Man on Wire
Last weekend, I caught Man on Wire, a documentary about wire walker Philippe Petit and his attempt to walk between the two World Trade Center towers in 1974. After watching it, I wondered how it was that such an obsessive personality could have escaped Werner Herzog's eye. Those are his specialty.
It turns out Petit and Herzog are longtime friends, and Esquire has a transcript of a conversation between the two.
WH: What I do is for spectators. Whether Philippe's walk between the Twin Towers was witnessed by anyone down in the street really didn't matter. Philippe once secretly put a cable across a 2,400-foot ravine and walked across it and danced on the rope. Only a farmer who was driving his cattle at sunrise realized that someone was there. He rushed into the village to wake a policeman. And when they came back on a motorcycle, there was no Philippe, there was no wire left.
PP: But the cows remember.