How did the idea for the film come about?

On the back page of a newspaper I read a brief article about a Japanese IT billionaire who wanted to fly to the International Space Station with a Soyuz rocket - so he could wear a specially designed spacesuit, a so-called «Mobile Suit» inspired by his favorite comic hero from a Gundam film.

That’s crazy, I thought at first. A Japanese man spends 20 million dollars to wear the costume of a cartoon character in outer space? And just how exactly does he plan to get up there? I began to do some research and was soon captivated by the topic. In the end, health reasons kept the Japanese man from going. Just a few weeks before launch, they offered his seat to the American billionaire Anousheh Ansari. And I had my protagonist!

Why doesn’t NASA do space tourism? That would seem more likely...

For a long time, NASA resisted the idea of using the International Space Station as a hotel for space tourists. And a paid ticket for a seat on the Space Shuttle is completely out of the question for the Americans. That’s why Western billionaires make the journey in the cramped confines of a Soyuz capsule. At the International Space Station, they are welcomed with a simple sleeping bag – and Russian space food. A fascinating paradox! The third seat in the Soyuz was always a kind of «wild card».

During the Cold War, it was occupied by an East German or a Cuban cosmonaut. So seemed was only natural, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to commercialize the seat. After all, at 20 to 30 million dollars per ticket, the tourist covers nearly half the costs of the entire rocket mission. Space travel used to be propaganda. Now it’s turning into a business.

Who shot the footage inside the International Space Station?

Anousheh Ansari documented her stay in the ISS with the assistance of the cosmonauts Mikhail Tyurin and Pavel Vinogradov, and she provided the material to me. Everyday life in space has probably never been filmed so candidly and authentically before! Anousheh is a very skilled camerawoman.

She floats at high speeds through the narrow tubes of the ISS, managing to capture spectacular footage of herself. I like her playful nature. Like many highly intelligent, creative personalities, she’s retained a wonderfully naïve, almost childish manner.

Was it easy to work with billionaires?

For me, each person has dignity, mystery and their own highly valuable quality. I’m used to working with all kinds of people - be they cave dwellers, war photographers or Cuban revolutionaries. I try to treat each and every person with the exact same degree of respect and curiosity.

But billionaires were new to me – and they did in fact pose a challenge! For the simple reason that extremely rich people are surrounded by an entourage of assistants and press attachés. And it takes a long time to explain something to them in a straightforward and direct way. This difficulty was compounded by the extreme restrictions and conditions imposed on filming in Baikonur. The only thing that helps you in such a situation is a lot of patience – and honesty! I give Anousheh a lot of credit for respecting my independent point of view.

In the film, some Kazakhs are shown waiting in the middle of the steppes for four rocket stages to literally fall from the sky. Has that ever been filmed before?

No. And I doubt it will ever be filmed again. Filming the work of the Kazakh scrap metal collectors was anything but easy. After we did extensive research on the ground, the Russian authorities finally gave us a film permit in principle, but they imposed crippling preconditions on our activities.

The real daily routine of the scrap metal collectors could definitely not be shown. Secret service agents and military personnel dressed in overalls and helmets were willing to «re-enact» their work for the cameras – in an idealized way that officials in Moscow deemed to be presentable, but not at all how it takes place in reality.

It was nearly a year before we could finally shoot that sequence. Using Google Earth, my assistant created a huge map of the steppes where you could see the tracks of the trucks. With the help of those maps and GPS navigation, we were able to navigate through the endless steppes.

Wasn’t it dangerous to film in the drop zone?

The four boosters disengage from the rocket after about one minute of flight time and fall to the steppes from an altitude of nearly 50 miles. We were only 5 to 10 miles from the estimated impact area. So you do have to be careful not to have a «turnip», as the call them, come crashing down on your head!

I’ll never forget that atmosphere: There you are, in the most desolate place on earth, looking straight up and waiting for rockets to fall from the sky! Then suddenly there’s a deafening boom and you see these things plummeting to earth.

The scrap metal collectors call the boosters «turnips» because of their shape. Each turnip weighs approximately three tons. Most of it is made of aluminum and titanium. It’s good money!

Is space junk a «gift from the heavens» or a danger to the population of the drop zones?

In Soviet times, the steppes were strewn with rocket parts. But nobody dared collect the metal to sell it. Everything that had to do with space travel was top secret! Nobody talked about it. But the turnips lay scattered all over the place. Hundreds of rockets! Local shepherds would sometimes take a piece along, using rocket junk to build shelters, tools and cooking ware.

The second stage of the rockets falls in a relatively densely populated region, the Altay. And there are in fact rumors of health risks caused by rocket junk.

What role does the Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen play in the film?

Anousheh provides her own voice-off commentary for her fantastic journey, creating a leitmotif through the entire film. For the story «on the ground», however, I needed a kind of travel guide. And Jonas was the obvious choice. As a young photographer during the collapse of the Soviet Union, he spent seven years on the fringes of the once-enormous empire, documenting the forsakenness and isolation of daily life in these remote enclaves. In 2000, he was the one who uncovered the story of the Kazakh scrap metal collectors, and to date he is the only professional to ever have taken photos of them.

I am fascinated by the raw poetry expressed in these photos. For the poster, we use one of Jonas’ pictures showing a group of scrap metal collectors. In the foreground is a boy with a look of elation on his face. For me, this photo reflects the feel of the whole film: What is big becomes very small. What is small becomes very big.

Some words on the music in the film?

As with my other films I began early on to look for an underlying musical layer that rests beneath the images. I never place the music over the images after the film is made. Instead, it is incorporated underneath the images at the start of the editing process. I’m very happy to have managed to secure the rights to film compositions by the Russian composer Edward Artemyev.

Artemyev is a pioneer of electronic music and composed the soundtracks to «Solaris» and «Stalker» by Andrei Tarkovski. Throughout much of the film, Baikonur looks like the «zone» in Tarkovski’s «Stalker»: abandoned launch pads, bricked up barracks, an orbital glider rusting away in the middle of the steppes...

I wanted to fill this emptiness, this desolation with music, with these metal sounds. With a mystery.

Baikonur was, as we find out in the film, «one of the most secret places in the world» – a place not even mentioned on any map.

The oldest and biggest space launching station was in fact not marked on any map. Up to the early nineties, over 100 000 workers and engineers worked here – privileged heroes of the Soviet Union, kept in complete isolation in the middle of the steppes of Kazakhstan.

A self-contained railway system took them to distant launch pads scattered across an area the size of Switzerland. Every three days a rocket was shot into the sky. A legendary place, a place steeped in history! And paradise for a documentary filmmaker.

The Romanian rocket enthusiast Dumitru Popescu wants to build his own solar-powered balloon to travel into the stratosphere, and ultimately to the moon...

When Anousheh Ansari became the main sponsor of the Ansari X Prize, it triggered a new space race. From then on, trips into outer space were no longer to be reserved for professional astronauts and billionaires alone.

Private companies were encouraged to seize the initiative and offer «affordable» tourist flights into space. One of the most remarkable participants in this competition is the Romanian Dumitru Popescu and his team. His concept is sublimely simple – both from an ecological and an economical standpoint. The balloon which takes him up into the stratosphere is the biggest solar-powered Montgolfier balloon ever built. A 230-foot tall plastic bag filled with air, heated by the sun, which lifts his spacecraft. Brilliant!

More than three years have passed between the initial idea for the film and its completion...

I’ve slowly come to accept the fact that I only release a feature film approximately every four years. The topics I choose happen to be very complex and require an extreme amount of persistence and patience. But I also enjoy the phases of doing research and getting acquainted with the topic.

Three years ago I was invited to Oerlikon in Zurich for a convention of space stamp collectors. And I discovered that these stamp collectors cultivate very close and cordial friendships with Russian cosmonauts. A few months later, thanks to those connections, I managed to be the only cameraman to get up close when Anousheh was lifted out of the capsule!