Moon landing anniversary docos Apollo 11 and Missions To the Moon take viewers into space
The first moon landing was one of the most extraordinary achievements of mankind and two new docos shed new light on the trip with previously unseen footage and audio.
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Even 50 years later, the Apollo 11 mission that put a man on the moon for the first time still stands as one of the towering achievements of the human race.
Thousands of technicians, scientists, mathematicians and a few brave astronauts all joined forces using technology and computers that would be put in the shade by a modern smart phone to bring to fruition then US President John F. Kennedy’s bold 1962 pledge to achieve the feat before the end of that decade.
But after the crowning glory of July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong took one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind, the interest of the public waned and NASA and the space community never again quite commanded the same attention and adulation again. With the half-century milestone looming next Saturday, a slew of timely documentaries including Apollo 11 and Apollo: Missions To the Moon are a timely reminder of just what a momentous feat it was.
For Todd Douglas Miller, the director of Apollo 11, which opens in cinemas on Thursday, the best approach to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing was to take modern audiences back to event itself using original footage and audio to trace the extraordinary 8-day journey of Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins.
“I think to do the story justice and to the story right you really have to do what we ultimately ended up doing, which was going to NASA and the National Archives and just saying that we wanted everything related to the mission,” says Miller.
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When he did just that though, and mindful of not wanting to just rehash what has become some of the most famous news footage ever, Miller got more than he bargained for. In a documentarian’s dream come true, he came across a huge collection of unprocessed, 65mm, large-format footage never before seen by the public and a staggering 11,000 hours of audio recordings. The boffins’ bonanza changed everything and, after years of converting and documenting the new findings, enabled Miller and his team to piece together an exhaustive and exhilarating exploration of the trip, without resorting to a narrator or talking heads.
“We wanted to really just go on the ride,” he says. “With the Apollo missions you could really kind of set your watch to when things happen. We knew we would have a launch that was exciting and a landing that would be exciting and then the re-entry scene and then it was basically trying to fill in all the gaps of all the moments.
“With the Apollo missions, those were the big three but there were really nine stages of things that had to happen for the mission to be successful. When I was editing the film that’s exactly what I wanted it to feel like, that there were these insanely intense moments of life threatening things — either firing engines in space or docking with a spacecraft, which could be a deadly serious business. I always thought it was completely underplayed in other films that I had seen.”
Miller also used footage from previous Apollo missions to depict events he knew happened on 11 but weren’t documented. Thankfully, he had access to the most reliable of sources — Aldrin, Collins and the family of Armstrong, who died in 2012.
“We showed it to (Buzz) right before Sundance and there were just a few little technical things that I wanted to make sure we got right,” says Miller. “He is such a champion of the film, which has been such a relief because obviously we want to get it right. And Michael Collins too and Neil’s sons Rick and Mark have been there from the beginning, which has been the thrill of a lifetime for me. It’s an honour and a very humbling experience to have those guys’ input on the film.”
Peabody award-winning documentarian Tom Jennings took a broader view for Apollo: Missions To the Moon, which screens on the National Geographic channel tomorrow night, and traces the events of the missions that led up to the moon landings and those that followed.
“We made a conscious decision from the very start that it would not be just about 11, basically our film goes from Sputnik to the Space Shuttle so you get all of the Apollo missions in there. You have a little bit of Mercury and Gemini, prior to Apollo and then you have all the Apollo missions told in a very dynamic way.”
He also eschewed the talking-head format but cast his net wide to local news networks from Mission Control base of Houston and Cape Kennedy in Florida and his own native Cleveland, Ohio, to find footage that had not aired since the 1960s. Missions To the Moon also examines the broader context of the space race, which sprang as much from Cold War paranoia as it did the spirit of exploration, and the rock star status of the astronauts.
“We have a lot of fun stuff that people have never heard or seen before from inside Mission Control but we also have the crew of Apollo 7 on The Bob Hope Show,” Jennings says. “They were the first ones to do a live television broadcast from space so Bob Hope had them on. To see it, it’s evocative of that age of innocence in the type of comedy that was common back then. I really feel like we are giving people a texture of what it was like to be alive and experiencing this in as real time as possible.”
Chillingly, he also uncovers an interview with Gus Grissom, who was slated to be the first man on the moon before he was killed with alongside Ed White and Roger Chaffee in a launch pad test, in which he discusses the risks of the program and the ever-present possibility of tragedy.
“The Grissom one was especially haunting when we found that,” he says. “That’s an example of when you go through the footage and you find stuff like that. I didn’t know he said that, I never saw that interview with him before. I am old enough to barely remember the Apollo 11 mission and how it consumed everyone’s attention and how the astronauts were these larger than life characters.
“If anything I have learned from the footage it’s that they are real men — they weren’t gods — but at the same time they were the type of people that had a goal, they were going for it and they were going to figure it out however, and if they had to risk their lives doing it, they were willing to do that.”
Apollo 11 is now showing at IMAX in Melbourne and opens in cinemas on Thursday. Apollo: Missions To the Moon, Foxtel’s National Geographic Channel, tomorrow, 8.30pm.
Originally published as Moon landing anniversary docos Apollo 11 and Missions To the Moon take viewers into space
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