SIFF Interview: Director Emer Reynolds on Voyager Doc ‘The Farthest’

NASA’s Voyager program should be remembered as one of the most ambitious and successful projects in US history. It is a space probe that was launched in 1977 and has regularly transmitted photos back to NASA since. It has traveled over 12 billion miles and in 2013, President Obama announced it became the first human-made object to leave the Solar System.

Voyager’s history is told through a great, new documentary called The Farthest from Irish filmmaker Emer Reynolds that is playing now at the Seattle International Film Festival. The two-hour movie tells the story of Voyager through interviews with its participants, and I found the film surprisingly accessible and funny. Reynolds does a masterful job of using pop culture as an entry point for discussion of the space project, spending much time discussing the Golden Record that had copies placed on both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, and showing it being referenced on “Saturday Night Live” by Steve Martin.

While at SIFF with The Farthest, I spoke with Emer Reynolds about her movie. It was fun to talk with Reynolds because it’s clear in the first few moments of meeting her that this was a movie she has wanted to make for much of her life and it has finally come to fruition. Our interview, lightly edited for clarity and length, is below:

So the first thing I always kind of ask, where did the idea for The Farthest come about? Where did or how did you decide you wanted to make a movie about the Voyager?

I’ve had a massive love of space and science since I was a child. I wanted to be an astronaut and grew up in a farm which had dark skies. And was devoted to looking at the stars, the moon. And I had very clear memories of lying around on the ground in the field in our farm, holding onto the grass, thinking I’m on a planet hurtling through space. I was really quite obsessed with it. I’m very obsessed with Voyager. Voyager was out there throughout my childhood and we would see this occasional broadcast on BBC about Voyager was now at Uranus, and then few years later, was now at Neptune. Seeing these photos … I just couldn’t believe that humankind could do such an amazing thing. I always thought it was such a romantic and fascinating story.

So we looked into making a film about it and there had never been a feature film made on this. Some TV documentaries, but nothing on this scale so … And as we were exploring, trying to make a film about it, that very weekend, NASA announced that Voyager 1 had reached interstellar space, that it was the first human-made object to ever leave our solar system. So it was back in the news and suddenly it was really achieving things all over again. So we pitched it then to make it, and had massive interest very quickly and that’s where it came from.

How long was the process? You said that just when NASA said it left the solar system, that was 2012, was it?

Yeah, they announced it in 2013 so … It was four years from writing the proposal to now.

One of the things that I loved about it is that I thought it was really accessible. If you’re a science nerd, then there’s all the details and logistics to absorb. But then if you’re someone that’s more of a layperson, then you can get into the story in another way. And there was so much there that there were a lot of different entry points for the Voyager to show.

I was very keen to make a film that would be accessible to a general audience. But not to exclude people who, like me, who dig all of Voyager as well. So to try to find that balance between science detail and also express what people may not know. But then of course, the Voyager story itself has the ultimate in accessibility because it has the Golden Record on it, which was this extremely mad mind concept to do and how we would express ourselves to aliens, were we to ever run into any. So the story essentially had all the elements of such a great film and had room for all the different types of audience that might be drawn to it.

When I started out as a writer, I was a music blogger, so seeing Chuck Berry as being a big part of that was something that I … I mean he just passed away recently, so he was on my mind anyway, but seeing him being part of it was real great.

Emotional.

Absolutely. And I loved the Steve Martin clip from “Saturday Night Live” with the Time magazine cover. I had to back and watch the whole clip for that.

It’s great. There’s a whole rabbit hole down that you can go if you’re looking for popular culture references to Voyager and Golden Record. There’s a scene in “the West Wing,” there’s obviously the great scene in “Start Trek Voyager” … Where the malevolent alien craft is revealed to be Voyager that has kind of gotten artificially intelligent and hell-bent on destroying humanity. That’s your future now, you’re gonna [fall down that rabbit hole].

Absolutely. I’m gonna try to. What did you learn about the Voyager from doing the film that you didn’t know previously? Was there something that really surprised you?

What surprised me were the people. It sounds quite intimidating and I knew the way to tell the story was through the people who were part of what it felt like. It felt like they’ve been waiting 40 years for someone to ask them that question. “How did feel like to dream this up to fly in? How do you feel that it’s out there doing all this extraordinary stuff?” And to find the engineers and scientists so happy and prepared to talk about the human side of the story, that was the greatest surprise to me. And to find this well of emotion I think.

Absolutely. And one thing that really surprised me too is that it was really funny, too. There’s a lot of science humor in there.

The editor is a actually fantastic editor in general, but he had also worked on a huge amount of British comedy so … He says that one of my very early notes was I want something to make this human, as real, as lively as we can, so all the comedy that’s in there, let’s really keep it there. It’s such a great relief for the audiences that watch it that they realize very early on it’s not going to be dry, humorless science. It’s going to be a frolicking adventure and lots of laughs.

It really was. And there were so many, like you talked about, the human things and the pop culture intersection with Chuck Berry and with Carl Sagan, who was, even though he was a scientist, he is pretty much a real pop culture icon and key figure really heavily throughout the movie.

And he’s such a massive hero of mine and I think he definitely took these ideas that were in this film, the ideas that are in Voyager but he really transformed those ideas that science can be something inspirational and spiritual. That you can actually use science and space to talk about big cosmic questions. “Why are we here? What’s it all about? What’s it for? How will it end?” I think that’s what draws people to space even people who aren’t space nuts. They lie in their garden and they look up at the moon and the stars and they wonder about their existence. His son, Nick, is in the film. Nick Sagan. He’s an amazing communicator, too. He’s now a screenwriter in science fiction movies and a science fiction novelist. And he hasn’t fallen very far from his father’s tree. He still has the same instance towards poetry, towards philosophy.

Yeah, absolutely. What I think that really blew my mind that I’ve been telling everyone about this was the Beatles turning down the chance to on the Gold Record. That blew my mind because that seems like to me like the ultimate honor. That seems like something that you-

Well, I think the Beatles themselves were in favor of going on the record, but the record company wasn’t. In fact, I believe they were multiple record companies that were involved and there was just no way. But it was also from the position of now that you think the Golden Record is this extraordinary thing. It took a long time for that idea even to catch on. Nowadays, it seems so logical to us that you would totally want to put something on it but it was a brand new idea. And it’s like … Frowned upon might be too strong, but NASA didn’t really take it very seriously.

Yeah. I mean now, 40 years later, that strikes me as the ultimate honor. I mean, the Pope is more indiscriminate about who he visits with.

I think subsequent to that … Definitely subsequent to … NASA sent some signal out in the last few years towards some distant star. Some super high-energy signal just to go one way to communicate. And they put the Beatles’ Across the Universe on, so they are out there.

Yeah, so what was it like showing the movie to audiences at these festivals because you played it at the Tribeca and you played it, was it in Ireland before that?

It’s been amazing. All the audience’s very, very strong response in a communal theater setting. All the laughs, all the tears … People are surprised at how emotional it is, how excited they feel, because they think they know the story and they’ll still on the edge of their seats. It’s a great, basic adventure. Will it blow up? Will it get there? Will it survive? Audiences really respond to feeling so invested in this little craft’s life, that it will survive.

I knew that  Voyager 1 left the solar system in 2013. So I knew that it was still out there, but I still felt so emotionally attached when they lost communications a little bit in the 70’s, I think. I know that they get it back but it’s still-

Your heart’s in your mouth.

It is, yeah.

And some of that is the film telling a story but it’s actually intrinsic to Voyager. That it has all the elements of a great Hollywood story. Will it survive? How will it get on?

What’s coming up for the film after-

A bit of a festivals, [it’s playing in Sydney] a couple weeks later. It’s in Washington DC, it’s in Telluride, Colorado. So it’s going on a little festival tour in Europe. And then hoping for a release in the summer.

Did I see that’s going to be on PBS later this year also?

Yeah, a version of the film. It’s a different version that is going to be on PBS later in the year.

{THE FARTHEST has two more screenings at SIFF: Saturday, May 20 at the SIFF Cinema Uptown at 5:00pm, and on Wednesday, May 24, at SIFF Cinema Uptown at 4:00pm. Emer Reynolds expected to attend the Saturday screening.}