Which is the easier mission, landing a man on the moon or for a 1960s ad shark and a by-the-book launch director to find common ground on Earth? The countdown to answer that question begins in Director Greg Berlanti’s romantic comedy, Fly Me to the Moon.
Berlanti’s film tells the story of Cole Davis, a NASA official saddled with the difficult task of making preparations for the Apollo 11 moon landing. He runs into a new complication when he meets Kelly Jones, an attractive marketing executive the White House has directed to stage a fake moon landing as back-up when the mission is deemed too important to fail.
On July 20, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Berlanti discussed the making of the film during a Q&A moderated by Director Dan Gilroy (Velvet Buzzsaw).
During the conversation, Berlanti spoke about using cinematography to emphasize the theme of the film.
“Obviously, we're appropriating 65mm footage from that era. We knew we wanted to use as much of that as possible, so we wanted to shoot something that felt similar, but still modern. Rarely do you read a third act that's like the theme of the movie at large, which is the fake versus the real, and if you do your job right everybody in the audience wants the true thing to be the real thing, and you've made your point just by the exercise of that. But you have to execute it on that level. We also needed to shoot the fake portion as though they would have done it in '69. So, what would be the technical elements of that? How big would the set have to be? How far would the backdrop have to be back? How are you lighting it? They had pretty much just one central light that they'd use at the time. The moon dust settles or rises and falls the same way. How many iterations of that are you going to have to look through? So, there's a lot of complex conversations so that the audience wouldn't focus on any of that and just enjoy the ride."
Berlanti’s other directorial credits include the feature films Love, Simon, Life as We Know It and The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy; and an episode of the mini-series Political Animals. He has been a DGA member since 2009.