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The moon shoot: film of Apollo mission on show again after 35 years in the can

This article is more than 14 years old
Film-maker reveals how Stonehenge inspired inside look at the lunar landings
Director Theo Kamecke discusses his film about the Apollo 11 lunar mission guardian.co.uk


When Nasa handed Theo Kamecke $350,000 (£220,115) and asked him to chronicle humankind's first footsteps on the moon, the film-maker's thoughts did not turn to Flash Gordon or the Sea of Tranquillity, or even to little Laika, barking uselessly into space. They crept towards a famous pile of monoliths in Wiltshire.

"The year before the moonwalk, I happened to be in England and persuaded some guys to drive me to see the dawn at Stonehenge," he said. "When [the film] came up, I right away saw the connection … It took a lot of thinking and a lot of effort and just a force of will to drag those stones to an empty field in the times when you only had deer antler to dig with.

"And it was the same kind of thing of stretching technology to its ultimate limits to be able to get somebody off this planet and walking on another one."

Kamecke's decision to cut from footage of daybreak at Stonehenge to shots of the vast "crawler" tractor dragging the Apollo 11 Saturn rocket to the launchpad at Cape Canaveral sets the tone for Moonwalk One, which has not been seen for 35 years.

Working with a reduced budget and the vaguest of briefs ("The Nasa guy said, 'Give me a time capsule' and I said, 'That's what you're going to get, buddy'"), Kamecke set out to make a film that reflected on the epochal event even as it recorded it.

To give the moon landing a context that was as human as it was historical, Kamecke, then 30, travelled around the US to film the women who sewed the astronauts' gloves and suits, the men who pulverised their bodies in centrifuges and ejector seats, and the thousands of ordinary people who stared into the sky on 20 July 1969 and tried to comprehend that a fellow member of their species was now striding across the face of the moon.

After Moonwalk One had been shown in a few east coast cinemas, picked up a special prize at Cannes and been screened worldwide in 1974, Kamecke stashed the 12,000ft of original film in two octagonal cans under his desk and moved on to other things.

The film, which is now being restored and will be released on DVD next month before of the 40th anniversary of the flight of Apollo 11, was rediscovered after the British producer and director Chris Riley, a long-time fan and occasional pilferer of its contents, got in touch with Kamecke to ask if, by any chance, he still had the original. Kamecke did.

The 71-year-old film-maker and sculptor came to London this month to oversee the production, revisit the film and moan about British coffee.

Despite claiming not to have thought too much about Moonwalk One over the last four decades, Kamecke's recollections of the film and its aims remain sharp.

"I wanted to make a film that had kind of an epic quality that just captured the sense of life on Earth as our species stepped off the Earth," he said.

"Of course there were the usual kind of scenes that you would expect of the launch control or places where the ­technicians and astronauts were – which is all very sterile – and then there were the people who came down in the millions to spill ketchup on each other and eat ­hot dogs and dance and just celebrate it as a human moment … All over the world, people were glued to their television screens, just mouths agape, just wondering about this moment when something changed. They didn't know exactly what, but something changed at that point."

Of the many shots that made up the 96-minute original, two still stand out for Kamecke.

In one, "little old grandmothers" are using foot-pedal sewing machines for the fine stitching of the spacesuits. "[They were] hoping that it was their pair of gloves that the astronaut had on and it was just so charming," he said. "They were using machines that had been used since 1900 to stitch together these suits with which men were going to go into space."

In the other, a little Chinese boy stands beside a basin and washes his face on the morning of the moon landing.

"This was the moment when man was leaving his planet and here was this kid with just ordinary 20th century stuff and having no idea what the future was, which is what I wanted the film to be – we have no idea of the future – but the film asks that it be open-ended."

Kamecke, who now spends his time in the New York countryside making intricate sculptures from circuit boards, is pleased that Moonwalk One is being ­resurrected after its 40-year stay beneath his desk.

"It's really nice that it's happening and, if I had to guess back then, I probably would have guessed maybe 40, 50 years is going to have to go by before it's going to become interesting again."

Looking back, would he have done anything differently to what he calls his "open-ended time capsule"?

"That's a crazy question to ask a film-maker," he said. "They'd probably do everything differently and sometimes it would have been a mistake to do it differently, because sometimes it was perfect the way it was."

Kamecke's only regret, in fact, is that no one ever offered him the chance to travel 238,855 miles and take a stroll in one of the lovingly stitched suits whose creation he captured. "Oh, heck if somebody had asked me I would have said yes in a flash. Sure. But nobody asked me. It was before tourist space travel."

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