Moonwalk One

Just one civilian was allowed to film the launch of Apollo 11's flight to the moon in 1969. That film was lost for four decades and rediscovered only recently. An exclusive interview with the director and the film's finders

One category of human happiness is meaningful connections, and one of the gifts of the internet is that it has enabled us to make connections that we might never have imagined possible.

This was the message of a lecture that Chris Riley, a British broadcaster and filmmaker, heard a few months ago, and he is telling me about it for a good reason. Without the internet, he might never have tracked down a missing documentary and the man who made it a man who appeared to be just waiting for the right person to find him.u00a0u00a0

The road to this particular meaningful connection started in the mid-1990s, when a colleague showed Dr Riley, who specialises in science, a tape of the documentary film commissioned by NASA about Apollo 11's flight to the Moon in July 1969.u00a0 "I found it absolutely spellbinding," Dr Riley says. "Almost every other film I had seen about the Apollo story that NASA had done was like a corporate video to illustrate the highlights of the mission.

Moonwalk One was really filmic and created with a lot of love and care. It stood out by miles. Not only was it breathtaking to look at, it also had a time capsule quality. In every way, I was just entranced by it from the beginning."

Dr Riley felt there had to be more of this film, and he was right. The tape he saw wasn't the director's original version and it had been cut by 15 minutes.

For the next decade, whenever he was at NASA, he would ask people whether they knew of a copy of the original film, but he drew a blank. Then came the internet. In 2006, when he was working on the film In the Shadow of the Moon, which tells astronauts' stories, he typed the director's name into Google one day. He knew that a lot of footage that had been used in other films had originally come from this film and he had some questions about it. Thankfully, the director was called Theo Kamecke rather than John Smith. He was now a sculptor, he had a website and he was living in New York State. Dr Riley got in touch, and he heard some very good news.

Mr Kamecke says: "I mentioned that I had the only copy of the uncut film sitting under my desk. It had been there for about 35 years. Friends had urged me to donate it to a museum, but I thought I'm going to be talking to some intern who doesn't know what the heck I'm talking about and it will get lost."
He says he did think that one day someone might approach him about the film. Dr Riley was the right person. Mr Kamecke says. "We began to germinate the idea of digitally restoring and re-releasing it."

Mr Kamecke was commissioned by NASA to make the official documentary just six weeks before the launch.

Theo Kamecke's film is more than just the launch it shows a general feel of earth in the 60s and includes newsreels; seen here with Dr Chris Riley who discovered the lost film

There were countless ways in which he could have made it, but his concept for the film came to him very early on. "I wanted to make it like an ancient epic, a story that would be told around a campfire," he says.

The film begins at Stonehenge in England. "When I went down to Cape Canaveral in Florida to scout the location, I was shown the giant crawler that moves the rocket to the launch pad," he says. "It was as big as a football field. What came to mind was Stonehenge. The year before I had been there and I thought, what an impractical thing for man to have done." It had parallels, he thought, with "putting three of our species into space and walking on the Moon".

Dr Riley says that one of his favourite aspects of the film is the way it builds up to the launch. "There's a thoughtful piece of poetry, the commentary unfolds and then you see all these people in their curious hats and funny glasses from 1969 at the Cape on the beach looking up at the rocket. I feel as though I am standing there watching with them."

Mr Kamecke wanted to make the film so that it could be understood by people in the future. "I wanted to show the general feel of people on Earth at the time, including newsreels and things like that. You get a real feel for the late 60s," he says.

He didn't interview the astronauts. "I never intended to," he says. "They were not big on doing interviews.

They didn't regard themselves as heroes in a celebrity sense and I looked at it that way too. It wasn't Neil Armstrong who stepped on the Moon. We stepped on the Moon."

He did interview the "little old ladies" who sewed the space suits. "They had to be extremely careful and accurate," Mr Kamecke says. "They couldn't make a pin hole. It was very interesting to hear their comments and the joy in their voices as they hoped that it was their pair of gloves that he had on or their pair of boots that he was wearing."

One of the most memorable times for him was being in mission control at the time of the launch.

"It was a very large room with giant windows on one side that looked out on the launch pad three miles away," he says. "It had to be that far away in case the rocket blew up. There were rows and rows of consoles with technicians sitting at each one and monitoring a switch or a hose connection or something. Everything was extremely tense because this was the big one and everyone was really worried that it might be something they had done that would make something go wrong. When I watched the rocket lift off there was absolute silence in the room. Everyone had their fingers secretly crossed looking towards the giant window. I smelt something that I had never been aware of before and have never smelt since. It dawned on me in a flash that it was the smell of fear.

"During filming I tried to be as quiet as you would be in a hospital. I was sensitive that they were concentrating on their business."u00a0

One of his favourite shots though is far away from the action. "Stock researchers did a marvellous job of chasing down little shots of people from all over the world going about their daily lives," he says. "There's one of a Chinese boy standing beside a simple washbasin. He is wiping his face with a towel and his eyes are looking out as if into the future. It's just a beautiful shot."

For the spectacular launch sequence, instead of using the few camera positions that had been selected for the media, he hunted down footage from 240 engineering cameras that had been trained on the rocket. While the launch itself took only a few seconds, the sequence in the film is five minutes.

The digital remastering has included replacing some shots exactly with pristine, first-generation flight film that has been kept in vaults at Houston. "The quality is superb," Dr Riley says.

One new touch is that Mr Kamecke has been permitted a little artistic licence. "Forty years ago as the rocket lifted off he wanted church bells as a celebratory sound," Dr Riley says. "Everybody looked at him as though he was mad and said it would have religious connotations. Now we have put the church bells in. It isn't the sound you expect over the roar of the engines but somehow it works in the way that other quirky bits work."

The original film received an award at Cannes but was only ever seen by a few hundred people. Audiences, it seems, were spaced out in more ways than one after the 1960s. "At the time that NASA was trying to distribute it people had lost interest in anything to do with space," Mr Kamecke says. "It just kept going on and on, one mission after another."

People are more likely to appreciate this classic film now that we live in a changed world. Dr Riley, who is one sixteenth Indian by way of an Indian great-great-great grandmother, says: "It is amazing that 40 years later it is India that now has a mission to the Moon."

What does Mr Kamecke think about his film now? "For years I didn't like watching my own films but it really is a good film," he says. "If it occasionally makes you chuckle, if it makes your jaw drop, gives you a thrill or brings a tear to your eye, that's what makes it work because films work on an emotional level."

The world premiere screening of Moonwalk One The Director's Cut is today at the British Film Institute, London.
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The two-disc DVD includes a full-length director's commentary and bonus features such as a 30-minute documentary about the making of the film

Alison Gibson is a freelance journalist