Word: mooning
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...cavernous conference room of the IMAX headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif., Hanks doesn't look like a man consumed by the moon. He looks like a man getting over a cold--coughing, sipping hot tea and racing to get through the last few weeks of postproduction before heading to Europe to begin shooting his next superproject, The Da Vinci Code...
...capturing that kind of experience in Magnificent Desolation was piling up as much detail as possible. The title itself has historical resonance--it's an exquisite oxymoron coined by Apollo 11's Buzz Aldrin as he stepped onto the surface of the moon and took his first look around. To ensure that the rest of the film had the same historical pointillism, Hanks recruited Apollo 15 commander Dave Scott--who also served as a consultant on Hanks' other space projects--to explain how to do everything from operating the module control stick to walking in one-sixth G to maneuvering...
Hanks has good reason to feel worn out. To re-create a flight to the moon, Playtone and IMAX filled a Los Angeles soundstage with Styrofoam, concrete and pulverized roofing tiles--the simulated lunar surface--and borrowed exact replicas of a lunar module and lunar rover from the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. They stitched together spacesuits from the boots up, rolled in a 240-lb. 3-D IMAX camera, in addition to the cameras director of photography Sean Phillips built himself, and rigged the entire set with a harness system to simulate the one-sixth-gravity bunny...
...like this doesn't need famous faces, mainly because those faces would all be hidden behind the opaque visors of the lunar helmets. But there's no shortage of famous voices. John Travolta, Matt Damon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise and Scott Glenn can all be heard reading the real moon walkers' historic reflections as the movie moon walkers explore the faux surface. The plum role--NASA nobleman Neil Armstrong--is voiced by Hollywood nobleman Morgan Freeman. Armstrong's characteristically minimalist style suited the actor. "Morgan looked at Armstrong's lines, nodded and said, 'O.K., let's do this,'" says director...
Hanks isn't the first to discover that there's a difference between rapture and rigor. The late Jack Swigert, command-module pilot of Apollo 13, said that the very thing that qualified astronauts to fly to the moon--a certain engineer's detachment from the outrageousness of the undertaking--disqualified them to speak about it terribly lyrically. Hanks, with lyricism to burn, decided to make the most of his astronomical talents...