Director Todd Douglas Miller talks about the making of 'Apollo 11,' his acclaimed documentary

Todd Douglas Miller’s documentary “Apollo 11” re-creates America’s 1969 mission to the moon using solely authentic film and audio recordings from the event. During production, Miller and his team discovered a trove of material that had never been seen by the public. This included large-format 70 mm film that captured the launch of the Saturn V rocket, the recovery of the three astronauts and other crucial moments. Also discovered were thousands of hours of audio recordings.

“Apollo 11” received widespread acclaim upon its release earlier this year and has since been shortened for presentation in museums and science centers. Miller recently spoke with Newsday about the making of his film and why, 50 years later, the moon landing still feels like one of mankind’s greatest achievements. The following is an edited version of the conversation.

You're too young to remember the moon landing, but you wanted to make a film about it. Did you have an emotional connection to the event?

I grew up in Ohio, so you can't grow up there and not hear the names Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, etc. My generation was the space shuttle, and I remember that very vividly. Of course we had the Challenger tragedy in '86, and that left a mark on everyone. I kind of came in and out of my interest in space. We had done a short film for CNN called "The Last Steps," which focused on the last mission to the moon, Apollo 17. Doing that really sparked our interest.

How did you discover there was unseen footage of the Apollo 11 mission?

About three or four months into the project, we received an email from our supervisory archivist contact at the National Archives, who alerted us to the potential of there being a historically significant find. That was putting it mildly. We had some of those reels sent here to our post facility in Manhattan. The very first thing we saw was the Saturn V being wheeled out on a crawler. It was actually an aerial shot. We were speechless. The next reel we saw were the suiting-up shots from the day of the launch. That just absolutely blew us away.

How many hours of film did you watch for this project?

Hundreds and hundreds of hours. And it's just not the film; right around the time we were introduced to the large-format collection, we were also alerted to 18,000 hours of project Apollo audio. Rifling through all of that obviously took a lot longer than the footage.

What were some of the moments that jumped out at you?

It was the little human stories. I saw this woman — she stuck out like a sore thumb, because you're used to seeing white males sitting in these giant rooms. Her name's Joanne Morgan. She was the first female engineer that was in the firing room during one of the Apollo missions. We also had some audio come up, during one of the arguments that some of the front-room controllers were having. They called to the backroom, and this young woman's voice comes on, a Texas voice, and her name's Frances "Poppy" Northcutt. And she went on to have an illustrious career with NASA. We had a series of other amazing little stories that, luckily, we can tell in the film.

Recently you spoke to employees at the Northrop Grumman facility in Bethpage, where the Lunar Module was built. What was that like for you?

I'd never been before, and I was really, really looking forward to it. We had all this footage that I had been looking at for years. It was just a trip down memory road, to go into the hangars where the LM was built. There were a couple of gentlemen there that worked on the program who told us a bunch of stories, which were amazing. We got to share with them some of the large format footage of the facility back then. It was a really fun day.

It’s hard to point to any tangible value or utility that resulted from the Apollo 11 mission, but it still seems important to us as an achievement. Why is that?

I think there's the practical idea of it, and there's the philosophical. We've developed technology to travel to places that were unimaginable to people hundreds of years ago. But the Earth's not going to be around forever. So we have to get out there. I think people are going to look back on this time as the defining moment when we first got out into the stars and touched another world. And we did it in such a short amount of time! And it's a real testament to the people that did it.