On August 7, 1974, Philippe Petit went where no man had gone before, and where no one can ever go again. Early that overcast morning, a quarter mile above the streets of New York, the French tightrope artiste crossed a high wire linking the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. When he crossed back over the wire, he lay down in the middle, then practically danced a jig as police waited at either end and crowds below gawked.

Long part of city lore, the feat is the subject of the new, award-winning documentary, “Man on Wire,” which opens Friday. Featuring Mr. Petit and assorted accomplices, the film, directed by James Marsh, recounts the clandestine preparations for the unsanctioned wire walk and its 45-minute execution. Home movies chronicle the planning, photos immortalize the moment of triumph, and re-enactments fill in gaps, but only one man can answer the question: What was it like up there?

“I remember feeling intensely living,” the elfin Mr. Petit, 58, said in his poetically Gallic-tinged English, a mere 28 stories up at a Midtown hotel. “I remember hearing, smelling, touching, seeing in a much more animal way. I could hear New York waking up, the traffic and the sirens, the mutter of a big city. I also could hear a strange kind of silence coming from another planet.”

The absence of the words “screaming terror” from Mr. Petit’s description testifies to his singular focus and his experience with such death-defying pursuits. As “Man on Wire” shows, the then-24-year-old had already walked between the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia before attempting the World Trade Center, which had captivated him for years. The illegality of all three walks only sweetened the deal.

“If I do something illegally, I have the joy of trespassing,” Mr. Petit said. “The rebellion inside me welcomes that very much. Although I don’t steal anything — I give. It’s also in my character as a street juggler: I have been performing so often chased by the police that I have eyes in my back.”

Street juggling, which he calls “essential in my life,” is a less frequent pursuit these days for Mr. Petit. But it dovetails with his vision of wire walks as performance. Indeed, everyone from his motley crew of French and American accomplices to an awestruck patrolman sounds possessed by the drama and grandeur of the Twin Towers act. The walk was a fantastical dream rendered real, and if that sounds overblown, it helps to remember the city’s mood at the time: both looser and lower.

“New York was, is, unique, and at the time had the chemistry to receive the walk fully,” Mr. Petit said, pointing to the “strike of garbage” and the crime level that could make a wire walk a welcome distraction. Nationally, of course, a besieged President Nixon would announce his resignation the next night. On the other hand, surely only in the 1970s could someone infiltrating the then-new World Trade Center have had help on the inside (care of an extravagantly mustachioed office worker on the 82nd floor).

Yet even before scaling its skyscrapers and captivating its crowds, Mr. Petit felt an instant bond with the city, which he openly embraced over his nation of origin.

“In my first week in New York I felt at home, because it’s such a wild, giant city and it’s made of the world,” Mr. Petit said, sounding for once like your average proud New Yorker. “I feel that I was born probably by accident in France, but I don’t see myself as so much French. I see myself as a New Yorker.”

Indeed, during the planning stages, Mr. Petit sublet a small apartment in Chelsea, and moved after his wire walk to a loft with a friend at 1 Hudson St., where he lived for 10 years. (“I liked the address number, but also from the corner I could see the Twin Towers.”) He parlayed his newfound fame into further artistic endeavors, though first he had to wire-walk across Belvedere Lake in Central Park as part of a community service arrangement resulting from the Twin Towers trespass.

Since then, Mr. Petit, artist in residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and author of several books, has performed around the world, spanning just about anything you could think of crossing. Some trips across the wire carried added weight, such as his Jerusalem walk in 1987.

“I put my wire between the Jewish and Arab quarters of Jerusalem,” Mr. Petit said of his so-called “Bridge for Peace.” “And Mayor Teddy Kollek was there, and for the time of my performance, people were clapping in unison to encourage me to walk.”

It goes without saying that such gestures are a bit quixotic, but “Man on Wire” unmistakably provides some small measure of psychological relief in recalling a past for the World Trade Center before the mass murder of September 11, 2001. Mr. Marsh, director of several documentaries, purposely limits the film’s purview to Mr. Petit’s tale of derring-do, and one’s own memory more than compensates. (Mr. Petit himself reports being “devastated” by the attacks and is uneasy about expressing his particular bond to the buildings in that context.)

“Man on Wire” won both the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at Sundance this past January, and the story looks set for another retelling. Mr. Petit is currently developing a feature film with Robert Zemeckis based on his book, “To Reach the Clouds.” (Mr. Petit’s associations pop up everywhere once you start looking: He drew illustrations for a new novel by actress Debra Winger, and at the documentary’s debut at the Tribeca Film Festival, he was joined by Sting, a good friend since the days of “Roxanne.”)

Given Mr. Petit’s steadiness at 1,500 feet and his entrepreneur’s resilience, it’s fair to ask what does rattle him.

“I am very human and full of little stupid fears on earth,” Mr. Petit says. “I have problems with big dogs showing their teeth. And centipedes and tarantulas. But up there, I have no fear. And I have no fear, I feel, out of working on it, knowing my subject, not out of not wanting to know.”

“That,” he said with characteristic seriousness of purpose, “would be death in my profession.”