In April 1970, the crew of the Apollo 13 became the most talked-about people on Earth after a malfunction en route to the moon left three astronauts stranded 200,000 miles from home. It was one of the biggest media stories of the decade, with audiences around the world glued to their TV sets and radios.

One of the few people who missed the saga that captivated the world? Ron Howard.

Then a 16-year-old actor best known for The Andy Griffith Show, Howard spent most of the crisis at Vasquez Rocks, 45 mile north Los Angeles, filming a guest spot on the TV Western Gun Smoke. There was no TV reception, and it was hard to get the radio. By the time he emerged back to civilization, astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise had returned to Earth safely.

Twenty-five years later, Howard would more than make up for not following the saga when he directed Apollo 13, a film that tested the limits of filmmaking with its innovative solution for weightlessness (just do it for real!) and put the words, “Houston, we have a problem,” into the cultural lexicon (even if that’s not exactly what Lovell said in real life).

Released in June 1995, the film earned $223.8 million globally and received nine Oscar nominations, winning two.

The film is back in the zeitgeist, celebrating its 30^th anniversary with an Imax theatrical run from Sept. 19-25. It comes just weeks after the real-life Lovell died on Aug. 7 at age 97.

THR caught up with the key players, including Howard, producer Brian Grazer, screenwriter William Broyles Jr. and stars Ed Harris, Kevin Bacon, Gary Sinise, Kathleen Quinlan and Clint Howard. THR also shared an email exchange with Tom Hanks, the Oscar-winning actor whose enthusiasm for the space program helped drive the production. The other principal actor, Bill Paxton, died in 2017, but his co-stars shared plenty of memories of the boisterous man described as a cowboy with the soul of an artist.

RON HOWARD, director At Imagine, Brian and I had an executive named Michael Bostick. His father, Jerry Bostick, was one of the mission controllers. Michael came to us and said, “Jim Lovell and Aaron Couch Jeffrey Kluger are going out with a book proposal called Lost Moon.

BRIAN GRAZER, producer He said, “There’s a 12-page outline.” I read it right away and was really captivated.

RON HOWARD We won it in a bidding process. Brian and I were on the phone. I was living in the east by then, and it was midnight my time, 9 his. We were on the phone with business affairs from Universal. We were thrilled to win this.

WILLIAM BROYLES JR., screenwriter Jeffrey was still working on the book. They said, “We really want to do this movie, but we can’t wait for the book. We’d love someone with journalistic experience go out and report and get the screenplay going.” The first person I called was Al Reinert, who had worked for me at Texas Monthly. We just did what we would do for a story. We talked to everybody. We hung out with Lovell at Cape Kennedy.

RON HOWARD I remember reading the first draft. I was literally standing up on Metro North, the commuter train between Connecticut into New York, jammed at rush hour trying to finish this script. I got emotional. I started crying, standing up, being jostled while reading the script.

BROYLES A lot of the script is from the transcripts. Whenever possible, we just had them say what they said. But Al and I argued forever about whether we should keep the actual transcript, which is “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” or go, “Houston, we have problem.” It’s just so much more active. It is dramatic. We got some flak from the purists. “That’s not what they really said.”

RON HOWARD Kevin Costner looked a lot like Jim Lovell, and Jim Lovell said, “Do you think you could get Kevin Costner to play this part?” It seemed like a good idea. Costner was hot as a pistol at that moment and was somebody I was interested in working with. I never really knew why he wasn’t interested. Then [CAA’s] Richard Lovett called us and said, “It’s your buddy Tom Hanks’ dream to play an astronaut.”

GRAZER There was a lot of names, big action actors that were put on a list. And I had this flashpoint moment where I thought, “Who does the world want to save the most?” And I thought, “Tom Hanks.”

RON HOWARD At this point, Philadelphia had just come out. Forrest Gump had not yet been released, so there were some who said, “Are you doing a comedy version of a space story?” It threw me a little bit that that was people’s first instinct. But by the time both Philadelphia and [Forrest] Gump had been released, and Tom had gone through the awards season victoriously, no one could have imagined anyone else ever in the role.

KEVIN BACON, backup command module pilot Jack Swigert I’m an East Coast person, and I used to hear people say, “You really should be in Hollywood because that’s where things get done. You should be out at these parties, and you should be going to the right restaurants.” And I was like, “Fuck that. Not who I am.” But I think that Brian Grazer saw me walk by at The Ivy in L.A. on Robertson and said, “I’ve got to talk to Ron about this.” And basically, that’s how I got the part. That was the rumor. I can’t confirm that.

GARY SINISE, command module pilot Ken Mattingly Ron told my agents, “Pick one of the astronauts that Tom is not playing and come in and audition.” I loved the part of the guy who’s integral to the mission, gets removed from the mission and then has to come back and be an integral part of saving the day. The fact that I had just worked with Tom on Forrest Gump helped because I hadn’t done all that many movies prior. I remember Ron came to the premiere of Forrest Gump after had cast me. He said, “Well, I’m glad I cast you.”

CLINT HOWARD, EECOM controller Sy Liebergot, Ron goes, “Who do you think you’d like to play?” I’d seen my brother do a lot of direction, and I realized that he shot a lot and that there is a problem of getting edited out of his movies. I knew that if I could play Sy Liebergot’s role, that there is no way I’ll get left on the cutting room floor.

KATHLEEN QUINLAN, Marilyn Lovell Right after I met with Tom and Ron, I had to have shoulder surgery. And when I woke up, it was when O.J. [Simpson] was being arrested. [Then-husband Bruce Abbott] said, “You got the part.” I didn’t feel like I knew Tom at all. So, I asked him to join Bruce and I to dinner at this little place, way out in the mountains that I thought he would be safe in. He was reluctant at first, but then we had a great dinner, and then it was more relaxed for us.

CLINT HOWARD It was so great that Mom [Ron and Clint’s mother, Jean Speegle Howard] was in it, playing Grandma Lovell. She was really too young to play the role. Ron made her audition, and Ron actually told her, “Mom, I still think you’re a little young.” And she turned around and she pulled out her false teeth and then she turned back around to face Ron. She said, “Does this make me old enough?”

TOM HANKS, commander Jim Lovell The very first meeting I had with the great Bill Paxton was on the film. We were all going to do it and he brings up the metaphor of Ulysses tied to the mast hearing the sirens call as the crew passes beyond the far side of the moon. Jim Lovell had done that trip once before, and now his opportunity to walk upon its surface was lost forever. That a guy like wild Bill Paxton, being the great artist that he was underneath that country-boy-guy-from-Texas bluster, was an extraordinary thing to come across. I knew that we were all going to be a fine team with plenty to talk about when the three of us were isolated in those tiny sets for as long as we were. He was one of the great joys of the production.

“IF YOU STAY LIKE THAT TOO LONG, YOU DIE.”

With the cast set, Howard and his team continue to refine the script, bringing on Jim Sayles to polish it, and incorporating new tidbits from the real-life people involved in the project. The cast, meanwhile, immerse themselves in their own research.

RON HOWARD Tom was visiting Jim in Texas, and Jim took him up in his private plane and was flying around and letting Tom fly a little bit. While they were up flying, Jim told him the story of being lost at sea at night and following the plankton to the aircraft carrier. Tom came back and told me this story and said, “I think it should be in the movie somewhere.”

QUINLAN I met Jim and Marilyn Lovell at one of their homes down in Texas and I got to spend a few days with them, and Marilyn gave me the lay of the land and showed me a lot of her memorabilia albums.

SINISE We all went to space camp in Huntsville, Alabama, and I remember just spending time getting to know the guys.

BACON We’d sit in these classes for hours. I have a mind that just does not work that way. But Hanks — and to a certain extent, Bill, too — I think they could fly a rocket. They were amazing. I couldn’t believe their ability to absorb and understand.

BROYLES  Ron, Tom, Al and I went to NASA to go and see the Saturn Five and the exhibits. Tom knew every mission. He could have been the docent at the museum.

BACON At NASA, we got into a chamber where they remove the oxygen, so there’s a higher balance of nitrogen, which re-creates high altitudes. You get super, super out of it. And if you stay like that too long, you die. Bill Paxton, who was such a cowboy, was pushing it further and further.

SINISE Bill had the funniest look on his face when they started to dial that thing down. He looked just like he had bubbles in the brain.

BACON I looked over at Bill and his lips are turning blue, his skin is a pale blue, and he’s got this giant smile on his face. He’s like, “Yeah, man, this is crazy.” Later, I remember me, Bill and Tom driving around and looking for a restaurant and ending up in this little Mexican restaurant in Houston and having this great meal. Tom was a big star, to say the least. And people just in this restaurant: “How did this happen?”

“OH, YOU MEAN THE VOMIT COMET?”
To re-create the weightlessness of space, Howard experiments using wires, but with CGI in its infancy, it was hard to digitally remove them and miserable for the actors. During a chance encounter with Steven Spielberg, Howard they learn of the “Vomit Comet,” a KC-135 training plane that simulates weightlessness by flying up to 40,000 feet, then nose diving.

RON HOWARD At Universal where we were prepping, I bumped into Spielberg, and he said, “How’s it going with Apollo 13? I said, “Well, I just did this awkward test with the wires, and that’s a drag. We’re going to have to build these sets, hide the wires.” Spielberg said, “I once saw some NASA footage where the astronauts were opening up a hatch and floating out of the hatch. It was on this airplane, and I don’t know quite how they were doing it, but you should ask about that.” So I went to Lovell, and he said, “Oh, you mean the Vomit Comet?”

BACON We took this stuff that the NASA doctor gave us [for nausea]. They say Dramamine makes you drowsy. I guess this is Dramamine times 10, because it would make you so drowsy that we had to combat it. It was a two-pill kind of thing. One was for the nausea, and the other was to give you the energy to make it through the day.

RON HOWARD We started off thinking we were only going to do five or six days, but it was so effective that I convinced the studio to let us build not just the command module, but also the LIM and the tunnel so that we could shoot every master shot for the movie on the KC-135.

HANKS The time shooting on it could not have been replicated in any other place at that time, cinema-wise. No wires, no tilted cameras, nothing would have produced the true look of zero gravity weightlessness [other] than going up doing those parabola over the Gulf of Mexico. Even today, no one would try to do that because it would all be done with CGI and newer techniques that take away all of the manpower and danger and time-consuming qualities of actually building a set, sticking it in a plane and going around flying up and down.

RON HOWARD I had all the storyboards and I had everything broken out so that everyone knew what we were doing. There was no discussing anything on the KC-135. We were just executing shots with two cameras that were also floating.

BACON On our first trip, there was a grip who was just a classic big, tough dude, but he never went again.

RON HOWARD Our B camera operator [vomited on Paxton]. Paxton floated over to me with vomit all in his hair. He said, “Oh, look what happened! He hurled! He puked all over me, give me a towel, Ron!” And he toweled off. And we kept going.

BACON The combination of doing the parabola every day and the drugs — my dreams were just insane. I would wake up in the middle of the night and I had cold sweats, and it was a pretty wild time. I also had this brand new family. I had a lot of anxiety about going up every day. Every time we’d get back, I would immediately call Kyra [Sedgwick] and say, “I’m back on the ground.”

RON HOWARD When we went back down on the ground and did all close-ups for those scenes, the actors knew what it had been like to be weightless. And so now as they’re acting it and faking it, whether it’s because they’re on a little jib arm or laying on a belly pan, and we’ve twisted the set around in some crazy angle, so it looks like they’re upside down or something. They’d already done the scene once in real zero G, and they were just able to perform it with real ease and a lot of authenticity.

BACON They cooled the stage down as cold as it could get.

RON HOWARD Down to 36 or 37 degrees, just above freezing so that we would get breath as the spacecraft cooled down.

BACON We would drink hot liquid right before the take, and then the lighting would be done in a certain way so that hopefully we could get some breath coming out. It was like 95 degrees or whatever in the Valley, and they had these giant coat racks outside the stage — Eddie Bauer coats and boots and stuff — and everybody was putting them on as they went to the stage.

“FALURE IS NOT AN OPTION.”
Howard and his team painstakingly re-create Mission Control, leading to some of the film’s most memorable moments — including the line, “Failure is not an option,” which chief flight director Gene Kranz never said, but liked so much he made it the title of his memoir years later.

BROYLES They went to mission control and they measured everything down to the millimeter, and they rebuilt it completely, just exactly like it was. One of the astronauts who was a technical adviser was on the set and went around the corner thinking that there was the hallway from the bathroom and it was just the wall.

RON HOWARD [The Mission Control actors] still get together about once every month or two and have breakfast. They were so close knit, starting with our Mission Control school, which was this two-week intensive period on the set with several Mission Control consultants, helping them understand that the technical vernacular.

CLINT HOWARD We got handed a lot of paperwork that at first was sort of intimidating.

RON HOWARD I gave them all a challenge. I said, “Hey, the more cool stuff you come up with, the more facetime you’re going to have in this movie. I’m interested in that minutia and that detail, and I want the authenticity.”

CLINT HOWARD There were tape loops, which were all the communication between the flight controllers, and then there was a tape loop between the CapCom and Jim and Fred and Jack. We were all given these sets of cassette tapes. We could listen and we could hear the rhythm and the cadence.

ED HARRIS, flight director Gene Kranz I listened to a lot of the interviews and whatever news stuff that had been recorded at the time, and just tried to fill my head up with details and technical information that didn’t maybe totally make sense to me, but I kind of pretended that it did, and just got familiar with the whole routine as much as I could.

RON HOWARD At that time, ER was a huge success, and there was this intern working on the movie called Ed Yoon, and he was a med student, but he loved films and he couldn’t decide which path he wanted to follow. Ed was incredibly helpful on this movie. He said, “Hey, people love techno speak. Look at ER. Do you understand everything everybody’s saying? No, but it’s really cool.” He was a big advocate for getting as much of that in there as possible.

SINISE Dave Scott was one of our astronauts on set working with us all the time. Ron would always say, “Dave, what happened here? What would they do here?” And he would explain it and then Ron would find a way to factor that into the scene.

RON HOWARD Dave Scott and Ed [Yoon] pored through the transcripts. Ed understood drama, and he would feed us little details. We were constantly sitting with Dave Scott, Ed, myself and the actors, and going through what the procedure was going to be in the scene we were going to shoot the following day. The actors always knew why they were flicking a switch and why they were saying what they were saying.

BROYLES Jerry Bosnick had been one of the controllers on the mission. We met at a crawfish place near Ellington Field where the astronauts would all fly from. We were sitting there, having crawfish and beer, and we were saying to Jerry, “These guys were 200,000 miles from home with no power, no way to get back. What were you thinking? Did you think it was impossible?” He said, “Oh, we just thought failure wasn’t an option.”

HARRIS I remember filming that [failure is not an option] shot very well. I don’t remember how many takes we had, but between you and me, I didn’t feel it was the best take of that line, but Ron felt it worked, and it has become quite a well-known phrase, for sure.

“I NEVER MADE IT TO THE MOON, EITHER.”
With filming completed, Howard begins showing the film to the world — to (almost) universally strong results.

RON HOWARD The very first test screening was a blind one. No one knew what it was. It tested great. I was thrilled. Great responses, except this one person, 23-year-old caucasian male, I’ll never forget. [The audience could rate the movie] Excellent, very good, good, fair, poor. “Poor!” Just the pencil stroke, no comments. Would you recommend it? “No! definitely not.” He wasn’t really writing or answering any questions. Finally on the back, you flip it over and he did answer one question with a comment. It said, Please rate and comment on the ending. And he said, “Terrible!” with an exclamation mark. “More Hollywood bullshit!!” two exclamation marks. “They would never survive!” More exclamation marks. And I realized he had no idea it was a true story. There’d been no advertising yet. He had no clue. And I also realized that if I tried to sell this as a work of fiction, people would raise the bullshit flag, but they can’t, because it happened.

SINISE Ron set up a big Houston screening and all these astronauts were there. I think they were all happy with it.

RON HOWARD Buzz Aldrin came up to me and said, “I used to be the chairman of the vault, and I thought I’d seen all of our shots, but you had some shots in there that I’d never seen before [of the space launch]. And I said, “Well, we researched the vault, but we re-created everything.” I thought that was probably the greatest comment that I had that night. And kudos to [visual effects supervisor] Rob Legato and team for coming up with something that fooled Buzz Aldrin.

QUINLAN I remember we were flown to Chicago to see the movie. I was there with all the guys, and Tom said to me, “Well, do you think it’s a hit?” I said, “I don’t know if it’s a hit. It’s a classic.”

RON HOWARD That launch sequence is a tremendous piece of music. And I remember Tom Hanks happened to be visiting the scoring stage that day when James [Horner] was recording that sequence, and it was one long piece, and so he prepared all morning with the orchestra. He conducted himself, and Hanks happened to be there, and I remember turning to Tom and he was crying. It was so moving, and to think we had that music supporting our movie, James just did a brilliant job with that.

SINISE You’re on pins and needles when there’s radio silence at the end of the movie and it cuts to everybody, it cuts to Mission Control, it cuts to Marilyn watching television. It cuts to the son and the Military Academy. It cuts to everybody waiting out that moment for when they hear those voices. People that grew up during that era knew the end. Yet it’s so high tension and so beautifully done. I thought that’s a real director’s feat when you can take a story that everybody knows the ending to and you can create something out of it and make the audience feel like they’re guessing or seeing it for the first time.

RON HOWARD  [At the Oscars] everyone thought Apollo 13 was going to win best picture. We’d won Producer’s Guild and other things.

GRAZER I kind of got up to accept the victory — and then they said, Braveheart. I put the little slip where I had my speech back in my pocket. It was the most embarrassing moment you could possibly have. I had a friend of mine go like this (Grazer makes an L on his forehead with his hand). He was the chairman of one of the studios.

HOWARD Jim Lovell reached over and grabbed Brian’s hand.

GRAZER He said, “I never made it to the moon either,” and that put things really in perspective.

HOWARD Six months after the movie came out, I crossed paths with Billy Wilder, whom I had met a couple of times, and was probably my favorite director of that era. He said, “I liked Apollo 13 very, very much”. And I said, “Wow, that was incredibly flattering.” He said, “You know what I liked about it? It was very stirring, it was very powerful, but it was about somebody who doesn’t get their dream.”