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Now, where were you when man first stepped on the moon?

Everybody who watched has their own searing memory and their own story.

Neil Armstrong setting foot out there and declaring one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind is the stuff movies and dreams are made up.

But this very real heroic feat is the subject of a new documentary showing us that moment 50 years ago, this July in a whole new light.

And here's a clip from the trailer I'd like to know what you feel as far as the responsibilities of representing mankind on this trip.

That's relatively difficult to answer.

It's a job that we collectively said was possible and we could do and and of course, the nation itself is backing us.

So we just sincerely hope that we measure up to that The whole Apollo program was designed to get to America, to the lunar surface and back again safely.

The enormity of this event is something that only history will be able to.

Chuck Todd.

Douglas Miller is the director of Apollo 11.

He's been speaking with our Hari Sreenivasan about it.

You know, never before seen footage is often used as a marketing gimmick, but in this case, it completely changed the composition of your film.

Yeah, I mean, initially and this was a tail end of 2016, we cast a very wide net within the spider web network of massive facilities and also the National Archives.

And three or four months into the project.

We get this email from the National Archives.

Our contact, their archivist who said that they had had this collection of large format material that was previously on Catalogs.

They didn't really know exactly what was on it.

They did have written on some of the reels Apollo 11, some of the dates in and around the launch which was July 16th of 1969.

So that began the process of discovering exactly what these were.

How much footage are we talking about.

So hundreds of reels.

And it just wasn't a National Archives.

We also had access to another 100 reels of engineering, 70 millimeter footage.

So that's all the great slow motion, you know, rocket of the rocket taking off.

We had a ton of that stuff to go through.

And then if that wasn't enough, we were also alerted to over 11000 hours of mission control audio that was uncovered by trying you get 11000 hours.

I mean what is, what are they recording for that long.

So it was really unique.

It was one inch tape.

If you can imagine, if you're sitting in mission control, you have 30 flight controllers.

Each one of those guys that's on a headset is recorded on a track in the back and really every word that was uttered in Mission Control had been recorded and sitting gathering dust.

Yeah.

And not only that, the back room, each flight controller had an entire back room full of other flight controllers, so they were all on loop.

So it was really in essence about 60 tracks that all needed to be sent up.

Why take this on I mean, at this point, we probably have a memory of seeing that black and white footage.

Why?

Why do this as a film?

You know, it really started as an editing exercise.

You know, with my archive producer, Steven Slater, who's based in the UK.

He had been singing up a lot of mission control footage with audio because when they originally shot, it didn't have any sound on it.

So, you know, it gets addictive, you know, to try to figure out what these guys are saying at what times, because they really shot it with no regard for if there was going to be any audio.

They were just kind of getting beauty shots of these guys working and documenting it for historical purposes.

Yeah.

Once the large format stuff came into our purview, it felt like, you know, we were all, you know, wanting to work on something like that.

So we were kind of it was the perfect team for this to land on.

So you find all this video film and you find all this audio.

What do you learn about this?

We learned a lot.

I mean, probably the greatest part of working on the project was working very closely with NASA's chief historian, Bill Barry, and his team.

Obviously, the National Archives as well.

And then the families and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, Neil Armstrong's sons, Rick and Mark, they were one of the first people that we showed this footage to before we even started the process of I think I mean, they were floored like everyone else.

Just when you thought you'd seen it all.

And particularly for them, I mean, they you know, they were so gracious with their time and helping us out, you know, really get the accuracy of not only the mission, but also just the spirit of who their fathers were and the people that worked with them.

What is it about this moment?

I mean, which might not happen ever again, maybe until we set foot on Mars or Raelians come down and talk to us, you know, that it almost seemed to unite the entire planet Yeah.

It was not lost on us at any time.

I can speak for the entire team.

It was just such a unique experience.

To to witness the sheer scope of this.

You know, you put yourself back in the sixties and with JFK and this charge to the country to try to drum up support for the space program, which was very expensive, to send someone to another planet or another world.

And all the political strife that was going on.

You know, JFK himself, a year after his his speech in Texas is assassinated in Texas.

His brother's is assassinated.

Dr. Martin Luther King is assassinated of the background of the Vietnam War.

But throughout all of that, you have hundreds of thousands of people that are spread across, tens of thousands of companies that all came together to accomplish this one goal of putting a human on another world.

And it was it's just miraculous You know, you've got a clip of that that I want to show as well.

It starts with just kind of a long shot of how many people it's dizzying even to think about it as the six minute mark and our countdown for Apollo.

11 now.

5 minutes.

52 seconds and counting.

Those to fly.

Yes, four or five.

Go go on CBS after I go for launch.

I guess where if I go for a launch booster fly over if I go to launch those are over if I go for a launch of their own or if I go for a long time or if I go for launch and no real life for launch or I'm going to go for flights out pretty much every Tuesday that we have some £7.6 million of thrust pushing the vehicle up with a vehicle that weighs close to six and a half million pounds.

That is a lot of people.

And that's just a clip from the film to illustrate your point.

You know, one of the things that I remember and I think most people nowadays, if when they go to your film, they'll they'll see is one of the first shots you had of mission control.

It was almost like it was a uniform.

It was all white shirts, half sleeve with a tie and almost all men.

There was one woman in the room, but really, I was like, wait, a minute.

What's her story?

Yeah.

I mean, that's the beauty of really doing the research and going deep into the archive with with the entire Apollo program.

There is one woman.

Her name is Joanne Morgan.

Apollo 11 was the first time that she actually was in the firing room, which was the launch control center, which was adjacent to the pad down in Florida at what was called Cape Kennedy at the time.

Now, today, Cape Canaveral and before the Saturn five rocket launched, she was just an amazing engineer.

She was there on her own credentials.

Didn't matter that, you know, she was a female and she ended up having a very long history with NASA, work there for 43 years, retired and is still alive today.

And it just wasn't her.

We had unfortunately.

Hopefully this ends up on like a Blu-Ray or DVD.

There was a 25 year old whip, smart Texan that was in the back room in Mission Control.

Her name was Poppy Northcutt.

She actually on Apollo 13 was in the front room.

But there's a moment after lunar liftoff when they're arguing the flight controllers in the front room are arguing over flight trajectories.

So the console with the back room, Poppy, comes on and basically just schools, these guys and some math.

And while their numbers are off and she's trying to articulate why they're wrong and it takes about 5 minutes for her to finally get through to these guys.

But it just highlights the great effort of all, just not male female minorities across all races to put this thing together.

One thing that surprised me was, relatively speaking, how advanced the technology in some way was.

They were getting near-real-time heartbeats of these astronauts and I had no idea that in 1969 we had the tech.

And then afterwards I was stunned by how low and how cool they are.

Yeah.

I mean sometimes I have a tough time calling my sister back in Ohio.

So it's it's just a testament to, you know, the technological advances that the Apollo program did.

Certainly, you know, if you listen to the air to ground transmissions, it's scratchy most of the time.

It's tough stuff to get through.

But they did it and they developed ways to communicate.

And and that was just one of dozens of new technologies that were invented to to put someone on the surface of the moon.

You know, at one point at the takeoff, I think Buzz Aldrin Heartbeat is around 88.

And then on the other end of the spectrum, Neil Armstrong's heartbeat when he's about to land.

The thing is, what, one 55 that is me on a treadmill at a good run, right.

I mean, that's really exerting ourselves.

And here he is the stress of that moment you could see was in his heart right there.

Yeah.

But when you listen to Neil Armstrong's cadence as they're landing, it never wavers.

So he might have been stressing on the inside, but on the outside and it goes for all of the mission controllers during that moment.

Charlie Duke famously says, copy eagle.

You know, you got a bunch of guys ready to turn blue here or breathe in again.

And it just goes to show off kind of the nerves of steel.

And you have to remember.

Buzz and Neil both were Korean War veterans.

They they flew, you know, missions dozens and dozens of combat missions.

And in and Korea both himself shot down a MiG and then pulled out a camera and photographed the pilot ejecting.

These guys had been, you know, hardened veterans of not only war, but they were test pilots.

And unlike some of their predecessors of the space program, they were educated.

Neil had a degree in aeronautics.

Buzz went to MIT and his nickname was docked at Rendezvous.

Michael Collins was a graduate of West Point and ended up in the Air Force.

So these guys had been around the block and it's no you know, now, you know, why they were chosen to go about this extraordinary.

And there was flying required back then I mean, that we kind of take it for granted now, but to get these things to connect and disconnect and really ultimately the landing of where the module ended was by hand.

Yeah.

I mean, Neil Armstrong, certainly they had, you know, I mean, very archaic computers compared to now.

But to get them to a certain altitude.

And then Neil actually, Neil Armstrong himself guided the lunar lander down to the surface of the moon.

Going through all this footage, what surprised you?

I think if you see the suiting up shots, that was the most surprising for me.

I'd seen those images a lot over the decades, but I'd never seen them like that.

And juxtaposed with a real that came shortly after we had that real, which was from the day of the launch, the morning the launch, they're getting suited up to go on this amazing thing.

Journey there was they were doing the same thing a few days before and a dry run and they were kind of slapping selves on the back but jovial.

You know, they did the same thing.

They went into the Astro van, drove out to the pad, got in the elevator, went sat on top of the rocket, came back down and went home.

But on the day of the launch, you just see this look on their faces.

There was no joking.

And you could just see the weight of what they were about to do written all over it.

And it just really snapped in the focus.

I think for all of us, their responsibility that they had to do that.

And also, you know, in a very small way, our responsibility to the imagery that we were lucky enough to be granted to work with.

I didn't realize one of the first things that happened on the moon was to set up a camera.

I mean, just like, well, there's scientific gear that actually sets up the camera and you can see all these shots of Buzz Aldrin coming down.

I mean, it was just there's certainly forethought put into what they should do and how it should be documented for the entire world to see.

Yeah, the training was immense.

They, you know, they rehearsed down to the second.

Exactly.

All the moves choreographed.

One of the kind of humorous things was when they landed, they were actually supposed to sleep.

They were supposed to have a sleep, period.

But of course, you land on the moon.

I don't think anybody's going to anybody's going to go to bed.

So they requested, if they could, you know, perform their lunar excursion activities.

The EVA first they were granted that.

And some of that imagery that we saw, you know, at first, quite frankly, the engineers at Goldstone in California weren't ready for it.

So that's why the image is flipped upside down.

There wasn't you know, originally it was supposed to go to Australia.

And just the way that the signal was sent to the earth and ended up at California.

So, you know, luckily we do have that imagery and lucky, you know, for me as a filmmaker.

Buzz Aldrin documented with a 16 millimeter camera looking right down the barrel the ladder Neil's first steps.

Yeah.

Juxtapose that capsule with what just happened a little while ago space sending a capsule up.

I mean you look around and every shot of Buzz Aldrin Neil Armstrong there's just switches and gear and buttons and lights everywhere.

And now it's this clean white wall, two LCD screens.

I mean it's amazing that these three humans had to know how to work all of that manually.

What we've accomplished in 50 years, you know, on the technology front, I think is is truly amazing.

And I'm actually encouraged that, you know, companies like SpaceX working with NASA and all the great you know, space programs all around the world, it's a very exciting time for the future of of space travel because we're going to have to get out there, you know, at some point.

Why doesn't the government undertake anything like this?

Could it?

Should it?

Is it going to be replaced by private companies?

And is that the right way to get going in space?

I can speak to the historical context, which is, you know, John F Kennedy made a charge to the country and went out and actually sold this.

So there was a political will that was established to make this happen.

Our legacy of Apollo, I think, should be followed up.

It's inevitable, you know, where as we grow as a population worldwide, where we need, you know, new places to go, whether it happens, you know, 100 years from now, a thousand a million, it's going to happen.

And Apollo 11 serves as the entire program serves as a primer for us to get back out there.

Is that what you want people to take away from the film?

I think so.

But also just to be reminded that, you know, over the decades and as time has evolved, you know, we we kind of get into our boxes, if you will, and events like this bring us together that unite us.

And they certainly did back then.

And they certainly can do again.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

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