Tales from Apollo, with 1 missing man on the moon

An audience prizewinner at this year's Sundance Film Festival, David Sington's documentary "In the Shadow of the Moon" (opening Friday) concentrates on stories told by the Apollo astronauts who orbited or walked on the moon between 1968 and 1972.

The wide-ranging interviews have plenty of heart and humor, as well as a touch of spirituality. But the film's most overwhelming emotion is nostalgia for a time when an unpopular war had not dampened worldwide enthusiasm for American courage and ingenuity.

"It's good to be reminded of the potential to actually achieve things, which I think does still exist in this country," Sington said when he brought the movie to the Seattle International Film Festival in May. He recently finished a film about global warming, and he sees that as a challenge similar to what faced the United States after the Russians sent up the first satellite in 1957.

"The unsung sort of hero of the space program is [President] Eisenhower," he said. "His response to Sputnik was to create NASA, which is a civilian space agency. He tried to demilitarize the space race."

While Sington acknowledges President Kennedy's push for the moon landings, "There was stuff on paper when he arrived. He didn't start with a complete blank sheet. What's interesting about Apollo is that it sort of began as this big competition with the Russians, but then it sort of transcended that.

"That was the genius of it. It was a nonmilitary way of fighting the Cold War. It was a cultural struggle, and it was a demonstration of the superiority of an open society."

The silent astronaut

"In the Shadow of the Moon" began as a British documentary intended to bring back the surviving Apollo astronauts for a reunion. Eventually it became a co-production between the BBC and the Discovery Channel, which is also planning a miniseries based on interviews and material unearthed during the production.

"In order to secure the financing, we had to get a commitment from a certain number of astronauts," said Sington. "That took a long time." Perhaps the most famous, Neil Armstrong, did not agree to be filmed. He was also absent from the Oscar-nominated 1989 documentary about the moon landings, "For All Mankind."

"He's reluctant to give interviews," said Sington. "We'd been in e-mail correspondence with him during the course of making the film, and he's been very supportive of it and he's never exactly said no to doing it. But he never quite said yes.

"I felt at first it was a bit frustrating, obviously, though I was understanding of his desire for privacy. It wasn't a very attractive prospect to have your face suddenly on cinema screens across America. He's not been out there, in the way that someone like Buzz Aldrin has been."

Despite his misgivings, Sington said he began to understand the rationale behind Armstrong's silence.

"I fully understand his sort of reluctance," he said. "Actually, I came to appreciate it as the film started to come together in the cutting room. Perhaps he was doing a very smart thing, really, by not constantly giving interviews.

"If you have an anecdote, something that happens to you in life and you can dine out on it, after awhile what matters is the anecdote, not the event. And I think that by not speaking publicly about 'one small step' and all that, he's allowed the event to stay fresh."

"In the Shadow of the Moon" does include some archival footage of Armstrong that was shot at the time of the moon landing, as well as several recent, almost worshipful comments about him from fellow astronauts. In the process of editing the picture, Sington felt that this indirect approach made it "a better film, a more interesting film, because of his absence in the heart of it."

New moon scenes

Some of the footage has never been screened publicly before. NASA has about 10,000 cans of sketchily cataloged material from the Apollo voyages, including color film from the moon landings that has been reprocessed through high-definition technology.

"It gives the whole thing an immediacy I don't think it's had before," said Sington, who credits researchers and producer Duncan Copp with finding the footage.

When the miniseries turns up on television next year, it will focus less on the astronauts than on the 4,000 other people involved in the Apollo launches.

"It will deal with Apollo from the perspective of those who built it rather than those who flew it," he said.

"At one point, we had a three-hour cut of this film, which I thought was really, really good, but you can't make a paying audience sit still for three hours. It's just not fair."

In other words, look for the DVD and the Discovery Channel for the rest of the story.

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com