Two years ago, documentarian Matt Wolf was poking around the internet when he came across a striking image of eight people in red jumpsuits in front of a glass pyramid. “I thought it was a still from a science fiction film,” he said. “Then I realized it was real.”
Wolf and I were in the back of an ice cream parlor in Park City, Utah—a plastic cow in a cowboy hat just inches away—discussing his new film, Spaceship Earth. Finished just in time for Sundance, it’s a fascinating portrait of a late-’60s counterculture theater group that somehow ended up in the Arizona desert, leading the $200 million scientific research facility Biosphere 2.
The Biosphere 2 experiment documented in Spaceship Earth lasted from 1991 to 1993. Eight individuals across different scientific practices entered an enormous, closed ecosystem intended to replicate all of the diversity of earth—a.k.a. Biosphere 1—then sealed the doors behind them. The idea was that they would both lead experiments and be the experiment, in a medical as well as sociological manner. The goals were simultaneously altruistic (“we may one day need to colonize Mars if we truly screw up our environment”) and also profit-driven (“we can sell any proprietary technologies we stumble upon”).
Biosphere 2 became a tourist attraction and fixture on the nightly news; as a result, there were, to put it mildly, unforeseen complications. Then came a twist ending involving bad faith business practices and a young banker who went on to become one of the 21st century’s most notorious villains. (No spoilers, but you can Google it!)
Spaceship Earth is the fourth feature for Wolf, a sharp-witted, San Jose-bred, New York-based 30-something and Guggenheim Fellow. In 2019, he released Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, the remarkable story of a woman who obsessively taped television for decades—amassing a one-of-a-kind library while simultaneously ruining her own life. Prior to that came Teenage, based on Jon Savage’s book about the origin of the 20th century concept of adolescence, and Wild Combination, a heartbreaking portrait of musician Arthur Russell, whose work was rediscovered long after his death from AIDS in 1992. In between came a number of shorts, including It’s Me, Hilary: The Man Who Drew Eloise, starring Lena Dunham and everyone’s favorite Plaza Hotel-dwelling little girl, plus a stint as cocurator of film for the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
His subjects seem at first to have little in common with one another. “I’m interested in outsider visionary figures who beg for reappraisal,” he said when pressed for a recurring theme. He called them hidden histories. Each time he uses a similar method: culling material from an enormous, oftentimes never-before-touched archive. His ideas are frequently born from discovering something weird online.
Wolf was just a kid when the first Biosphere 2 experiment was launched—though, like the rest of us, he does remember the Pauly Shore film Bio-Dome. The second he learned its story, though, he was “absolutely determined to make the film.” When the living “Biospherians” welcomed him and opened their enormous archive of 16mm film and Hi8 video, he recognized an urgency to get this story, with its environmentalist and late capitalist implications, out now.
Despite being initially dazzled by the theatricality of Biosphere 2’s look, Wolf does not consider himself “a sci-fi guy.” He was a shy kid, he told me, and up until his mid-20s, his friends were always older. At the age of 16, he responded to an ad in a queer youth center in San Francisco and ended up the “novelty young intern,” working on a documentary about Harry Hay—the gay activist who cofounded the Mattachine Society and, very in tune with Wolf’s later work, the countercultural, anarchic, and spiritual group called the Radical Faeries.