On September 11 when the planes struck the towers, James Marsh ran against the crowd. The 45-year-old Cornwall-born and Brooklyn-based filmmaker grabbed his video camera, and headed for Manhattan. He passed a hospital in Brooklyn, bursting with medics in green and white coats, waiting for patients that never arrived. He saw fire engines zoom past him and straight to their doom in the as yet untoppled towers. Then later, right through the day, and through the thick fog of upchucked detritus that cruelly blanketed the city, he found businessmen, dozens of them, caked in ash and wandering aimlessly, utterly confused and daring to wonder why they alone were the ones to survive. "And you see," he says, "that was the thing. That was the striking thing. There were no casualties. It was either death or survival."
Seven years on, and Marsh is still running against the crowd. The filmmaker, who first made his name directing documentaries for the BBC, and then through the haunting Wisconsin Death Trip and the satirical drama The King, has made a new movie, Man on Wire, which is about September 11 and yet very deliberately not. It is a documentary film that charts the illegal wire-walk of the French acrobat Philippe Petit between the then almost completed Twin Towers on the morning of Aug 7th 1974. In doing so, the movie, which is entirely free from any explicit references to September 11, dares you to be counterintuitive, and to think the impossible - to imagine a time when the World Trade Center was free from all apocalyptic connotations and instead signified only youthful exuberance, technological achievement and the realisation of human ambition.
"Of course, implicitly everyone in the audience is going to bring their knowledge of the buildings' destruction to the film," says Marsh today, floppy fringed and burdened by a scowl of concentration as he sits in the plush armchair of a swanky Edinburgh hotel, on the eve of his film's European premiere. "But the real idea of the film is to get beyond that. It's to try and reclaim the towers for something else entirely, even if it's only for the duration of the film."
That something else, naturally, involves Marsh's star subject Petit, and the band of merry men (and woman), both American and French, who surrounded him in the Seventies, who were his co-conspirators, and who made possible the self-described "artistic crime of the century". Marsh cleverly plays his movie out like a heist flick. The dramatis personae are assembled on camera. They include the cherubic-faced Frenchman Jean-Francois Heckel, the dour Parisian Jean-Louis Blondeau, the cynical New Yorker Alan Welner and, of course, the philosopher poet and action man Petit himself.
"Wire-walking is a mix of joy and frustration, impatience, despair, the elation of making progress and a solitary discourse and communion between me and my cable," is a typical Petit statement. The testimonies of the conspirators are intercut with archive footage of Petit wire-walking between the spires of Notre Dame, and then across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, plus oodles of colour film, shot by members of the Petit posse, of their meticulous preparations for the Trade Center walk itself.
Here identity cards were forged, contacts were made within the building, and endless hours of surveillance were undertaken to ensure that the tonnes of equipment needed (43 metres of heavy steel cable, support wires and rigging) could be smuggled up to the 110th floor without arousing suspicion. For these sequences, in particular, Marsh has filmed deft dramatic re-creations, some of which were shot inside the newly completed WTC 7 tower, itself rebuilt on the site of the original WTC 7 which had collapsed before Marsh's very eyes at 6:30pm on that September day. "Normally filming in any buildings in Manhattan is a logistical nightmare and extremely expensive," explains Marsh. "But when we approached the owners of WTC 7, who were actually the leaseholders of the original Twin Towers, and told them the idea for our film - which was about the life of the towers and not the death - they said they loved it, and we were given the run of the place for a whole weekend."
Elsewhere, stock archive footage of the Trade Center being assembled has an eerie resonance, particularly the seemingly innocuous shots of the growing skeletal structure, and the very girders that became so symbolic in the aftermath of the attacks. "I was aware of the power of those shots," says Marsh. "And the degree of reaction, I'm sure, will change for each person watching it. But there are several images in the movie that have an uncanny power, and those girders are one of them."
Marsh's completed movie, topped off by an aching score from Michael Nyman (the composer, who owns all his music rights, gave Marsh complete access to his back catalogue), has a mesmerising power that's both obvious and strangely ineffable. Shown recently to New Yorkers at the Tribeca Film Festival, it reduced the audience to tears. "They said they were moved by the story of the buildings' life, and how it was framed this way," says Marsh.
In several scenes, as Petit and co bluster through bumbling Trade Center security, and as insiders gladly flout rules and laws for the sake of art and the beauty of the walk, the movie seems to be a lament for an innocent pre-21st century New York that was more chaotic, less rigid, more free. Marsh, an adopted New Yorker for 15 years, agrees. "I went to New York myself for the first time as a student in the late Eighties and fell in love with it as a place of endless possibilities and excitement," he says. "And the film addresses that. The year of Philippe's walk was renowned for corruption, rubbish strikes and out of control crime, yet within that this adventure was possible in a way that it wouldn't be now."
At its best, however, Man on Wire reaches serene heights (hardly surprising, perhaps, considering Petit's 415-metre elevation on the morning of the walk). The depiction of the walk itself, through witness testimony and carefully chosen stills, moves far beyond the remit of the documentary, beyond any vaguely cerebral contemplation of the meaning of September 11 and the misguided human endeavour that brought that event crashing down upon us. Instead, right here, at the heart of the walk, the movie becomes something transcendent. "Everyone who had seen the walk and tried to talk about it ending up crying on camera," says Marsh. "I had to cut so much crying." The film shows Petit as a tiny spec in the sky, but one who is summoning up superhuman strength and courage, who is channelling the love and support of friends, and who is thrilling in the joy of a lifelong ambition simply for the chance to stand alone in the middle of the sky and say, "I am".
"I still find it incredibly moving," says Marsh. "If you're down below looking up, it's a dream. There's something very life affirming about being death defying. It's a riposte to gravity, to fate and to the grim reaper." Marsh, whose next movie will be a crime drama about the Yorkshire Ripper, adds that, ultimately, Man on Wire will probably be read as a riposte to September 11 itself. "After 9/11 there was a little baby boom - I had two children - which was seen as sort of a response to it. And maybe the film could be seen as a life-affirming part of that response?" He pauses and shakes his head, unhappy with the seeming simplicity of this approach. "But you know what?" he says, flabbergasted that one could even try to explain the meaning of the movie, that one could try to look at the walk and turn it into mere words. "I just think it's a miracle. And I never tire, to this day, of thinking of it as a miracle. I love it that way."