“WE CAN BE AMAZING IF WE WANT TO BE”

Turner takes us behind the scenes of his docuseries Among the Stars, available now on Disney+

- Daisy Dobrijevic

BIO

Ben Turner Turner is a director, producer and founding partner of Fulwell 73 Productions. He has worked across a wide range of genres in documentary, drama, comedy and music. His latest project, Disney+’s Among the Stars, chronicles NASA’s quest to replace failing cooling pumps on a cosmic-ray detection experiment, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), on the International Space Station. The six-part show is centred around astronaut Chris Cassidy, astrophysicist Dr Samuel Ting, AMS project manager Ken Bollweg and a global cast of talented space professionals. The full series of Among the Stars is available to watch on Disney+.

You’ve made quite a lot of documentaries, including sports documentaries. How did you find yourself pivoting over to a space documentary?

The more I’ve done, the more I’ve had license to indulge in my passions. One of the great privileges of being a filmmaker is to get to see the world through other people’s eyes. I’ve always wanted to make something about space, and I’ve been trying to get into NASA for a long time.

We used to make a lot of music videos with One Direction, and we realised that they were so big that they could open more or less any door for us – like NASA. And they came to us once with a song called Drag Me Down, and we were like, well, what’s the opposite of drag me down? Launch on a spaceship! We pitched it, they liked it and we got into the Johnson Space Center just to shoot the One Direction music video, and that was the first time I ever got in there. The recce day was one of the greatest days of my life.