‘Fly Me to the Moon’ uses real footage from NASA

While Fly Me to the Moon is about a group of folks tasked with faking the Apollo 11 moon landing, the production team’s goal was to make what audiences see as real as possible.

Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum in ‘Fly Me to the Moon’.

Everett Collection

The film tells the story of PR expert Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson), who the government recruits to help improve NASA’s image with the general public. She comes up against launch director Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), first sparring with, then falling for him. But things get complicated when Kelly is ordered to produce a fake version of the moon landing as a contingency plan — and to keep it a secret from Cole.

Director Greg Berlanti and the entire production team turned to researchers and experts at NASA for guidance, filming on location at Cape Kennedy. Berlanti also littered his film with archival footage, including 1960s television commercials, news broadcasts, and more.

Then, there’s the launch of Apollo 11 itself. The iconic moment has been recreated for everything from Apollo 13 to First Man, but Berlanti was determined to use as much original, historical footage as possible.

“The most influential movie for us was the Apollo 11 documentary, [Apollo 11: First Steps Edition], which was a lot of historical footage that NASA has preserved,” Berlanti explains. “They shot a tremendous amount, many hours of which has still not been seen really by the public. That’s about 10,000 hours of footage from the Apollo program in 65 millimeter, and we had access to it.”

“We got ahold of this footage and we were using it from prep as inspiration for shots,” Berlanti continues. “We were going to try and do what the color tone would be, what the temperature would be, knowing that if we could emulate enough of that original footage that then we’d have access to all the footage to intersperse, and that would actually widen how much material we could use in the movie.”

Berlanti and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski were so successful in their endeavor that the director estimates more than half of the launch sequence seen in the movie is the real deal. “The blast-off has two or three CGI shots, but a lot of it’s the original footage,” he notes. “Every decade, the capacity to restore it gets better and better, so it looks better and better. People can’t tell what’s what.”

They also used NASA’s footage of the crowds gathered at Cape Kennedy on the day of the 1969 launch to help capture the flavor of the moment. “There’s some crowd shots that are ours, and there’s some crowd shots that are theirs,” Berlanti adds. “My favorite thing is that there’s people who worked on the movie who can’t tell what was ours and what was theirs.”

Entertainment Weekly caught up with Berlanti ahead of the film’s July 12 release to discuss everything from tackling his first-ever period piece to what it was like actually having to create a fake version of the moon landing.

GREG BERLANTI: I’ve always wanted to and been excited by it, but I wanted to find the right thing. The Apollo program and NASA were things of great interest to me, and doing something with Scarlett was of great interest to me. Then, doing a romantic comedy-drama in the vein of a lot of the original movies that I loved growing up was of interest to me. It felt like the right time to make the leap, but it was definitely one of the elements of the film I was the most anxious about. I tried to be over-prepared and was really guided by many of my department heads, two of whom, DP Dariusz Wolski and costume designer Mary Zophres, were real mentors to me and were amazingly helpful in trying to get the period right.

Did having this historical element make your job significantly harder?

It’s always going to be something. It made it exciting because there were things I didn’t know yet, and it’s nice to be challenged in new ways. It makes things not feel like you’ve done them before. So that part was neat. I’ll say the other part about it that I didn’t foresee was that I was raised in the ’70s, and so many of the things that were around in ’69 prop-wise or set dec-wise brought me right back to my childhood. I’m not sure I realized what a nice little treat that would be — to be so immersed and to feel like I was spending some time back there. Or to watch my dad show up as an extra dressed as my grandfather was dressed back then.

Our producer, Jonathan Lia, was in direct contact with them throughout the development of the script. Then, we were campaigning the whole time to actually shoot on the premises because we wanted to dramatize the awesomeness of that place. So many times when you see an Apollo film, they’re really doing it from Houston’s perspective, and they take over after the rocket launches. But ours was so much about the VAB [Vehicle Assembly Building], Cape Kennedy, and the launch that we built the firing room from scratch to scale. Everybody spent many, many, many hours [recreating] every single detail in that facility.

We had two gentlemen who worked on the original Apollo program who have worked on movies before, everything from Apollo 13 to First Man, and they were present for our time in the firing room and when we were working with the astronauts to land them on the moon. We were so focused on, “Okay, if we’re going to do how it was faked, then we had to spend as much time possible actually figuring out how they would have faked it in ’69 with only ’69 technology and what all those accouterments would be?” We had to spend as much time on the real as we did on the fake so that we could dramatize both of them simultaneously.

So how did you create a fairly real, yet obviously fake version of the moon?

We had to figure out what size the set [would] have to be so you wouldn’t see a black backdrop. It is the size of a baseball field pretty much. What source of light would you use so there would be only the right kinds of shadows? It’s a massive key light, almost five stories. So, the set had to be super high too. Then we took weeks, if not months, to figure out what exactly the right moon dust would be. If I never see another sample of dust the rest of my life, I’ll be okay.

Then, we had our stuntmen who had to play our astronauts, who were on wires. We had to figure out, in that ’69 technology, how would they obfuscate the wires. Then we had to have them train and choreograph each of the steps so that we could cut between the camera takes. I wasn’t sure which portion of the moonwalk I was going to use. So we had them learn all two and a half hours of the moonwalk with a choreographer. We shot all of it. I wanted to avoid as many cuts as possible, so it didn’t look like I was always cutting, so that people could understand elegantly where they were at what times. We shot this stuff in-camera, and the screens you’re seeing were actually shooting the footage at that time. It goes on and on.

Did you turn to the Smithsonian and their moon rocks, samples, etc. at all?

No, we did not. There were funny things like, I had to wear these really silly boots every time I had to go on a moon set because I didn’t want to leave footprints. You can’t fly people in to rake it, and the dust takes a while to settle, so we had to cover it a lot too. There’s safety concerns about people breathing too much of that stuff. But we kept going down to Cape Kennedy, and there were several things down there, including a mini version of the firing room on Apollo 11 blast-off day, that really simulate the feeling. That was probably the biggest inspiration: wanting to try and capture that place in an emotional way as much as possible.

Probably the crowd-pleasing element of something like Apollo 13 — Ron Howard‘s whole Americana aesthetic. Then, I would add to it the old documentary, For All Mankind. Not the TV show that’s since been named that, but there was a doc. It was a little cultish, but it was always a big inspiration for me. Tonally, the comedy mixed with drama, obviously there’s things like Wag the Dog, which came up a lot, but we talked about a lot of other films too. Everything from Working Girl to Tootsie to Quiz Show, films in the ’80s and ’90s that were able to blend comedic and dramatic tones and never took you out of it.

They get their happy ending, but do you think Kelly and Cole will go the distance?

My little vision as a storyteller was that we went down for the pre-supposed launch of Artemis [Note: The launch date was ultimately delayed and the crew did not attend], there were so many people that had been to launches all the way back to the Apollo launches. And I thought, They’re here, their spirits are here. The two of them would be here today with all their grandkids stepping off the big bus to see what amazing things NASA was currently up to.

Fly Me to the Moon is in theaters now.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.