There are over seven billion people on the planet Earth. Nine of them have stepped foot on another world. It was that concept which got British filmmaker David Sington excited about the prospects of making the Apollo Mission documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, he just didn’t know how fantastic the journey from concept to screen was really going to be. I caught up with the director shortly after a screening of his picture during the most recent Seattle International Film Festival and it goes without saying speaking with him turned out to be an almost otherworldly joy.

The Earth as seen from orbit in ThinkFilms' In the Shadow of the Moon

“For me, I think it was an absolutely entrancing prospect,” commented David about what it was that drew him to the picture. “These [astronauts] journeyed to another world; they have stood there and looked back at the Earth. I was just very interested in talking with them about what all of that experience was like, what it felt like at the time, what they thought it meant to them at the time (and later) and what do they think it means to us today. And that is what the film is really about.”

“[Moon] isn’t really a history of Apollo, it is a film about a group of men who had an extraordinary human experience that sets them apart from the rest of humanity in some way. I wanted to understand who they were and how this situation has affected them.”

All of which sounds like a great idea, but tracking down and speaking to the astronauts wasn’t an easy proposition. The Apollo group in particular has proven to be extremely reclusive, for the most part avoiding both interviews as well as the limelight. They tend to like their privacy, so just getting the ten showcased in the picture to talk must have been a difficult task.

“It took a long time but it wasn’t exactly difficult,” stated the director in regards to my query. “We just had to be very patient. All of them get huge numbers of requests for interviews and some of them say yes quite a lot. But then, they’re used to just giving you a half an, an hour, maybe two hours, we always really wanted to spend much more time than that. And then there are many of them who get lots of interview requests and just say no to everybody.”

“We really had to explain to all of them what we were doing and why we thought it was worthwhile their taking part. It took a while. We had to sign up a certain number of astronauts, a half-dozen of them at least, before we could even raise the money to finance the film. So it was a real protracted process to get them to [agree] and then we would use those letters to raise the money in order to start the interviews. In the end we ended up with ten interviews which is more than we thought we could get at the beginning.”

But the thrills found in the movie aren’t just in these interviews, but also in the majestic and sometimes ethereal images straight out of the NASA vaults projected up upon the screen. In the Shadow of the Moon offers up footage that simply boggles the mind, the majority never before seen by anyone outside of aerospace agency’s own screening rooms.

Apollo astronaut Bill Anders in ThinkFilms' In the Shadow of the Moon

“The other reason it was a timely moment to make the film is that we knew a lot of the footage that had been shot in space that NASA had been holding in cold storage was in the process of being transferred to high definition video,” said Sington. “Therefore, that footage would be available to us as filmmakers in a way it had been available [before]. We were than able to make very good use of that space footage.”

“We also spent a lot of time researching in the NASA archives the footage that had been shot on the ground of which there was a very large quantity. A lot of it hadn’t really been looked at by filmmakers for a very long time. It’s a rather surprising thing that there is so much new footage you haven’t seen before, like in Mission Control for example. One would have thought everything that was available would have been seen before.”

But why? Wouldn’t NASA want to get everything it had out into the public for their eager consumption if even only to make sure Congress wasn’t going to start cutting their funding? “I don’t know,” answered the director. “I think part of the reason is that NASA was shooting material at the time and then immediately after each mission they would put together a half hour documentary about [it] which they released to the press. Those little half hour films became the basis for all the stock footage that is used in previous programs and films.”

“Of course, as a filmmaker you know that for everything that goes into a film there is lots that didn’t. We suspected there must be more material shot in Mission Control than what was readily available from these tapes. And, indeed, we went back into the archives and sure enough there was more material.”

All of which had to be very exciting for the filmmaker and his crew to discover. “It was all very compelling,” he agreed readily. “The only problem with it was that it was all mute, so you’ve got all these people talking and chatting away and you don’t know what they are saying.”

“The good thing is the Flight Controller’s Loop, which is the recording of all the people in Mission Control talking on headsets to each other and talking to the astronauts, has been preserved. In fact, you can even download it from the web and you’ve got this complete record of the audio.”

“So, we then actually spent a lot of time synching up this mute film footage with its audio which is of course quite difficult. They say things like, ‘Roger,’ and ‘Apollo,’ and ‘Houston,’ and of course you don’t know which Roger or Apollo or Houston or who belongs to it, but after a few weeks we managed to put the sound back to this film footage which gave us this amazing stuff that you’ve not seen before of [Apollo 16 Lunar Module Pilot] Charlie Duke saying, ‘Roger, we copy you,’ and all of that sort of stuff.”

Still, even with all this fascinating, sometimes spellbinding, new footage Sington wanted me to know none of that compared to the privilege of letting the Apollo astronauts tell their story using their own words. “We were determined we were going to allow the astronauts to tell their own story,” he says a second time emphatically. “We weren’t going to use any sort of mediating narration as their so often is. On the whole, film is carried by the astronauts themselves. And, I think it is part of the appeal of this film is that you get the sense you’re spending the evening with these guys.”

An Apollo astronaut in ThinkFilms' In the Shadow of the Moon

“We were certainly privileged, really, to spend time with these people, to go out to diner with them, spend time in their homes [chatting] together. These guys, all of them are pretty good company and fun to be with, very interesting and down to earth people. And I so wanted the audience to feel like they’ve spent the same type of evening with [the astronauts] and I didn’t want a narration constantly butting its head in on that. It would spoil that sense of intimacy.”