Constructed almost entirely from archival sources, the documentary “Apollo 11,” which opened on Imax screens March 1 and will expand to regular theaters March 8, condenses nine days of the moon mission into roughly 90 minutes, beginning with preparations for the launch and ending with the astronauts’ safe return. It interweaves a variety of perspectives, including those of the space travelers, of mission control, of onlookers anticipating the liftoff and of naval officers awaiting the capsule’s splashdown.
The result is a film that drew spectacular reviews at its Sundance premiere. In The Los Angeles Times, Justin Chang called it “a stirring companion piece to Damien Chazelle’s recent ‘First Man.'” Reviewing it Friday for The New York Times, Glenn Kenny called it “entirely awe-inspiring.”
For documentarian Todd Douglas Miller (“Dinosaur 13”), using original materials without voice-over or interviews seemed like a natural approach. In the audio recordings, public affairs officers explaining the mission to viewers at home “just sounded like narrators,” Miller said.
Drawing on written documentation for clues, Miller and his team pieced together a variety of materials: 16 mm and 35 mm films that have long been available in some form; a treasure trove of 177 rediscovered 65 mm Panavision reels found at the National Archives and Records Administration; and audio recordings from mission control and other technical outposts.
With help from Stephen Slater, a TV documentarian and space buff in Britain who became the movie’s archive producer and who, as a passion project, synced audio with footage from Apollo 11’s descent, the filmmakers assembled those components into a remarkably fluid whole. Image and sound were fitted together like a puzzle. At points, onscreen text links the footage before our eyes with facts such as Apollo 11’s precise velocity, distance from Earth and fuel level.
The sequences filmed in space — which earned Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins honorary memberships in the American Society of Cinematographers — have been seen before. Some of the most stunning images in the movie, like a shot from the lunar module as it descends toward the surface of the moon, can be found in degraded clips on YouTube (although they look far better restored here).
What has gone largely unseen until “Apollo 11” is the material shot on the ground, much of which was filmed in 65 mm Panavision, a high-quality format that would have been familiar to 1969 moviegoers from, well, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Whether the camera is racing by technical consoles or engaging in Frederick Wiseman-style people-watching of bystanders gathered to witness the launch, it produces imagery that has a startling vividness.
This footage remained buried until now because of financial, technical and institutional limitations. Daniel Rooney, a supervisory archivist at the National Archives who discovered the 177 reels, noted that NASA had photographic and film operations at sites across the country. NASA’s movies of the Apollo missions eventually made their way to the National Archives.
But while NASA had “a very meticulous process” for collecting and cataloging footage from all those centers, Rooney said, “for some reason that never happened with these particular reels.” Those reasons aren’t necessarily mysterious. These were original color negatives, he said, and it would have been difficult to know what was on them without processing the film, which was and is expensive. When Rooney investigated a future for the archives’ 65 and 70 mm holdings in the late 2000s, processing of those formats had been declining for years.
And so it happened that Rooney, digging for film in 2017 after speaking with Miller, stumbled across the Panavision negatives that concerned the Apollo program. More than half the reels involved the preparation, launch and recovery of Apollo 11. “Those are sort of the big key areas,” Rooney said.
Although some of the film was shot by NASA itself, much of it was made for a movie called “Moonwalk One,” a strange combination of educational documentary and blissed-out philosophizing that opened in New York at the Whitney Museum in 1972.
Filmmaking and photography were integral to space exploration from the moment NASA started launching rockets, said Todd Gustavson, curator of the technology collection at the George Eastman Museum. John Glenn was the first astronaut to carry a camera on a mission, said Bill Barry, NASA’s chief historian; Glenn had bought the camera in a Florida store and adapted it so he could wield it in a spacesuit for his 1962 Mercury voyage. In 1966 and 1967, special cameras that Kodak had designed for NASA mapped the surface of the moon, ensuring that Armstrong and company would know a safe spot to land.
Miller discovered from watching the launches of Apollo 8, 9 and 10 that the camera operators had flubbed a move they needed. “Everything was a dress rehearsal for 11,” he said. “When 11 came, they just nailed every single shot.”
His documentary draws on some footage that was captured specifically for engineering purposes. Extreme close-ups of the launch were filmed on a special 70 mm format, which made digitally scanning them even more complicated.
And almost all of the footage Miller’s team had was silent. Luckily, specialized tape recorders in Houston captured key voices from those nine days. “NASA keeps records of everything,” said Gregory Wiseman, an audio engineer at Johnson Space Center in Houston. “On any given day, this audio that’s recorded is not significant, but if there’s any sort of anomaly in space, then they will go back and review all of these different conversations.” This would have been useful, he noted, with Apollo 13 and the Challenger and Columbia disasters.
The filmmakers also had crucial help from Ben Feist, who works part-time at an advertising agency in Toronto and also does research for NASA. (His sister is singer-songwriter Feist.) In what began as a hobby, he took 11,000 hours of digitized recordings from Apollo 11, improved the audio quality and mapped them by minute and second. Using his programming, the filmmakers could listen to technicians’ voices separately or in concert at any moment of the mission.
Although NASA approved the release of all the audio, and those heard speaking were government employees, the approach did raise ethical questions. “There are private phone conversations and things like that that occurred, between husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend,” Feist said. “I haven’t come across anything untoward,” he added, although there is a discussion of booze quantities at splashdown parties. In one of the most striking moments in the movie, technicians are overheard discussing the fatal accident on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, involving a car driven by Sen. Edward Kennedy, which was in the news at the time.
Feist plans to post all 11,000 hours of audio on apolloinrealtime.org before the mission’s July anniversary, allowing armchair historians to hear audio as if they were sitting in any seat at mission control. They could come across “something that, possibly, they’re the first person to hear it in 50 years,” he said.
Miller was focused on keeping the re-creation as to-the-minute as possible. “We did have kind of our own mission rules,” he explained. “We said, if it didn’t happen on that day at that specific time, we’re not using it.”
But he occasionally broke from that purist approach. To show a solar corona phenomenon that the astronauts speak of, Miller said, he used a shot from Apollo 12. During the moments showing the translunar injection maneuver — the propulsive push that sent Apollo 11 toward the moon — Miller used a shot from Apollo 8. He hopes to document these liberties and other aspects of the filmmaking process in a production journal.
The filmmakers are still hunting down names of camera operators, and the digital scans used for the movie will be made publicly available at the National Archives.
“I don’t think it ever will end with Apollo,” Slater said. “I can’t really see how you could improve on this, but in 10 years maybe there will be another film with more uncovered footage. That would be great, wouldn’t it?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.