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"  Dedicated appetites for the eccentric have made film director Werner Herzog and tightrope artist Philippe Petit friends for decades. Since the 1960s, Herzog has populated his movies with dwarfs, nomads, and outcasts in titles such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Grizzly Man (2005), and Encounters at the End of the World, a documentary about the people who live and work in Antarctica, which opened earlier this summer. Petit pulled off an audacious and illegal high-wire walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974. Man on Wire, James Marsh&amp;#039;s documentary about the event, which opens August 8, re-creates the complex stunt in nail-biting detail. Stephen Garrett recently sat down with the pair in the New York offices of Herzog&amp;#039;s distributor.  Esquire: Think of me more as a fly on the wall while you two talk. Philippe Petit: You are a moderator? You are going to have a big problem, because there is absolutely no moderation here. ESQ: What draws you two together? Werner Herzog: I don&amp;#039;t know. It doesn&amp;#039;t matter. We like good food. PP: I think only mad people are doomed to meet. It was obvious that we had to meet. In my life, I wanted to meet certain people. I never met Charlie Chaplin, but I met Werner Herzog. WH: I tried to be as funny as him. And some of my films actually are. PP: You know, in this so-called obsession, humor has its place. Obsessed people are not humorless at all. WH: Philippe is not obsessed. PP: I am beyond obsessed!  ESQ: Philippe, you were 18 when you decided to walk between the then-unbuilt Twin Towers, and 24 when you actually did it. Isn&amp;#039;t that kind of young? PP: If I had been born in the circus, my parents would have pushed me on that little high wire at four years old. That&amp;#039;s when the body is most limber to learn those acrobatics. But I was very late. I learned by myself when I was 14, 15, 16 years old. WH: Every great achievement in mathematics was done by men between 14 and 24. Hardly ever beyond. I was very late with cinema. I never saw a film until I was 11. I didn&amp;#039;t even know that cinema existed. I made my first phone call when I was 17. And I made my first film when I was 19. PP: Do you remember the first films you saw? WH: Yes--both of them bad and disappointing. One was about Eskimos building an igloo, and they did a lousy job. And I could tell right away because I had grown up in the Alps. It didn&amp;#039;t impress me at all. PP: Film is a lying media.  WH: It&amp;#039;s beautiful to invent. And truth is not found in facts per se. In Philippe&amp;#039;s case, there&amp;#039;s a deeper truth in what he&amp;#039;s doing--an ecstasy of truth. And he&amp;#039;s discovering, of course, walking in the sky, in the clouds, means a form of ecstasy--a quintessential metaphor of an ecstatic moment. There&amp;#039;s a truth in it that we can somehow function beyond our limitations. He can walk in the skies. PP: Truth deserves more than being factually recorded. WH: We have to be cautious when we use this term &amp;quot;truth&amp;quot;--let&amp;#039;s touch this only with a pair of pliers. Not even a mathematician or a philosopher could give you a real definition of it.  PP: Werner succeeds in taking you out of your seat. Some images in Encounters are amazing, like when those people are lying on the ice and putting their ears to it, and we hear songs from the waves underneath--it&amp;#039;s from another planet. WH: Actually, the woman who listens with her ear to the ice had her ear frozen to the ice. She didn&amp;#039;t want to say anything. She had to struggle, but she got it off. PP: When art in general, and film in particular, succeeds is when it pulls you away onto a voyage. Then it&amp;#039;s a good film. I was in another world. WH: What I do is for spectators. Whether Philippe&amp;#039;s walk between the Twin Towers was witnessed by anyone down in the street really didn&amp;#039;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. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a4885/herzog-petit-0908/>