Documentary details Garriott's space adventure

Stereotypical wedding receptions feature an unknown band cranking out radio hits from the '70s, rubbery chicken, teenagers sneaking forbidden sips of grown-up drinks and an intoxicated uncle attempting to master the Electric Slide. People chat about their kids or recent vacations or how pretty the bride looked. Rarely does the conversation turn toward space travel. Of course, most wedding receptions don't have as a guest a private citizen who harbors ambitions of leaving the Earth's atmosphere.

Legendary Austin video game designer and producer Richard Garriott spent a lifetime dreaming of traveling to space. In January 2010, he was on the precipice of a grueling physical training regimen that would determine his fitness for the otherworldly venture.

Filmmakers Mike Woolf and Brady Dial independently approached Garriott at their mutual friends' wedding reception with a simple question: "Who is filming this thing?"

"It had never crossed my mind to even consider a documentary until they had mentioned it," Garriott says. "When they did mention it, it was the most obviously correct thing to do."

Garriott was due in San Antonio the following week for a centrifuge test run, the final hurdle that would determine whether he would be able to take his training to Space City in Russia. Undeterred by the lack of a budget or production schedule, the filmmaking team sprang into action the day after the wedding.

"He had me at 'centrifuge,'" Woolf says.

The team traveled to San Antonio to film the first scenes for what would become "Man On A Mission: Richard Garriott's Road to the Stars."

A Baltimore native and Boston University graduate, Woolf originally came to Austin in the mid-'90s to work for advertising agency GSD&M. It seemed fitting that the man (Woolf) who wrote the tag line "Wanna Get Away?" for Southwest Airlines and a producer (Dial) whose most recent credit was an IMAX film titled "Ride Around the World" were teaming up to make a movie about space travel.

On a personal level, Garriott wanted the film to be made as a document of his experience. But he also recognized the importance of detailing a ground-breaking transition in global space activity.

As the son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, a veteran of Skylab in the early '70s and the space shuttle in 1983, Richard Garriott would represent the completion of the first American father-son duo to travel to space. An early investor in technology designed to enable citizens to travel to space, Garriott believed that his journey would advance the idea that space travel could eventually be made more accessible to private citizens.

After enduring the challenges of the centrifuge run in Texas, Garriott and the film crew headed to Space City, outside Moscow, where they were given unprecedented access to the inner workings of the Russian space program. As they learned about Russia's rich history in space travel, the filmmakers began to contextualize Garriott's place in the lineage of both Russian and American space exploration. Garriott's bold curiosity and lifelong desire to reach space guided the story, with the filmmakers following his lead.

"We talked about whether we would have a voiceover or not," Woolf says. "Pretty quickly it became apparent that this was going to be in Richard's words because it was so first-person. And he's a great storyteller, so why put our words on top of what he's already describing so perfectly. I felt like we were there to follow him around. The story's so good by itself, let's just tell it."

Though Garriott paid $30 million for his trip to space, he never tried to direct the narrative of the film or treat the filmmaking team as subjugates.

"We tried to hold back at first to let him set the boundaries, because it is his adventure," Dial says. "He's paid for it. He's let us come along for the ride, and as documentarians you don't want to influence your subject. You want to have a little bit of distance. But at the same time it's such an isolated, strange place, he wanted to have someone be there. He's a really warm, kind persona. He's very outgoing and very sharing."

The filmmakers entered the production with only a slight understanding of the details of the narrative arc. They knew the story began with Garriott's childhood dream of following his father into space and that the film would (hopefully) end with a safe landing. But outside those markers, they were making their event-based documentary on the fly.