When director Todd Douglas Miller set out to tell the story of NASA’s moon landing in his film Apollo 11, he wanted to distill myths surrounding the historic event.
“There’d been so much made about Apollo 11. The mission has been covered ad nauseam in films and fiction and non-fiction. So it was really a research project to drill down into those myths and see who these people really were,” he told The Hollywood Reporter’s Documentary Roundtable.
“Once you start researching the astronauts and who they were, then you start figuring out that it’s this massively big project that wasn’t just about the astronauts,” he continued. “There were hundreds of thousands of people that were involved in this, almost half a billion people around the world that were involved to make this mission a success, so it’s really where it started.”
When asked who Miller would want to see Apollo 11, his answer was simple: “Young people.”
“When we do screenings, to see people that live through it have their experience, but then they bring young [people], whether they’re their kids or a science group, it’s phenomenal,” he told the roundtable. “We were in theaters on Imax screens for a week in March, and we got kicked off the screen for Captain Marvel. And I said, ‘We had the real superheroes.'”
He continued: “That’s kind of the point with all of that, you know. I enjoy going to a cinema. I realize it’s a rare experience that a documentary could get in that space. But the beauty of all of what’s available now with all the multi-platforms is it comes down to the story. And there is a need, I think, for bigger, even larger screens.”
The full Documentary Roundtable is set to air Feb. 9 on SundanceTV. Miller appears on the roundtable panel along with Julia Reichert, Nanfu Wang, Lauren Greenfield, Asif Kapadia and Alex Gibney. Follow all the Oscar season roundtables at THR.com/Roundtables.
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