David Sington 002, "In the Shadow of the Moon" director: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2

(Return to Part 1)

BOB ANDELMAN: Were you surprised at how poor the film quality was from Apollo 11 compared to what there was later? I mean, it’s not like better equipment wasn’t available by 1969.

DAVID SINGTON: The TV footage is very poor quality, but some of the film footage is fine. Our shots of Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon are not the ones that we are used to seeing, which is the TV downlink which is very, very fuzzy, but it’s a shot on film from inside the LEM, and you can see the reflection of Buzz Aldrin, the reflection in the window of Neil Armstrong taking that first step, so there is some pretty decent 16mm film footage, but there isn’t very much of it. There is a very small quantity. It’s interesting how the TV footage, though, improves between Apollo 11 and Apollo 17. By the time you get to Apollo 17, the color pictures coming back from the moon are getting reasonable quality, though they’re never as good as the actual film footage shot on the moon, which we sort of show quite a lot of that, which is absolutely stunning because it’s so clear.

In the Shadow of the Moon Director David Sington
Discusses the Movie at Sundance

ANDELMAN: I think the sequence that I liked in addition to the one you mentioned of the breakaway is the lunar rover on the moon. Again, it just made me think, my God, why did we give up on this so easily.

SINGTON: I know. It’s fantastic stuff, and it’s terribly exciting to see it.




ANDELMAN: The other exciting thing in the film is the new footage that you shot with so many of the Apollo astronauts. As the director, how do you balance how much you’re going to use of each to get that balance just right? And I must say that based on my, I saw the film, and I’ve been reading the reviews. The reviews have been spectacular, so you obviously got the right balance.

SINGTON: Yes. Well, I think it’s one of those things. You just try it out in the cutting room. The big challenge with a film like this is editing, because we started with 60 hours of interviews with the astronauts plus a similar amount of archive footage that we already selected from thousands of hours, so you are starting with hundreds of hours of material. How do you pull that down to 90 minutes? And so what we did was we started by selecting some of the very best shots, and also some of the very best pieces, parts of the interviews, some of the nice, interesting, funny, surprising, moving parts of the interviews. And then you just try to organize that material so it starts to make sense and then bring in more material to sort of just keep the story going. There’s no great rule, you just start with more of the astronauts talking and relatively little archive. As the story comes together, then one’s able to put in more and more of the archive and start to put the astronauts’ voices as it were behind the archive, what we call voiceover. But I always wanted it to be absolutely clear, this is a film as if it were told by the astronauts. There’s no linking narration. It’s all the astronauts’ own words and words spoken at the time from the archive. It’s just a feeling thing. We want to see Mike Collins’ face at this moment, because his face is telling you something as well as what his voice is telling you. I think that was our criteria for when we look at these guys. It’s when you can tell something is going on behind their eyes. You can see that they’re there. You can see that they’re upset about something or they’re remembering something with joy, and all those emotions are written on their faces, and that’s really the justification for looking at the astronaut’s face rather than looking at the archive.

ANDELMAN: Would it be a safe guess that the DVD for this movie will be pretty spectacular?

SINGTON: I hope so, yeah! I’m just working on it now. We’ll certainly have a lot of, there’s a lot of really interesting stuff that just didn’t make it into the final movie. There is very nice archive material that’s really interesting but also some wonderful poignant and interesting scenes that didn’t make it into the movie that will be on the DVD.




ANDELMAN: I don’t know if this is a particularly American expression, but we often talk about the “800 lb. gorilla in the room,” and I wondered, I mean, the 800 lb. gorilla not in your film is Neil Armstrong, and I suspect that wasn’t for lack of trying.

SINGTON: No, it wasn’t, and we actually had a very interesting email correspondence with Neil about why he, as it were, really liked the film project and wanted to help us but didn’t want to talk about his experiences on the moon, which was the thing that we wanted to talk to him about as much as anything else.

You know, of course, he’s in the film. He’s a very strong presence, and in the end, I rather like the way that he is there but not there so that the other astronauts talk about him and you see him as he was then, and I think you get a very intimate portrait of what the guy’s like from his close colleagues, but he remains young, and I actually quite like that in the film. The reason he doesn’t talk about this is very interesting. If you look at the patches of the different missions, which are designed by the crews themselves; each mission had a mission patch. The Apollo 11 mission patch is the only mission patch that doesn’t have the names of the crew on it. It has “for all mankind.” I think that Neil takes that notion that they were merely representatives, merely messengers, they weren’t the message, and as he says in the film, “We, the crew of Apollo 11, are privileged to represent the United States in this venture, and one small step for man,” not one small step for me. And in the film, when Neil steps on the moon, the film becomes about how everybody around the world shares the moment, and I think that he takes that very seriously. “I’m just the messenger. Don’t worry about me. It’s what the message was, what we did that’s important. Don’t worry about whether my nose was itching or not.” We talked to the other astronauts about bodily functions on the moon, you know, but …

ANDELMAN: Yes, you did. You certainly did. Buzz Aldrin, I believe.

SINGTON: Yes.




ANDELMAN: That was great. I do have to say that the footage that you do have of Armstrong’s parents was wonderful and so early in his career. I don’t want to give away what it is exactly, but it wasn’t from the day before he landed on the moon, it was from when he joined the program. It was very prescient. Finally, let me ask you this: this comes back to I think where we started. Politically speaking, do you believe that a movie can affect public policy, and would you like your film to impact America’s approach to future space exploration?

SINGTON: It’s a movie. It’s one thing among many things that we see, and I think… The media has a big effect on how people see the world through television, through movies, through newspapers, through books, all these things, so cumulatively, I think that the media has a huge impact on what happens. It’s idle to pretend that we are merely spectators and recorders of the world. I think we’re actually players in the world, and I get rather impatient with some people who want to deny the power of the media. When you make a film and lots of people are going to see it, what a big responsibility in all sorts of ways, to be truthful. There are a lot of films which exploit things like violence in a way which I think is quite irresponsible. I think lots of films have an effect. I don’t think one film can necessarily change the direction of public policy very easily.

What I would like American audiences particularly to come out of this film with is a sense of optimism about the future. I think what the film shows is what America can do when it really wants to, when it really needs to, and I think that’s a very encouraging thing to think, what we face everybody faces, lots of different, difficult problems, problems in politics and war and also in the environment and in all sorts of ways in society, and I think that what this film shows is that when a country like America that’s self-confident and is democratic and open, when it decides it really wants to do something, it can really move mountains. It was only eight years, from 1961, Kennedy, to Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon. That’s an incredibly short period of time, and an enormous amount was achieved, and I think that pessimism and cynicism are always the enemies of anything good happening. In order to make something, let’s make a better world, you have to believe that you can actually do it, and I think that’s the kind of general -- not exactly a political message -- but social message I hope that people take from the film.


© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.