While growing up, one of my heroes was Amelia Earhart. She defied expectations by attempting to fly around the world. Rumors were that she had disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle, but apparently no one has seen her since that day she disappeared in 1937. There is so much missing about her story that I would have loved to have learned about as an adult. Recently, I saw the 1933 film “Christopher Strong,” directed by the trailblazing Dorothy Arzner and starring Katherine Hepburn as an Amelia Earhart-type, a few years before the real-life pilot disappeared. Like Amelia, she seems to defy gravity in the air, and breaks records that her male counterparts could not reach. But the film ends in tragedy when her plane explodes, a result of her distraught response to being in a secret relationship with a married man. It’s a dated and sexist conclusion to an otherwise compelling film, but it does subvert one’s perception of heroes being invincible. Reading about Ameila’s achievements as a child inspired me to wonder whether I could be invincible too.
This was how filmmaker Cristina Costantini first perceived astronaut Sally Ride. She was the first woman to go to space on June 18th, 1983, which immediately made her a hero in the public eye, and to Cristina. Sally was good at keeping her private life a secret, but after her death in 2012, it became public that she had a closeted relationship with a female partner for 27 years. This brought Cristina deeper into Sally’s story. Coincidentally, Story Syndicate was looking to tackle the story of Sally Ride as a follow-up to their feature documentary, “Becoming Cousteau.” National Geographic gave Cristina the job to direct the film on Sally’s life, with Story Syndicate producing. Cristina was drawn to the story that still had not been told on screen, the one that involved her devoted partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy. I had the opportunity to speak with “Sally” when it premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and received the Science-in-Film feature film jury prize from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (partnered with the Sundance Film Institute).
How did you come to this project and how did you meet Tam?
As long as I can remember, I’ve been a huge fan of Sally Ride. In fact, I can’t remember a time when I was not a fan of Sally. When I was in elementary school, I painted a mural of her on my school’s wall, and it’s still there today. She’s up there with Michael Jordan and Brett Farve and other popular stars and childhood icons. It was a very simple equation for me: if Sally, a girl like me, could go to space, maybe I could do big things too. I think that was true for a lot of women. She represents women who can do these really badass, athletic, and really brave things that women for a long time weren’t “supposed to do.” Then in 2012, when Sally passed away, I learned along with the rest of the world that she was survived by a female life partner, and that she had this queer romance for 27 years that nobody knew about. When that happened, I immediately thought, ‘Wow, NASA was barely ready for a woman. I wonder what that would have been like and how that would have felt had the news come out during her lifetime.’
I was really interested in the story, but it wasn’t until many years later that Story Syndicate had been working with National Geographic on a film called “Becoming Cousteau,” and they were looking for their next explorer film. They had reached out to Tam to get her to sign on to do a project about Sally. Coincidentally, I had emailed Carolyn Bernstein at National Geographic about the possibility of doing a film on Sally Ride, and she told me they were already developing a film. So I put my hat in the ring, and it was a great honor that they chose me to direct this film.
When I met Tam, that was the day it all really changed. She’s an incredible storyteller. Her bravery and her desire to be really vulnerable and honest about who Sally was made me realize that we could make a difference and make something really special together.
I feel like this film is sadly timely in light of where we’re at in our country. Why do you think this film is so important right now?
When we started making this film, it didn’t feel like it was going to be as radical to celebrate queer love as it does now. It didn’t feel like it would be as radical of an act. And now, we find ourselves in the fight of our lives for these basic human rights for queer and trans people. I really wanted to make this film for anyone who’s ever had to hide part of who they are to get where they want to be. I think for Sally’s story, it’s two things. First, Sally’s story gives me hope because you can see how far we’ve come from how women were treated in the mainstream media, and how little we thought about the abilities of women in 1983 when Sally went to space. But it also shows me that people can change. We can progress like the Mike Mullanes in our story. People can admit that they were wrong, change how they think about things, and drop biases. We can get better, so it gives me hope in that sense. But it also serves as a stark reminder of where we can go if we don’t fight for these rights. These rights are not guaranteed and they have been won by people who came before us and fought for them, people like Sally. I hope that the film gives us the courage and the strength to keep fighting.
I think it’s great how you guys pieced the film together, and how you told Tam and Sally’s story through the public eye. Can you talk about the editing process with Kate Hackett and Andrew McAllister?
This is a film that was made in the edit, like most documentaries are. But this one especially, because archival films are completely constructed in a way. We used archival like it was vérité, which is what Kate and Andy are so good at. We had thousands of hours of film, including 5,000 tapes from NASA, a reel from the NASA archive that we had to bring into the system. There were a total of 17,000 different individual pieces of archival material that were brought in, logged and looked at, so it was really a team effort. We were so terrified that we were going to miss some gem. Our team consisted of Kate, Andy, and myself; Tom Maroney, who was the head of story and writing, and who co-wrote the film with me; co-producer Eugen Bräunig; associate producer Juliana Hartman; and Stephen Slater, who was one of our NASA archival consultants. It was just an entire team of people who were obsessed with not missing a gem.
We really had to chisel out these scenes from the rough rock that was the NASA archive. For most documentaries, you shoot a day, come home, and the scene is obvious. These were all constructed from found footage, so it was a much tougher task in many ways. That was the NASA side of it, which was difficult in one way. On the other side of it was the personal, romantic material, which was difficult in a completely different way, in that we had nothing. We had only about six pictures of Tam and Sally together. How are you going to tell a love story with six pictures? Many of them were just professional looking, with two people standing together but not touching. So we decided to shoot all of these visual elements with stand-ins for Sally and Tam.
I like how you did it too. It wasn’t cheesy at all, and really fit within the landscape of the film.
Yeah, we didn’t want them to be super-cheesy. We wanted them shot on film and they are more of a vibe than they are scenes. They’re just visual representations of what it feels like to fall in love, to have a secret, and what it’s like to be in a sexy lab. These were key set pieces from their romance and in their love story. It was a joy and such a privilege to be able to tell this story of an American historical figure in a way that had never been told before.
And I love that you started with her appearance on “Sesame Street,” which is where many children likely first encountered Sally and began to view her as a hero. What do you hope people see in your film?
That’s a great question. I think our film is about bravery, and I feel we need to be brave right now. This film is about how to be brave, and you see within it many different kinds of bravery. As a kid, I thought Sally was the bravest person that I could imagine. She can go up like a literal bomb into space, and risk her life. Then I met Tam and as an adult, her kind of bravery is actually much more remarkable to me. To live in a time when being gay is dangerous, you could lose everything: your job, your social circle, your life. Tam was brave enough to say back then, “I’m gay and I’m proud and I’m out.” Those are two very different kinds of bravery. There’s also another kind of bravery that I admire more as I’ve gotten older, which is what Mike Mullane demonstrates. For him to say, “I was bigoted and I was wrong. I had held these beliefs like most of society and I’ve changed,” there is heroism in that, and should be seen as a heroic act. Society often doesn’t celebrate that kind of bravery, especially right now. They only celebrate strong men who think that they have never been wrong. But it’s a very brave thing to say, “I was wrong, I got it wrong. I want to be better. How do I get better? How can I learn?” That, to me, is a very admirable trait that we want to celebrate.
