The Man Who Walked Between the Twin Towers | Interview with Philippe Petit

Why did the towers become such an idée fixe? Yeah, well, they're not so fixed. They move a lot, but it was my idée fixe. Why? Because, oh, I am so uninterested in that why, but I'm being asked that. Why did I do it? I am so happy that I don't know the answer to that question. Probably again, it's my upbringing and what flows into my blood. Basically, it's again the rebellious child in me. Here I am at 16, learning by myself an art that is not even an art, which is a rough, rustic circus craft where you have to have big muscles so you can kill your neighbor with a, with a stick, you know, a steel stick from the circus tent. And not being born in a circus, coming from from literature, from theater, from poetry, from the world of arts. Um, of course I had to reinvent the art of wirewalking all by myself, and I did that in no time, in not even one year.

I did within one year by myself, uh, all what a wirewalker can, can do on the wire. And then within that year, I, I immediately thought of my masterpiece. How ridiculous. A craftsman and an artist should think of his or her masterpiece after a lifetime of trials and error. Maybe the towers, when I saw them in their form in that article, a little picture of the model, the last Minoru Yamasaki model, he had done hundreds before that, but the one that was approved by the Port Authority to be built. When I saw that, maybe it was the ridiculousness of it all. It was a— I was so much into escaping my own world and so much into creating my world that these towers belonged to my world. They were out of scale. They were rebellious. They were impossible to build, to design, and to conquer.

So that's probably the real reason why they called me their personality, their existence, what they represented, the impossible. You know, did you love them? I love them, and at the same time, I never agreed with them as a lover of art. I went— well, we have, you know, this— we have— the French tend to always steal everything, but we have this motto 'Connaître, c'est aimer,' to know, to deeply know is to love. That's something true in that if you listen to the music that you hate on first hearing again and again, you will discover, you will actually assimilate, and you will enter. And it's always interesting to enter even something that at first is not made for you. So those towers were not made for me. They were too monolith, and most people in New York actually find them interesting, uninteresting.

So I, the same, I didn't find them beautiful and interesting at first sight. But as I get to know them, as I found out that to build those two monoliths, you had to add a group of insane designer, architect, structural engineer, steel connectors, builders. Hundreds of them for years, it became something to love. It became a reflection of who I was. I was with limits, but my mind was limitless. And I was with my eyes set like everybody else on the ground, but my heart forced me to look up. All my childhood I was climbing trees, and so somehow I got to love those towers as I studied them from afar first, as they were being built, and from inside as they were near completion, and I was in New York for a few months.

My love for the tower was in my relation with them, not as an overall appreciation almost in an architectural sense. My love was for their life. They were alive. Not many people know that. The people who built them know that they were vibrating. Actually, they were not swaying left and right, but they were vibrating with the passage of a cloud over the sun, difference of temperature, the wind, combined factors. And the skeleton was actually making noise. I discovered that. And at times the towers were asleep, hibernating, and at times they wake up and they cry and they almost, I don't know, yell for help. It was a very scary thing to get to hear and feel them move. At times you could feel a little bit them move. And I love their strength and their arrogance. Somehow they were so overlooking the skyline.

Of New York. I love those towers, and it's the first time that I'm being asked, did you love those towers, or how did you love them? It's a beautiful question, and I think I love them from the inside. What would have happened if you had not been able to do it? I would have died. You need dreams to live. Nobody knows that. And another thing that is not taught in schools, but it's as essential as as a road to walk on and as bread to eat. It's— I don't know, I would have killed myself? No, I would have felt myself dying if this dream would have been taken away from me by reason. So— I—the dream was as big as the towers. There was no way it could be taken away from me by authority, by reason, by destiny.

It was as high and as big as the towers. What time of day was it, or night was it, that you made your way into the building? And what day of the month and the year was it? It was— when I actually sneak into the building, it was close to noon on the day before the walk, the 6th of August, 1974. And then the walk happened after an entire night of rigging on Wednesday, August 7th, 1974, at 7:10 AM, because at 7:15, as I knew, the first workers appear on the roof and start constructing, and that would have been the end of my dream. Finally, this wonderful phrase you had, this huge ocean of an adventure, came to its climax in August of 1974. When did you take— set the scene as you go into the building?

So when I refer to the adventure, I just said it was an ocean of an adventure. And actually, I'm afraid of the water. I don't know how to swim. At the time, I didn't know. And it was an ocean of an adventure and full of obstacles and sea monsters, probably. All that disappeared when I set foot on the cable. But, it was not a surprise. It was not a new condition. I said I never thought about the walk. Maybe I thought about the walk all along without psychologically realizing I was thinking about the walk. So when I found myself on the wire, facing the wire, one foot on the wire, one foot on the building, and ready to decide to shift my way to become a bird, to become a wire walker on that wire. It was not something new.

It was something that I know I belong to, something that, as opposed to the ocean of hazards, was something simple. The wire is a safe place for me to be. The street is not. Life is not. It's a rigorous and simple path. It's straight. You don't have meanders like, like, you know, on the ground in life. There are no obstacles, no red light, no bad guys, no politicians, no representative authorities with uniforms. You suddenly— and there is no life. There is something much more supreme than life. There is carrying one's life across, not chancing it, because I'm really not somebody who is ready to play with life, mine or the one of the building or others. But I was finally finding myself living because I had now opened the door to living on the edge, living the only place where it's worth living, which is fully, and grabbing my life and carrying my life across.

It's the most beautiful profession in the world. And somehow I did this shift from being grounded to being aerial. And I started gliding, and the first crossing— there might have been only one, but the first crossing is always an interrogation between me and the place where I anchored my wire, me and the wire itself, because there's no way to test that wire before. So the first crossing has a little bit of a test. To it, but I didn't even take the full length of the crossing to get to know the rigging and the vibration of the building and the wire. After a few steps, I knew I was in my element, and I knew the wire was not well rigged. We had some tremendous problem during the whole night of rigging, but it was safe enough for me to carry on. And then very slowly, as I walked, I was overwhelmed by a sense of easiness, a sense of simplicity.

And actually, I can be seen on the first pictures smiling, smiling probably out of disbelief. It's so easy after all those years and months of ups and downs and detours, victories and disasters. Finally, I was carrying my life on a path that was the simplest, the most beautiful, and the easiest. I shouldn't say that. But why not? It's very easy to walk on a wire if you spend a whole lifetime practicing for it. So I was actually enjoying myself tremendously, and I was feeling the birds in me, the feathers in my arm grow. And then somehow I improvised on that wire, and I found myself spending 45 minutes and doing 8 crossings. Were you aware of the people below? Did you have any sense of— you're so high up at 1,350 feet or whatever it is. Did you have any sense of that, of the spectacle that— or were you aware of the people down in the street below?

For me, the beauty of the wire and the only way I can do my first step on a crossing, on a performance on the wire, is by— in a process of getting ready for that first step is by erasing the entire world outside and inside. Call it concentration, call it mad concentration on my part, but anyway, I don't hear you, I don't see you, I see the wire, and that allows me to do the first step, knowing that there will be a last step, of course. But then the beauty of wirewalking for me is that as I enter this other world where man is an outlaw. Suddenly my senses become decuplated. I smell, I see, I hear, I touch much more than on Earth. And actually, at some point during these different crossings, I enjoy listening to the audience a quarter of a mile below.

It was a surprise performance And yet there was so many thousands of people there after a few minutes of, you know, pointing and looking from the street, an enormous group of people gathered. And I could hear them punctuating what I was doing on the wire. Let's say if I would take a bow on one leg or salute the horizon or kneel in front of the tower to say hello to the tower, I would hear almost with an echo, the people cheering, screaming, applauding. And it seems to me that I could hear them talking, whispering. So it was quite interesting. And at some point in one of the crossings, I laid down on the wire and looked at the sky, and I saw a bird above me. And again, because my senses were decuplated, I could I could see that bird pretty high up, and I saw the eyes were red, and I instantly thought of cruel eyes, and I thought of the myth of being, you know— Prometheus. Yeah, the Prometheus myth there.

But the bird was circling and looking at me as if I was invading his territory, as if I was trespassing, which I was. But actually, I was in other worlds. So yes, I could feel very much what was going on, on earth, in the sky, and in between, on the roof of the Two Towers when the cops start invading the roof. And I keep performing, but I was all ears and all eyes. How did it come to an end? How did you— at what point after the 45 minutes and the 8 crossings, how did you come back off the wire? During the walks, I had a sense of dancing on top of the world. I had a sense of communicating, communing, having a communion with the city of New York represented by the crowd below. I had a sense of having stepped in otherworldly matters by silently dialoguing with the bird hovering above me.

By making a very important discovery for mankind, which is by looking at the horizon, I discovered that the Earth was round. And I thought that really I should tell that. It's— I have seen it with my eyes. By stopping to conquer but marrying the Towers, by being allowed by the Towers to marry them. All that has limits for a miserable human being. So at some point I thought the gods, the gods of— the god of the wind, the gods of the towers, the god of the wire, all those invisible forces that we persist in thinking they don't exist, but actually that rule our lives, might become impatient, might become annoyed by my persistent vagabondage there. So I somehow decided, but it was not a thought, it was again intuition, that okay, now is enough.

Maybe underlining it all was the fact that the weather was turning 90% humidity and the rain was being felt in the air. And actually, when I set foot to surrender myself to the police, it started to rain. What did they do to you? What happened? What was the consequence? Well, there was a very rough moment right there, because the authorities, whatever their uniforms, and there were many, were very frustrated. I mean, they thought, maybe because they are American, they thought that I was the type of person who would want to walk across and to claim the title of having walked across and to roll into the world and famous game. And somehow I was the opposite of that. I was some kind of daydreaming child that had very other way of thinking about life. So after they see me go back and forth and back and forth, they were furious at me.

And when I landed, they actually grabbed me in a furious way, handcuffed me, and threw me downstairs. And then the afterward, I tend to frown at it because I don't recall it as I recall the walks or the long approach, the 6 years of planning to the walk, because it didn't matter. If they would have cut my head, so be it. But somehow, because I was instantly famous there, and also because I understood it only later, I shared a dream, or I gave people hope somehow, or a breath of fresh air, because of all of— and I made the towers more human. Because of all of that, I was soon treated as a New York hero and not as a criminal. And that's who I was. That was 28 years ago.

Mm-hmm. What were— where were you when you found out that the buildings had been struck? I was upstate New York when I heard of the towers being destroyed. And I don't have a television, so I received a phone call by an artist friend nearby, and I run to another artist friend nearby, and I sit there all day, watching in disbelief. What did you— what was your— how did you respond? How did you feel? Having had this Absolutely unique experience. It's very difficult for me to talk about how I felt that day, seeing what I was seeing on television. A side of me was not believing it, and there was this disbelief.

I knew those images were live and were happening. But I refused to believe it. Then when I saw the actual collapse of the two towers, it was a very strange blend of feelings. One was, one would say, universal, although it was not at the time. Which is the sorrow, the horror at witnessing human life being obliterated for no reason, apparently like that. And— but somehow something in me was of a very different nature. I was at the same time watching my towers, and I call them my towers because —that's how I used to refer to them in this very long path to conquering them—being destroyed right there.

And I felt something beyond words. It's hard to describe. I felt almost an alive part of me being squeezed to nothing, being extracted, an evisceration. Almost. But how can I talk about that when actually the collapse of the towers took so many human lives? No one that I knew personally, no friend, no family. But it was those, those three elements, the, the horror of of human loss, the disbelief in front of something bigger than life, and I'm not making a pun there, and the loss— more than the loss, the witnessing of the terrible crushing of my towers continue to be an impossible to describe memory.

And of course, after that, when people ask me that question, where were you and how did you feel, I stopped saying my towers. I start saying our towers because more than ever in their disappearance, those towers became New York City, America, and the world's. and they became loved finally, or more than they were during their life. But I had seen them being born, I had watched them grow, and I married them. So it was really, and it still is something that I cannot believe.