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The commitment to verisimilitude for the sequence went all the way back to the script stage.
All of the Apollo stuff is incredibly well documented, says screenwriter Josh Singer.
So he opted to keep things punchy and digestible but that meant rewriting history.
Dave was like, All this stuff about the lunar landing, this is all B.S.!
Which it was, so I really got pounded by all of these guys.
Singer went back to square one and listened again to the original recorded communications.
However, he added tiny, barely perceptible details to clarify the jargon.
He nervously passed the script around again.
When I sent this version back, he says, it got a pass.
Flash forward to the actual planning of the landing and the walk on the surface.
You look at this thing and it literally is a tin can, says visual-effects supervisor Paul Lambert.
Just seeing how it kind of felt like an old car.
As such, when they shot the descent, the camera was on the move.
But how can you do that and still have all the necessary visuals outside the windows of the spacecraft.
So it shows the different parts of the capsule while seeing the screen.
However, they had to time out all the exteriors just right, which meant meticulous planning.
So it was very much run like a play.
But all of that was a prelude to the greatest challenge: recreating the surface of the moon.
Trouble is, they needed the set to look as expansive as, well, the moon.
I needed a huge space.
An idea occurred to him.
Miracle of miracles, they were able to locate a perfectly colored quarry there.
Shaping it up was a massive undertaking.
So we pretty much matched it perfectly, crater-by-crater, rock-by-rock, because it was so well documented.
The moon was a crucial part of the sequence, but so, too, was the sun.
The team needed it hanging in the sky, blazing down onto the surface.
That challenge brought perhaps the most audacious technical achievement of the shooting process.
How do you get the crisp shadows that the sun would give you?
How do you get enough exposure for a wide enough terrain that the sun would give you?
The time came to actually shoot the moonwalk.
Initially, the process was as ill-fated as the actual lunar landing had been fortunate.
At long last, they were ready to get the surface portion shot.
But even when things are going well, IMAX is a difficult hill to climb.
Nevertheless, they worked around those constraints and were able to nail what they needed to do.
It was actually kind of refreshing to work in a way that broke the rules.
