming wirewalker

laying down and dialoguing with a seagull, so they were really mad.

When he got to the building, we asked him to get off the high wire,

but instead he turned around and ran back into the middle.

Everybody was spellbound in the watching of it.

When we observed the fact that he wasn't about to come in because he seemed to be enjoying it so much,

we mentioned the fact to his associate that if he did not come in,

we would have a helicopter pluck him up off the wire,

at which time his associate spoke to him in French,

being that he's a Frenchman.

"Philippe!" And he said,

"The police are going to dislodge you and you should stop!"

I was madly enraged by that, but also he'd saved my life.

There is somebody out there on a tightrope walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center,

right at the tippy top.

I personally figured I was watching something

that somebody else would never see again in the world.

I thought it was once in a lifetime.

I had no reason to stay on that wire anymore

and also I felt the humidity in the air and the wind growing.

My friends later told me I spent 45 minutes. They said, "You did eight crossings."

The grabbed me and they grounded me.

Handcuffed - hands in the back.

I was thrown down the staircase - the most dangerous part of this adventure.

I almost break my head on the narrow staircase that leads to the elevator.

We got it from the port authority that they took about three days to rig it up.

I'd say it's about 1,000 worth of cable,

and the rigging itself, it's magnificent, the way he did it.

-Did he say anything about why he was doing it?

-No.

-Why did you do it?

-I will explain.

"Why? Why?" That was again, in my way of seeing America, a very American, finger-snapping question.

I did something magnificent and mysterious and I got a practical "Why?".

The beauty of it is that I didn't have any "why".

Why did you do this?

That's the 1,000th "Why?" this morning. There is no why.

I was then taken for a psychiatric examination by a psychiatrist.

I keep asking for water cos I was so dehydrated, and he said, "When was the last time you drank?"

I said, "Are you crazy? You're mad! Do you know what I did?

"I danced at the top of the world, front page of all the world, 300 journalists are waiting

"to talk to me, and you're asking the last time I drunk? You're mad."

So he wrote, "The guy is completely normal and he's just very thirsty!"

The police took a humourless view of the act.

They took Petit and a companion into custody

and finally decided to charge them with trespassing and disorderly conduct.

The district attorney offered me a deal.

He said, "Philippe, if you're going to do a little show, like juggling three oranges in front of four kids,

"but on camera, the New York News and all that, then we'll drop all the charges." So I said, "Sure."

APPLAUSE

And now I climb down the steps of the Palais de Justice, I saw in the crowd an admirer.

She was smiling beautifully and she came to me

and she put her hands on my neck in a loving way and she amorously said,

"Philippe, I would like to be the first person to welcome you and to celebrate with you

"and I can follow you anywhere."

So, yes, we did end up on a waterbed in a loft somewhere,

but here I went for a very short little moment of, I don't know, of pleasure of the flesh.

How disgusting! But, but, but, I am sorry, how beautiful too.

I mean, my friends were waiting for me. Annie, my girlfriend.

It was a betrayal of my friends.

I remember I called and said, "Well, no. I have many interviews to do, so I'll see you soon."

I had this magnificent explosion of pleasure - let's say it -

then I went back frightened to death of my friends, thinking, "I'm a really guilty guy!"

I am a celebrity in New York. People say, "Are you the guy who walked between the Twin Towers?"

I say, "Yeah, yeah. It's me". "This is incredible!" And then some people say, "Are you the guy who..."

I say, "It's me".

We talked about it in the plane and Jean-Francois was so happy.

He said, "Well, I'm ready for the next time." I said, "No.

"There will not be any more story like that."

There was something broken, probably, in this friendship.

Doesn't matter because...

Well, basically, because we did it.

And basically, eh...

I mean, you cannot take away what happened.

And, yeah, what happened is that...

To me, it's so simple - that life should be lived on the edge of life.

You have to exercise rebellion.

To refuse to taper yourself to rules, to refuse your own success,

to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year,

every idea as a true challenge and then you are going to live your life on the tightrope.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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