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Documentarian James Marsh turns a wire-walking stunt into high drama.

The last time we talked to director James Marsh, he was braving the tricky transition from documentaries (The Burger & the King: The Life & Cuisine of Elvis Presley, Wisconsin Death Trip) to narrative features with The King (2005), a brooding indie drama starring Gael García Bernal, Paul Dano and William Hurt. Though it’s a solid drama, it did so-so at the box office and hasn’t been talked about much since its initial release. One might be tempted, then, to interpret Marsh’s return to documentaries as a strategic retreat.

In fact, the progress of Man on Wire, Marsh’s new doc, has looked more like a triumphal march. The film—about wire-walker Philippe Petit’s 1974 effort to walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center—has been getting rave reviews. Given a very limited release in New York on July 25, it did huge business, and there are reports of audiences bursting into applause. You might be tempted to dismiss that as a sign of New Yorkers’ emotional investment in the subject, since the film remembers the Twin Towers in a more joyous era. But Man on Wire isn’t just for New Yorkers, in large part because of Marsh’s deft use of suspense-movie storytelling techniques. “The story offers itself to you as a kind of heist film, and that’s the genre that we’re in here, more so than a documentary almost,” says Marsh. “It is much more like a fictional film even though everything in the film is true and we’re dealing with real accounts and real testimonies from people that you’re seeing in middle age. The audience is going to know either that he did it or at least that he’s alive because here he is. So what we have to do is enjoy the mystery of how this is done. It’s constantly surprising how they got to pull this off.”

To develop that suspense, Marsh mixes interviews with Petit and his helpers, Petit’s own archival footage of their preparations, stock footage of the towers and some reenactments. The result is a film that feels like Rififi as imagined by Buster Keaton.

Petit’s assistants recall regarding him with a mixture of bemusement and devotion, but they all look back on the project as something magical. In this security-conscious era, “magical” might not be the first word that comes to mind to describe a small band of people doing surveillance on the World Trade Center to figure out how to infiltrate the building and get access to the roof, but Marsh pulls off a high-wire act of his own by keeping the tone exciting but light.

Marsh decided early on that the film would make no references to the World Trade Center’s dark future, since Petit’s story all played out in the days when construction was just being completed. But viewers can’t help putting this story in a larger context, and Marsh doesn’t fight that. “There’s some complex issues at stake, but I wanted to just concentrate on telling this story, allow this narrative to generate the ideas without me trying to articulate them in any kind of pretentious way.”

Petit is an unusually camera-friendly subject. He even acts out key moments for the camera (at one point he uses the curtains in the interview space to illustrate how he hid from a security guard). Marsh says all of that is pure Petit. The wire walker was fairly uncomfortable when they began the interview process. “A conventional setup [remaining in a chair] did not work for him, so he began to act out various parts of the story in a very animated kind of way. We had to change our plans and shoot a very unconventional kind of interview.”The key is that while Marsh uses the reenactments to develop suspense, Petit views much of the experience as a series of comical mishaps. “He remembered it as sort of this slapstick piece of comedy,” explains Marsh, “and therefore enacted it that way.”

One perfect punch line is that though Petit and his friends brought a movie camera to record his walk between the towers, no footage was shot, leaving only a series of haunting photographs. While setting up the rigging, they dropped one end of the cable, and Petit’s friend Jean-Louis Blondeau spent four hours pulling it back up. By the time Petit started his walk, Blondeau was exhausted. “His arms are so destroyed by this he tried to get the movie camera but he can’t even lift it. The first photograph he takes with the still camera is out of focus because he is wobbling and shaking; by the time he gets to engage with the film camera, the police are literally one floor below.” But Marsh sees the lack of moving images of the walk as a plus. “These stills are beautiful and capture these little moments in time, and it is an ephemeral dream that is being enacted out there.”

Man on Wire opens Friday. See review and showtimes.

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