Is ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ a true story? Director explains his take on a famous conspiracy theory | Channing Tatum, Fly Me to the Moon, Greg Berlanti, Scarlett Johansson | Just Jared: Celebrity news and gossip

The new film Fly me to the moon tells the story of the Apollo program and how the USA sent the first man to the moon. But is the story completely true?

Fly me to the moon is set against the backdrop of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing. The filming was carried out to improve NASA’s public image. Sparks fly in all directions when marketing expert Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) wreaks havoc with starting director Cole Davis (Channing Tatum) is an already difficult task. When the White House deems the mission too important to fail, Jones is ordered to stage a fake landing on the moon as a backup, and the countdown really begins.

For years, the conspiracy theory has been circulating that the moon landing was faked and in reality filmed in a recording studio. Fly me to the moon explores the “what if?” possibility and tells a story around the idea that the theory contained some semblance of truth.

So what is actually true?

Read on to find out more…

Cole and Kelly are not real people, but they are based on real people. The real NASA flight director was named Gene Kranz and just like Cole, he was involved in the Apollo 1 tragedy. Unlike in the film gene was not directly responsible when the fire broke out, but he blamed himself for the incident.

It is also true that a PR team was hired to change public opinion about NASA, so a Kelly Jones-type person probably actually existed in real life.

“One thing I didn’t realize until I started working on it was how long this had been a conspiracy theory,” said director Greg Berlanti told Weekly entertainment. “Obviously, right after the launch, there were people saying that. Obviously, the growing distrust of government since then and the advent of social media has only exacerbated all of that. But that was also the reason to take one of the OG conspiracy theories and actually tell a narrative story about it.”

“The purpose of our story is actually why the truth matters,” he added. “When I initially read the script, even before I had the job, I felt at the end, ‘Oh God, I want the truth to be true and I want this to really have happened.’ And I thought that would be a great feeling if I could get the audience to feel that collectively.”

Greg has no doubt that some conspiracy theorists will believe the film confirms their theories, but he is not worried about that.

“As a storyteller, I take my job very responsibly and I want to entertain, but you can’t be responsible for every part of the audience. When people see this film, hopefully what they take away from it at the end is more of an appreciation of what was achieved,” he said.

Greg also talked about how NASA helped ensure the science parts of the film were factual.

“We had real help from NASA,” he said. “We wanted to get all the NASA technical elements (right) so that when we’re making a movie about faking a real thing, it feels very real. (We took) the usual liberties in historical fiction and then also general narrative liberties that you take, even with some things that actually happened, and we expand slightly if it helps our story. For example, the first camera and the first television broadcast were on Apollo 8, but we made it Apollo 11 because that would be more meaningful to our narrative. There were things like that that we changed, but for the most part we didn’t change true historical facts.”

Check out photos from the film’s recent premiere!