KEY POINTS:
The powerful new documentary In the Shadow of the Moon recounts man's greatest adventure through the eyes of the astronauts who walked on another world. Russell Baillie reports
Next year is the 40th anniversary of man landing on the moon. The men, who were already experienced American military and test pilots before they became the astronauts of the Apollo missions, are now generating obituaries.
But many of those who remain, still walking the Earth they once saw from 400,000km away, have recounted the defining moments of their lives in the remarkable documentary In the Shadow of the Moon.
As the likes of the gregarious Mike Collins (Apollo 11), the now Johnny Cash-like Buzz Aldrin (11), the artistic Alan Bean (12), and others talk, they show how that transformative experience has turned to wisdom.
Their unique perspective about life, the universe and everything, is what attracted the film's English director David Sington.
"I was just intrigued by the idea that of the seven billion people on the planet there are just nine individuals - seven surviving - who have walked on another planet. It is almost as if there are aliens among us.
"What they share is this amazing experience which has given them this perspective on life. They have had a perspective on the Earth and they have seen with their own eyes what our true situation really is - small planet lost in a vast nothingness, a universe that is beautiful but utterly desolate.
"Once you have seen that perspective with all of them, you realise, as Mike Collins says, that so many of the things that we think of as important are really not that important. I think they all share a kind of serenity and paradoxically, it sounds like a bad joke, but they are very down to earth."
A notable absence from the interview line-up is Apollo 11 commander and the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong. He has long avoided the spotlight, something Sington respects him for.
"His view is admirable in a way - it's `don't get confused in thinking that Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon is an achievement of Neil Armstrong'. It's not, it's an achievement of the whole Apollo programme, the whole American nation, and ultimately it's a human achievement - one small step for a man not one small step for me. Always, right from the word go, he has studiously avoided taking credit."
"I think Neil Armstrong is aware he is a human everyman. He's a bit like the unknown soldier.
"We didn't put in any footage of him as he is today. He remains the one astronaut in the film who doesn't age."
But we see Armstrong as he was as Shadow unfurls through its restored Nasa film footage, which includes the awe-inspiring blast-off of the 90-metre Saturn V rockets, unleashing their 3000-plus tonnes of thrust.
The visual power of the doco is helped by Nasa having shot with multiple high-speed cameras on colour-rich film, not videotape. Sington and his team's timing was good - they arrived just as Nasa was thinking of transferring its vast film archive on to high definition video and they made a copy for the documentary to draw from.
"It's the magic of celluloid in a way. It's great that it happened when it did. If it had happened in the 70s I think it would have been all rather fuzzy NTSC video, and it wouldn't have had anything like the same impact.
"It was not shot because people thought it would be fun to watch this. It was basically shot for engineering purposes in case something went wrong - like a visual black box.
"So it is almost a miracle that the stuff survived. It was jolly nearly junked because when everything went smoothly the engineers were not interested in this footage, it's like nobody looks at the black box for the flight that comes in safely."
Sington, who has had a career of science-based documentaries, says being a non-American gave him a different perspective on the film - that his wasn't just a film about the Apollo missions but about the troubled US of the time.
"I set out to make a film which is about these men going to the moon but in the cutting room I realised it was also a film about America, and also about America at a particular time in its history - I think I noticed that more by not being American."
The film puts the space programme in the context of a 1960s America rocked by political assassinations, the civil rights movement and Vietnam - Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan recounts feeling guilty that he wasn't flying in the war with his former naval comrades.
"The film ends up having this political dimension which I didn't think, going into it, was what I was aiming at. In the end, any film, particularly a documentary film, tells you what it wants to be and you simply follow the grain of the material and you end up somewhere you didn't think you were going to be."
But it's also a study of the remarkable members of a very exclusive club. Men who know that, having trained for years, then spent a short time - a few hours in the case of Apollo 11 - on the lunar surface, that nothing in their lives was ever going to top that.
"It is strange to have those couple of hours define your life. It's like winning an Olympic gold medal if you are an athlete; nothing is going to top that but would you rather not win the gold medal?
"They know they are immensely privileged human beings because they are the only human beings who have truly seen what we are."
LOWDOWN
What: In the Shadow of the Moon, inspiring doco about the Apollo astronauts
When & where: Opens today at Rialto cinemas.
