Christopher Riley: A Great Escape

I’m a writer, and film director and producer. This means that I spend my days writing – either for print or for scripts for documentary films, or organising the logistics to get them made.

There’s no such thing as a typical day. Every day is different. What I do depends on the stage I might be at with a project, and often working on several at once I end up juggling the hours in a single day to fit in all of the tasks below. These range from speaking to people or reading about them and their work for the research needed for a new film or book idea, to pitching the stories to a third party to try and find investment to make them happen.

Or if I’m in production on a film – working to produce and write a shooting script, drawing up budgets, setting up a shoot with a team of other producers, researchers and production managers. Or if I’m on a shoot then a day might involve travelling somewhere to film and interview characters, or sitting in an edit (usually back in London) and shaping all the footage and re-working the shooting script into a finished film – which is mostly about writing again at that stage.

So a typical day can involve elements of all of these stages in making a film or writing a book, which can make each day very long. I tend to do some work every day of the week – and often work late into the evenings to try and keep up with all the concurrent projects that I might be involved with at any one time.

I’m reading a science fiction book called The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. I’m not really a science fiction fan – but my next film is about science in China – and Cixin’s stories often reflect something of Chinese culture and history – which has shaped the way they approach and conduct scientific research today. And I’m trying to better understand that.

It was a book called The Lure of the Falcon by Gerald Summers, and I think it appealed to me because it was about nature and one particular creature’s relationship with a human being, and I was very interested in animals at that time.

Page folder; I always lose bookmarks!

After The Lure of the Falcon by Gerald Summers – I started reading a series of books by a writer called Willard Price. I loved his writings about two brothers who toured the world together collecting wild animals for zoological collections – something that is thankfully mostly outlawed today. They were adventure stories and I found the books terrifically absorbing, and first realised reading could be such a great escape.

At age 16 I think I would have given myself A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin. I didn’t discover it until I was much older – and I think I would have loved to read it sooner. By 25 years old I think I would have given myself a book called God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment by Scott Adams. It reminded me how to see the world differently. Something I could have done with as I was completing my Ph.D. at that age.

A long remote train journey or a plane ride, with no distractions from emails and other social media.

Story by Robert McKee – because it makes you think deeply about structuring stories – and makes you a better writer and storyteller. And we all need to be better storytellers. The second would be Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan – which gives a personal insight into understanding and appreciating the vastness of the cosmos, from one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. It’s a book that spans so much – and paints the most accurate picture I’ve read of how we might fit into the Universe. Lastly, I’d recommend In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing by Walter Murch which is a wonderful insight into visual storytelling – that’s helped me to write better scripts.

Scientist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, physicist and inventor of the particle accelerator Gerard O’Neil, rocket scientist and futurologist Werner von Braun, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and, although technically more a purveyor of books than an author, Jeff Bezos. The first group of people were the pioneering thinkers and writers behind the idea to make us a space fairing civilisation. They lived to see us start this dream – but died before it properly came to fruition. Connecting them with their modern-day equivalent – Jeff Bezos – whose space company Blue Origin might just succeed in delivering their dream, would make for an epoch-defining dinner party conversation.

Escapism (in fiction) and the spread of ideas worth sharing (in non-fiction) – one of the key things that make us human.

I’ve not read much in the last six months as I’ve been writing quite intensely for a couple of documentaries and two books I’ve been working on. I don’t read for pleasure when I’m writing – as I spend so much of the day reading for work. But before that – (within the last year) I read a book by Hector and the Search for Happiness by Francois Lelord. I loved Lelord’s simple use of language – which brought a refreshing, child-like wonder to observing the world and what makes life worth living. It inspired me to write my latest book – Where Once We Stood – which attempts to capture what it felt like to visit the Moon, buy using a similar voice and language as Lelord does.

I’d love to have been a Capsule Communicators (Capcom) in A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin – which would have meant conversing directly with the Apollo astronauts during their pioneering exploration of the lunar surface; as their only point of voice contact with Earth.

Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine Saint-Exupery. This book, by the author of The Little Prince, is an autobiographical account of Antoine’s adventures during WWII – as a pilot, reflecting on the meaning and significance of life from a humanistic philosophy and how perceptions of life are shifted when you are tested to your limits. A good lesson for anyone grappling with their existence and purpose in life.

Men from Earth by Buzz Aldrin, which I read in my early 30s. It’s a visceral account of what it was like to fly a 1960s spaceship to another world – and propelled me into an obsession with the Apollo program – that started me on a path which led to many of the books I’ve written, and films I’ve made since then, which celebrate the audacity of NASA’s 1960s Moon shots.

Easy Travel to Other Planets by Ted Mooney is a fictionalised story of an attempt at another Moon shot idea; the building of an interspecies communication bridge between humans and dolphins. This was a real experiment attempted in the 1960s, by neuroscientist John Lilly – which I made a film about, for the BBC, in 2014 called “The Girl who talked to Dolphins”. Like God’s Debris, Mooney’s book challenges our perceptions of reality and like Varieties of Scientific Experience, it tries to shed light on what it is to be human. Not only does it cover these grand ideas, but it also touches on some very prescient themes – such as our current epidemic of information overload and our existential environmental crises.

I like books about connections and systems – the sort that makes our planet such a rich haven for life. Having spent most of my career immersed in planetary science I’m desperate to better understand our economic systems. To attempt this I’ve started to delve into the writings of Mariana Mazzucato. I’ve just bought her books The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths and The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. I’m excited to dive into these as soon as I get a chance.