Lights. Camera. Trapeze!

James Cameron wanted to get close. Really close. He thinks all those other 3-D performance movies–Glee, Justin Bieber’s, Katy Perry’s–offer merely a simulacrum of a live performance. “I asked, Why aren’t we giving the movie audience the experience they can’t get? Even if you’re there at the theater, you’re not onstage,” says the director of Titanic and Avatar. So Cameron, who is an executive producer of Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away but also worked as a cameraman in a safety harness 70 feet in the air, got so close to the performers that at one point the star of the movie, acrobat Erica Linz, kicked a camera lens.

Worlds Away (in theaters Dec. 21) isn’t quite the documentary of Cirque’s Las Vegas shows that Cameron originally planned. Instead, director Andrew Adamson (of the first two Shreks and the first two Chronicles of Narnia) stitched the circus scenes together with a flimsy Alice in Wonderland–ish plot in which Linz falls down a hole and chases a male aerialist, identified as the Aerialist (Igor Zaripov), through surreal circus worlds until (unimportant spoiler alert!) she eventually kisses him as fireworks explode.

None of this requires much talking. “I think it’s good for us that The Artist was such a recent success,” says the 4 ft. 11 in., Colorado-born Linz, 30, who calls herself an “actor-bat.” She has been in Cirque shows ever since she flew to Las Vegas to audition the day after she finished high school, in 2001. “You don’t need words to tell a love story. It’s a story told with eyes and bodies.” This makes sense if you have a Cirque du Soleil performer’s body. In fact, Linz informs me that when two Cirque performers are very much in love and are ready to start a family, what they do is called the “gymnasty” and that it is indeed more interesting than the way non-Cirque performers do it.

Adamson was able to use the Canadian troupe’s stages, equipment, costumes and makeup. “It would have been a $300 million film otherwise. If I said, ‘I need to create this thing that’s a swimming pool with a mechanical floor,’ the studio would have laughed me out of the room,” he says. Adamson and Cameron learned to set up shots quickly and use very few takes, since they could shoot just on days off between the live Vegas shows and since even world-class contortionists, acrobats and men on fire can do their routines only a few times before becoming exhausted.

Exhaustion was not a problem for the two gigantic Samoan fire dancers who grabbed Cameron’s walkie-talkie and threw him in his hotel pool to commemorate their three long days of shooting. Though they forgot to grab his cell phone, Cameron was smiling as he walked back to his hotel room in his soaked clothes. “Doesn’t everyone want to join the circus at some point in his life?” he asks after telling this story. Before I can answer, he yells, “Hell, yeah!”

Actually, no. When I saw the circus as a kid, I thought, This looks like the kind of dangerous, smelly, itinerant lifestyle that leads to unsatisfactory short-term relationships. But after seeing this gorgeous movie, I understood Cameron’s point about its being more impressive from up close. So I wanted to get as close as I could.

That’s why on a Friday afternoon in October, I’m beside Linz in the seats of the Bellagio theater in Vegas, where Cirque puts on O, its aquatic-themed spectacle. Before I try out some of the death-defying acts in the show, I want to make sure I won’t really have to defy any death. Linz punches in my weight and the height at which I am going to dangle from a suspended boat-shaped apparatus into an app on her phone. She puts her hand on my knee, assuring me that I’ll have 10 times more protection than I’ll need. I have no idea what she’s talking about. I just know that upstairs in the massage room, there’s a dry-erase board that reads, “Need meds? See Manu, your friendly neighborhood pharmacien!” I also notice that her app fails to ask certain crucial questions, like “Can the magazine writer in question touch his toes?”

Before getting into the bateau featured heavily in the movie and the live O show–it’s a steel-framed boat that swings three stories in the air–I have to pass a swim test. It’s just a couple of lengths and five minutes of treading water, and I’m pleased to pass it easily and even more pleased to find out Cirque’s quartet of Mongolian contortionists–who have spent a half hour making fun of the fact that I can’t touch my toes–needed a lot of coaching to get through it. After the test, I swim below the boat, where 11 spandexed performers in whiteface stand ready to flip around on parallel bars. Nearly all of them are short, East European former Olympic gymnasts. None seem afraid of heights.

One of them drops a rope ladder into the water and tells me to climb up. Once I do, I try not to look down, as head coach–pharmacien Manu Durand cheerily yells directions at me from the seats below. Suddenly, the gymnasts start pushing the boat back and forth on its cables, which I think is some kind of hazing technique until I realize it’s part of the act. Linz, who is reviewing my performance from the seats, writes down, “Love the realness of the terror.” Then Jozsef “Beast” Tokar, a Hungarian with enormous muscles and a shaved head who plays the strongman, has me climb down a steel beam to the bottom of the boat, where I sit on his lap. I consider telling him that what I want for Christmas is anything but death.

Suddenly, Tokar leans back, hangs upside down from his knees on a steel bar and swings me from his hands, holding my wrists. As I float back and forth like a trapeze artist, first by both hands then by one, our hands slipping slightly but inexorably from each other’s wrists, I learn an important lesson: all those movies in which a non-circus-strongman hero holds a guy by the wrists over a building for a few minutes while they chat about how much they mean to each other are totally ridiculous. At this point, I hint strongly that I might have had enough of my acrobatic audition, and Tokar drops me into the water. But when I pop up, to my shock, I want to do it all over again. It turns out Cameron was right.

I try a few other Cirque roles. Maurizia Cecconi, a former Italian Olympic synchronized swimmer and current Cirque swimming coach, coaxes me through some synchro tricks. Danut Coseru, a gymnast I met on the boat, teaches me to march like one of the Buckingham Palace–style guards who parade around the pool, but embarrassingly, even walking with my arms akimbo tires my muscles.

Afterward, artistic director Sandi Croft, a former backup dancer for Celine Dion, sits me down in a back room for a performance evaluation. “You have to be fearless and courageous, and you were. Athletic? No. Strength and acrobatics? No. You’re a very good floater. And you have good artistic expression,” she says.

It’s too late for me to join the circus. It’s probably been too late since I was about 3. But between the closeups in the movie and in real life, I got to see how both tediously technical and thrillingly liberating it is to fly. I was so inspired that I’ve vowed, by springtime, to touch my toes.