This year’s Topanga Film Festival includes a story that started with a silver briefcase. Director Archie Macpherson remembers the moment clearly. He’d just moved to Topanga Canyon and met musician Will Worden, who showed up carrying an old silver briefcase stuffed with memorabilia from the 1960s, including a weathered journal that once belonged to his grandfather, Colonel Al Worden, an Apollo 15 astronaut.
Al Worden’s story is astonishing, and In the summer of 1971, while crewmates David Scott and James Irwin explored the lunar surface near the Apennine Mountains, Worden orbited the Moon alone, 74 times over three days, making him, by some measures, the most isolated human being who had ever lived, separated from any other soul by more than two-hundred-thousand miles of vacuum.
On the way home, he did something no one had done before: a deep-space spacewalk, floating outside the command module to retrieve film cassettes from the ship’s scientific instruments; including a TV camera and a 16mm camera, a maneuver he’d rehearsed underwater at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. At one point of the mission, clipping the cassette to his own wrist so it couldn’t drift away into the dark. When the capsule finally made its way down into Earth’s atmosphere, one of its three parachutes failed. On that day a margin of two was enough.
“Will shared stories of Al embarking on the Apollo 15 missions,” Macpherson recalls. He and Worden became “kind of obsessed” with old 16mm Air Force training reels on YouTube—some of which Al Worden appeared in—and the two decided a story set in that world would make the perfect music video. Of all Will’s songs, Macpherson says this one “jumped out to me as the most cinematic, vast and epic. It felt perfect for a story driven music video.”
What followed was a genuine canyon-crew road trip: Macpherson, Worden, and cinematographer Seth Naugle driving from LA into the Arizona desert dunes, then on to Sedona, where it snowed unexpectedly and they simply kept rolling film in it. Worden threw himself into the physical work of it, climbing boulders, “fake-parachuting,” staying present as locations revealed themselves along the way. The trip ended at a private airstrip, where Worden had called in favors to secure not one but two vintage aircraft, including a 1950s fighter jet, through the generosity of friends Vernon Rich and Scratch Mitchell.
“The only VFX we used was a green screen behind the yellow plane, and then the glinting reflection in the dune. Huge thanks to Ben Winter for doing excellent work there.
“For all the aerial footage, timing was on our side as Vern and Scratch had just been testing their gimbal mounted camera plane, and captured this incredible aerial footage. They kindly allowed us to use it, which completely elevated those scenes beyond what we had dreamed.” The aerial footage that resulted became some of the film’s most striking imagery.
For Worden himself, the song and the video weren’t really born in nature—despite the desert backdrop.
“Chaos is more inspiring to me than nature, honestly,” he says. “I think nature serves a great purpose—grounding, a reset—and I do find that in rock climbing or horseback riding. But I don’t necessarily find musical inspiration out there. The music comes when I’m driving on the 101 and I hear a melody and I’m just singing it into my phone before it disappears.”
The video, he explains, carries two threads at once: a reconnection with “the divine feminine” and his own path toward learning “how to fly again,” under the direction of his heart. It’s also a tribute to his grandfather, whose wisdom, he says, has stayed with him “even post death,” guiding him “in a very special spiritual way.”
The plane becomes both memory and metaphor: a bridge between Al Worden’s path in the sky and his grandson’s navigation of life on the ground.
Worden is equally quick to credit Macpherson’s approach. “It feels very natural and very classic,” he says of the director’s style. “It doesn’t feel like we’re chasing something.” The project took three and a half years, start to finish — an eternity by internet standards. “We live in such a viral day and age where everyone’s just creating for a certain reaction,” Worden says. “He’s very intentional and very patient.”
For festival co-director Adam Noble Roberts, the music video became the seed of something bigger. “Both the video itself, and the talent of Will Worden himself, inspire the idea of doing a mini showcase,” he says. Other local musicians had submitted videos of their own, and the team decided to widen the lens.
Underneath it all is a simple belief about why festivals still matter in a streaming world. “It’s really the difference between watching something on your computer or listening to it alone,” Roberts says. “It’s so different to be in a room with a large group of people taking in the art—in this case, it’s just on a bigger scale, in a communal experience kind of way.”
Macpherson, for his part, is looking forward to something smaller and just as important: seeing his neighbors’ work up on a screen. “I’m looking forward to hanging out with all the canyon filmmakers in one place, and seeing the amazing work being made in our backyard.”
That backyard opens its doors at our Community Center Labor Day weekend.
