British documentary maker David Sington was given unrestricted access to the NASA film archives to make In the Shadow of the Moon, his film about the Apollo Space Programme. Here he tells IGN about his fascination with space, his hopes to one day visit the moon, and why his documentary is like a dinner party with the astronauts.
Q: Were you always fascinated by outer space exploration?
I’ve never been a space fanatic but I remember the Apollo missions vividly as a child and I do think that a generation of people was changed by Apollo in ways that are very easy to take for granted nowadays. Certainly we all now understand that the Earth is this blue marble in space, but nobody had seen that image before 1968, it didn’t exist. Jim Lovell and his two companions were the first people ever to see the Earth entire and as [astronaut] Charlie Duke says in the film, the only people to have seen the whole circle of the Earth are the 24 guys who went to the Moon.
Q: So what was the impetus to make this film?
I’m very interested in environmental matters and made some films on it, and all of that understanding is influenced by Apollo. Indeed all the photos that we have of the Earth like that are from Apollo. For me the interest of the film was in meeting and talking to the men who’d had this totally unique human experience because I didn’t think I knew anything about them as people. Nothing that I’d ever seen in fiction or documentary had really communicated to me what they were like.
Q: Did the astronauts live up to your expectations?
Well it’s a strange thing because you look up at the Moon and think, gosh I’m about to go and meet somebody who’s been up there. That’s an awe-inspiring not to say alarming thought. Mike Collins himself in the film says I can hardly believe I was up there. I think that they all have a certain kind of down-to-earth wisdom –
No pun intended!
Well no, in a sense they’re all more down-to-earth than us, precisely because they know what being ‘down-to-earth’ really means. I think that makes them all really attractive people and that’s really the idea of the film. I wanted it to be like a dinner party with the astronauts, to get to know them as people.
Q: What level of co-operation did NASA give you?
We had unrestricted access to the NASA film archives. NASA produced a series of half-hour documentaries about each mission at the time but of course behind the twenty tapes, there were 10,000 other rolls of film and that was what nobody had really explored.
Q: So what new images made the biggest impression?
There’s one extraordinary 2001-ish shot of the upper stage of the rocket separating from its housing in space and the spacecraft zooms off into the blackness and this thing turns and falls back towards the earth, that’s a very spectacular shot. But also I like some of shots of the construction of the spacecraft where you see engineers working with wooden models. There are no computers in sight, no 3-D mock-ups, everything’s done with rulers and protractors and pens and wooden models. I thought that was amazing.
Q: Are you surprised that there haven’t been such big symbolic breakthroughs since Apollo?
Yeah, I thought when I was a kid watching Apollo that probably I would go to the Moon when I grew up, that it would become something that lots of people could do. Lots of people thought like that – I think the astronauts themselves thought like that. By the early 70s, by the end of Apollo, it was becoming clear that that wasn’t going to happen. And actually one of the main reasons it didn’t happen was Vietnam. Vietnam was like Iraq is today, a huge black hole that sucked a lot of American taxpayers dollars and flushed them down the loo. And that put a budgetary squeeze on the government. And also I think Vietnam kind of knocked the wind out of the sails of the American psyche.
Q: If civilians do have the chance to go up in our lifetime, presumably as the director of this film you have a chance to be among the candidates?
I have made this point to the Deputy Director of NASA – “If you are going to go back to the Moon, you really ought to think about taking a filmmaker along…” I’d probably be pushing it a bit but I’d be younger than John Glenn. If I were NASA I’d want to go back in 2019, the 50th anniversary and obviously I’ll be in my 50s then, so I don’t think that’s impossible.
Q: What about the conspiracy theorists who claim the Moon landings were faked?
I never gave any credence to those sorts of stories because I was there when it happened. The notion it’s a fake is transparently ridiculous and the people who believe that believe in fairy stories. How could you possibly fake something like that?
Q: Maybe they’ve seen that 70s thriller Capricorn One about faked moon landings?
Yes but the key to Capricorn One is that the astronauts have to be killed in order to get away with it. So you’d have to kill every involved and you certainly wouldn’t allow them to go around giving interviews to every Tom, Dick and Harry like me, would you? Nobody can keep a secret, not like that. In fact, if the US government was able to fake the Apollo moon landings, I’d kind of want them to take over the entire world because they’re clearly a lot smarter than the rest of us!
—–
The published article can be read on IGN – ‘In the Shadow of the Moon Interview’