Interview with 'First Orbit' Director Christopher Riley

April 12 marks the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight into space aboard Vostok I. To commemorate the flight, space documentary maker Chris Riley presents First Orbit, a stunning recreation of Gagarin's flight.

TheCelebrityCafe.com: It's already been 50 years since the first orbit. That was in 61 but Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon in '63 kind of overshadowed everything else.

Chris Riley: Yeah, it's gone quick. Humans have been flying in space for half a century. Something like 500 people have been into outer orbit - 24 americans beyond that. In some aspects some might deem that a failure because in the sixties there were these great promises of where it might take us - how far and fast into space human exploration might go - and we've somewhat retracted from that a bit.

TCC: This film didn't have a typical film making process. What were some of the challenges in making this film?

Chris Riley: It was about the hardest film I've ever made actually; the logistics alone were somewhat daunting. I came up with the idea for it about a year ago in early 2010. As a film archivist and documentary maker I've always been struck by the lack of footage of the Gagarin flight. There was a little bit of footage from onboard Vostok I of his face and of his head but nothing of the view he had of the Earth; it wasn't a priority for the Soviets. So in february 2010 they put a giant window on the International Space Station and I wondered if we could film what Gagarin had seen from this brand new window. I emailed the European Space Agency, with whom I've worked in the past, and asked if the ISS orbit ever went inside the ground path of Vostok I. So now it became a math problem and they put me in touch with one of their orbital mechanics, Gerald Ziegler, and we figured that the ISS covered the Vostok I orbit roughly every 48 hours. That was encouraging, but what was complicated was I had to film at exactly the same time that Gagarin flew to get the sun angles right. There's no point in going over Africa at night when he went over it in the morning. So Gerald worked it out and found that the path and times coincided roughly every six weeks. So we took the schedule of when these opportunities might arise to mission control to try to incorporate that into crew time. They are very, very busy on the ISS and are frequently behind schedule so trying to add on extra stuff to do was not easy. We made about 20 requests to film when the space station crossed Gagarin's path and they were able to accomodate only five of those.

We had one astronaut onboard the space station, Paolo Nespoli, who served as our director of photography - our extraterrestial camera operator as it were. Paolo is a great photographer, and he's got a huge following on Flickr. He was a good choice and he filmed when he could. We got the footage back down in early January, so now we had to compile it all in the edit. Up until now it was just a big mass of different media and we had to try to recognize different coastlines and locations to piece it all together.

And the other thing, of course, was that Paolo filmed it in weightless conditions and that his idea of north and south, up and down, and left and right was a little bit scrambled. When we watch footage we like to have a clear idea of travel - the top of the screen is north and the right of the screen is east - and so we had to flip and flop a lot of the imagery that came back.

TCC: I figured it would be tough to film just to coordinate with your photographer in space while you're on Earth. I didn't even think about having to flip flop images which must have been brain wracking to figure out 'where is this?'

Chris Riley: It was a real headache. I considered just getting this stuff down was the great victory and that was actually half the battle. I always wanted to unite Gagarin's original mission audio with these pictures and that process took about 10 months. But another thing needed, if it was to have any public interest, was a good musical score. I was looking for 90 minutes of good, original music so I sent a really cheeky email to Philip Sheppard, who I worked with on In The Shadow Of The Moon, asking if he had any free music since I really didn't have a budget. He very generously wrote and said he was working on an album inspired in part by space flight called Cloud Song.

Coincidentally enough this album was already on the space station. He was friends with astronaut Cady Coleman and he had given her a copy of his music to take up on her iPod. So on one end of the station she's listening to the First Orbit music and on the other there's Paolo filming First Orbit and they didn't know about this connection.

TCC: What are your favorite parts of the film?

Chris Riley: I've got a couple gems. When filmmakers combine images and music and whatever else they got, when the overall effect becomes greater than the sum of the parts, you know emotionally that you've done something right. So we looked everywhere for Gagarin's original mission audio - what did this man say, the first man to go into space and, in my opinion, one of the most significant moments in the history of the Earth - yet this audio archive was hardly heard outside of Russia. We spent months and months trying to find it and we located it about a week before the end of the edit. We brought it into the editing room and dropped Gagarin's words over these new pictures and that was what made my spine tingle a little bit. When you see these picture of Siberia with the snow 150 miles below and you hear Gagarin's excitement in his voice describe to Sergei Korolev what he can see. This is the first human being to look down on the Earth fom space and that's the moment he says this quite spontaneous thing about what he can see. Hearing that and seeing the pictures for me was precious.

TCC: You added a shot of the moon, something Gagarin couldn't see when he was in orbit.

Chris Riley: Yes, when Gagarin flew it was a crescent moon so it was quite close to the sun. It was difficult if not impossible for him to see. In his biography, Road To The Stars, he wrote quite touchingly that he looked to the moon, that he was curious to see what it looked like above the atmosphere, but he couldn't see it. He writes in the lovely phrase, "I'll see it next time." I think he assumed since he was an aviator that he would fly into space regularly but he was too precious a human being afterwards and he wasn't allowed to fly again, and then he tragically died in a plane crash in 1968 so he never got to fly again.

So when it came to construct this rather challenging night sequence to the film ... roughly 40 minutes of this film takes place at night over the Pacific so there's not much to see. What we wanted to do was to give him back the moon, and there's this lovely shot of the moon rising over the Pacific.

TCC: Gagarin would have been 77 years old today. Did you ever wonder what he would think of this film had he been here to see it?

Chris Riley: That's a lovely question. I'm going to Moscow to present this film to some of Gagrin's compatriots and peers from the time including his friend Alexey Leonov, who later made the first space walk, so maybe it's a question I should ask them. I would love to have interviewed Gagarin. What would he have made of the film? I hope he would have liked it because he wouldn't ever see this view again. In his absence I hope everyone will share this experience Yuri had 50 years ago.

First Orbit is available for free download on April 12 at firstorbit.org.