David Sington: interview

After joining the Science and Features department at the BBC in 1987, David Sington‘s many programmes included the geology series ’Earth Story‘. He formed the independent DOX Productions in 1999, turning out science-based projects for international broadcasters, among them ’The Day the Oceans Boiled‘ for C4‘s Equinox strand. ’In The Shadow of the Moon‘, his first theatrical feature, tells the story of the Apollo moon missions through the testimony of the astronauts and long-unseen NASA footage shot by the crews in space

It’s such a simple idea, so why did a Brit end up making this and not an American?
Dave Scott, the Apollo 15 Commander, was in London working as technical advisor on a BBC series called ‘Space Odyssey’, and we took him to see ‘Touching the Void’ with the idea that you could do the same for the Apollo astronauts, blending interviews with archive material rather than dramatised reconstruction. We knew that the NASA vaults were about to be opened so that the original 16mm film could be digitised, and we thought there’d be footage that nobody had seen before.

We also reckoned with Dave on board we’d be able to gather together more of the astronauts than had ever been previously assembled. Luckily, both these assumptions proved correct.

We’re so used to seeing these sort of images as movie special effects, it’s almost a struggle to get your head round the fact that they’re real…
Definitely, there are some real Stanley Kubrick shots in there. I also remember nagging my dad to take me to see ‘2001’ when it came out, which was an excited seven-year-old’s first time in London. That film’s about human beings as the only self-conscious animal, yet until the Apollo missions our knowledge of who we are was somehow incomplete. If you look at Apollo in a very Kubrickian and Arthur C Clarke way, the astronauts who walked on the moon were the first people to take that next step into human self-consciousness. Nobody did it before them, nobody’s done it since.

Is there a special significance of seeing the Earth from space, as the title suggests?
I’m old enough to have watched the moon landings as a child, and I think that perspective they brought back through the famous photo of the Earth floating in space has always stayed with me. It seems like a very small planet in a very large universe and everything we think about the human condition has to begin with that fact. As Jim Lovell, the Apollo 13 Commander, explains, once you can take your thumb and block out your view of the entire Earth, it changes you.

Is it these extraordinary images which make this a film for the cinema rather than TV?
Yes, there’s footage here which has spent much of the past four decades preserved under liquid nitrogen, but for me the difference between cinema and TV is that the former is a collective experience. This is edited in a different way from TV, giving us time to watch the interviewees think. But the thing which really makes it a piece of cinema is the emotional temperature of watching it in a room full of other people, it’s that collective experience of being transported back to a time when everything seemed possible.

Did you reassess the American can-do spirit in the light of their accomplishments with Apollo?
As someone who’s made films about climate change and understands the urgency of the issue, the Bush administration is not my favourite. Doing this in a way has been a process of re-enchantment with America. They have this go-for-it attitude which is so different from us. I love it in the film where JFK gives a speech and says they’re going to build a rocket from ‘new metal alloys, some of which haven’t yet been invented’. Fantastic! When that spirit is harnessed to a great cause it can do great things, so the film’s a celebration of a moment of human greatness in America and a sort of implicit subtextual rebuke to the present day – an invitation to do it again.

It’s not often that any film brings you pride in human achievement, is it?
Mike Collins, the astronaut who orbited in the command module while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the moon, remembers that when he returned, the reaction worldwide was not that the Americans did it, but that ‘we’ did it, a kind of ‘we’ he’d never heard before. That’s about human beings going beyond their limits, about the contrast between yourself and the rest of the universe. Actually feeling your living-ness. That refreshed perspective was the gift of Apollo.

‘In The Shadow of the Moon’ opens on Friday.

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