British documentary filmmaker DAVID SINGTON has an enviable track record, with a host of producer credits for prime-time factual programmes broadcast around the world, a Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism, and a Grierson Award for Best Science Documentary to his name.
Sington talks to film journalist Jan Gilbert about his film In the Shadow of the Moon, which won the World Cinema Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and brings together the men who journeyed to the moon to tell their incredible story.
David Sington, director of In the Shadow of the Moon
MMM: You got your first taste of filmmaking as a university student.
Sington: I was one of those students who didn’t really do what they were meant to be doing! I was doing a lot of plays and comedy at Cambridge – I was an exact contemporary of people like Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, and Sandi Toksvig. And one day somebody said, ‘Why don’t we make a little film?’ I think it was going to be part of a revue. So we made a five-minute silent comedy film, and that’s when I realised that’s what I ought to be doing. I love the theatre but there was something about the technical aspect of the film – I was quite a keen photographer – that seemed to combine everything I was interested in.
So I started making films with the help of grants from Trinity College which paid for the film stock, using some of the facilities the university had for its audio-visual unit, and borrowing or renting equipment from the Eastern Arts Association. And I never really stopped. I don’t think I’ve had a week of my life since then when I haven’t had a film either in preparation, shooting, or being edited.
MMM: What was the inspiration behind your latest film, In the Shadow of the Moon?
Sington: We did it because nobody had actually done it before. We have eight of the surviving moonwalkers in the film and somebody from every single mission that went to the moon. The other new thing is that there’s a lot of footage that we discovered at NASA that’s never been seen before. It’s been sitting in the NASA film library, but I think filmmakers didn’t realise it was there. So we’ve gone back and remastered it and it looks very fresh, like it was shot yesterday. It makes the whole thing come alive – it’s so vivid you feel like you’re there. It’s not what you’re used to seeing, you’re used to seeing these rather fuzzy shots, but actually there’s all this fantastic footage shot on the moon with extraordinary clarity. So we knew that all that was there and that was another big reason for making the film. It’s just amazing that nobody had done it before, but you seize those opportunities when they come along.
How difficult was it to get access to rare NASA footage from Mission Control?
Sington: It wasn’t difficult, but it was expensive and time-consuming to go to Houston and look through all the film archive. We had two people working there for several weeks. Then after having selected a few hundred film rolls from the 10,000 available, transferring them to high-definition video was expensive too, so it required a project that had a sufficiently large budget. I think that’s one of the reasons it hasn’t been done before.
In the Shadow of the Moon
Was it a challenge to get the astronauts on board?
Sington: It took eighteen months to get them all together. The difficult thing was to persuade them to give us enough time. I think most of them were willing to give us a couple of hours, but we didn’t want a couple of hours, we wanted a couple of days. We really wanted time to get to know them as people, to get a different kind of interview – something more personal, more emotional. And we were fortunate; we managed to do that with most of them.
The one person you didn’t interview was Neil Armstrong…
Sington: We knew Neil wouldn’t want to do it, but we approached him anyway. I mean, why wouldn’t you? Maybe he has a sudden rush of blood to the head, and decides to break the habit of a lifetime! I actually quite like the fact that he doesn’t talk about it. I was in email correspondence with him about the film, and he’s always said his own personal feelings are not really relevant. The important thing is that it was done by human beings, and it doesn’t matter which one.
I think that in some sense Neil sees himself as a sort of Unknown Soldier – he’s the representative of everybody else. And he said to me that the other people in the film who walked on the moon all spent much more time there than he did and probably had more interesting stories. He was only on the surface for a couple of hours. Some of the others were there for three days. So I like the fact that he’s the one astronaut you don’t see today. He’s the one who stays forever young, an iconic figure, and icons really shouldn’t speak. If they start to speak, they stop being icons.
