Is 'Fly Me to the Moon' a True Story? Director Explains Take on Famous Conspiracy Theory

The new movie Fly Me to the Moon tells the story of the Apollo program and how the U.S. sent the first man to the moon, but does the movie tell a fully true story?

Fly Me to the Moon is set against the high-stakes backdrop of NASA’s historic Apollo 11 moon landing. Brought in to fix NASA’s public image, sparks fly in all directions as marketing maven Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) wreaks havoc on launch director Cole Davis’s (Channing Tatum) already difficult task. When the White House deems the mission too important to fail, Jones is directed to stage a fake moon landing as back-up and the countdown truly begins.

There has been a conspiracy theory for years that the moon landing was faked and actually filmed on a soundstage. Fly Me to the Moon takes the “what if?” possibility and tells a story surrounding the idea that the theory had some semblance of truth.

So, what is actually true?

Keep reading to find out more…

Cole and Kelly aren’t real people, but they were 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 the movie, Gene wasn’t directly in charge when the fire started, but he blamed himself for what happened.

It’s also true that a PR team was hired to change the public opinion of NASA, so a Kelly Jones-type person probably did exist in real life.

“One thing I wasn’t as aware of until I started to work on it was how long this has been a conspiracy theory,” director Greg Berlanti told Entertainment Weekly. “Apparently there were people right after launch that were already saying that. Obviously, distrust of government since then and the advent of social media has perpetuated more of all of this. 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 really about why the truth is important,” he added. “When I was reading the script initially, before I even had the job, I had the feeling at the end of like, ‘Oh gosh, I want the truth to be true, and I want the real thing to have happened.’ And I thought, that would be a great feeling if I could get the audience to feel that collectively.”

Greg doesn’t doubt that some conspiracy theorists will believe the film is validating the theories, but he isn’t worried about it.

“As a storyteller, I take my job really responsibly and I want to entertain, but you can’t be responsible for every segment of the audience. Hopefully, when people watch this film, what they get from it in the end is more of a celebration of what was accomplished,” he said.

Greg also talked about how NASA helped make sure the scientific parts of the film were factual.

“We had some real help from NASA,” he said. “We wanted to get all the technical, NASA elements [right] so that if we’re going to do a movie about faking a real thing, the real stuff felt very real. [We have] the usual historical fiction liberties, and then also, general narrative liberties you take, even with some of the stuff that actually did occur, augmenting it slightly if it helped our story. For instance, the first camera and telecast was on Apollo 8, but we made it Apollo 11 because that would be more significant for our narrative. There were things like that that we changed, but true facts of history we did not change for the most part.”

Check out photos from the latest premiere of the movie!