To anyone over 45, the moon landings in 1969 rank alongside the death of Kennedy, John Lennon and Princess Diana in the where-were-you memory bank. On this side of the world it was the middle of the night, and I, along with anyone who had a television, was glued to the set. Today it seems inevitable, then it seemed miraculous. What none of us knew was that those scratchy pictures arrived courtesy of a satellite dish in rural Australia.
The Dish, which opened yesterday, is an endearing and very funny account of the string-and-sealing-wax story of how it happened. A small-budget Australian production, it stars Sam Neill in one of his regular appearances Down Under, which he balances with his mainstream Hollywood career. In 1993, for example, he starred in both The Piano and The Hunt For Red October.
"I have always gone back, partly because I think that the industry should be supported in that part of the world, probably more pertinently for completely selfish reasons. I just love going back - I feel comfortable there, I am entirely relaxed there and I feel I do much my best work there, because the best acting comes out of relaxation at the end of the day. Plus I have houses in both Australia and New Zealand and it's quite good to be able to work out of home once in a while."
In July 1969, Neill was a student at Canterbury University in New Zealand's south island, reading English and History. He doesn't remember exactly where he was because, not having a television, he didn't watch it.
"I would like to think that I was in the library swotting, but I suspect I was not doing that at all." Neill had arrived in New Zealand at the age of eight - his father, a third-generation New Zealander, was returning from a spell with the British Army in the Irish Guards. Although the young Neill had been born in Northern Ireland, he was very much the little English boy, complete with severe stutter and name (Nigel) which he changed when he was 11 to Sam. The shyness remains, and there is even a residual hint of the stutter. Neill speaks slowly with long pauses between sentences, letting his clear, bright eyes do most of the work for him.
The acting came about quite by chance and didn't really happen in any serious way until he was 30. "I was never driven to be an actor, it just happened to me. I'm glad that it did, but it was really not something that I actively pursued." After university, Neill got a job with the New Zealand film unit, a state-run concern, where he trained as an editor.
"I would love to have gone to film school, but there just weren't any in New Zealand. It was the same for all branches of the arts. Most people of my generation are autodidacts." Within a year he was directing documentaries - "a couple about architecture and one about travelling players" - though he dismisses any idea that he showed exceptional promise. Everyone else, he says, was doing the same thing.
The film unit had no real money and, instead of being paid overtime, these young film-makers were given time off in lieu.
"So you'd find yourself with three or four months off. So we'd go off and I'd do some theatre or act in other people's little films - just for something to do, and because that was my particular interest, or I would go and plant my vegetable garden, stuff like that."
The sensitive boy had sensitive looks to match, and in 1977, aged 30, and on the back of the odd parts he had done for friends, he was cast as the lead in a film called Sleeping Dogs, which included Warren Oates in its cast.
"It wasn't particularly good, but it went to Australia, got picked up there and that brought me to the attention of Gillian Armstrong, who directed My Brilliant Career."
Neill fell in love with Australia and never looked back. "I thought it was the most wonderful place. I turned up there just as the cinema way was breaking with Peter Weir [Picnic at Hanging Rock] and Bruce Beresford [Don's Party and Breaker Morant] and Fred Schepsi [The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith]. And anything and everything was possible, the climate was great, and I loved the people and it was such fun. I thought, `Bugger this, I'm going to jack in my job and come and live over here and see if I can make a living as an actor.' It was a big move, very exciting and intoxicating. But if you'd asked me 23 years ago when I went to Australia if I thought I'd still be acting in films in 2001, I wouldn't have begun to imagine that was possible."
In those 23 years, Neill has notched up an impressive 52 films. There are some people who seem to get better looking as they get older, and Neill is a case in point, still being cast as romantic leads at past 50. He's just spent five months in LA shooting Jurassic Park III with Laura Dern. "Two dinosaurs and a babe," he says with laconic self-deprecative laugh. Neill takes the whole Hollywood thing with a pinch of salt.
"I've got friends in Hollywood - and I really like going there. And while a lot of it is obviously completely odious, a lot of it is great, great fun - and if you earn a few American dollars, they go a long way when you get it home, so far be it from me to bite the hand that feeds me."
Home remains resolutely in Central Otago, a spectacularly beautiful and remote area of New Zealand's south island, where Neill has three vineyards of Pinot Noir grapes. The first - only five acres - was planted about nine years ago and is already producing wine commercially. (In London it features on the wine list of the celebrity restaurant, The Ivy.)
Like Mel Gibson on his ranch in Australia, Neill is firmly rooted to the land. He is committed to making his vineyard organic within the next couple of years, explaining that, in the first few years of planting, the land was irrigated, so he needed to use mild herbicides to keep the weeds down. Now that the roots are deep enough not to need irrigation, weeds are no longer a problem.
"In a literal sense it is rooting oneself, but it's also very satisfying to open a bottle of your own wine, and it's very satisfying to wander among your own vines. But also, at the end of the day, it's much more interesting what's happening to this year's vintage [as opposed] to what's happening to this year's box office. I mean, I couldn't care less about box office. But it's really that matters in Los Angeles, and who's hot and who's not. Who cares?
"It's of absolutely no consequence to the world, but I think whether the grapes are going to make it this year, that's riveting."
What is of consequence is what happens to the land itself, and Neill is currently "in the middle of a political `stash' with the local authorities, who are gung ho, pro-development cowboys and hell bent on the destruction on one of the most beautiful areas in the world. It's not a position that I wanted or enjoy at all."
He is not interested in the trappings of celebrity, and thinks that the reason he has never won any of the major US gongs is simply that he is "not flashy" enough. The feeling is that he should have got an Oscar for the 1987 Evil's Angels - which went to his co-star Meryl Streep.
The same is true of the Australian film he did that year, Dead Calm, which introduced the world to Nicole Kidman. He says he really doesn't care. "It is nice to get a gong once in a while, and I have once or twice - and they [the British Government] were nice enough to give me an OBE a while back. It was just a few days before my father died, and it was one of the last things he was aware of, and it was important to me for that reason. It meant a lot to him."
Although a colonial of the old school who strongly disapproved of his son's artistic leanings, Maj Dermot Neill was an eccentric and patrician father who instilled in Sam Neill a love of the remote and the wild.
"There is quite a bit of work involved in getting a nomination, it's quite tough stuff and you need a publicist but I don't bother with that.
"Occasionally I get crow-barred out to promote something. And I'm happy to do so for something like The Dish - it's a really good film and I'm proud to be in it and I really want people to see it. And it's something I would be happy for my kids to see - only too rare these days.
"I think it was the last of the great, brave - foolhardy enterprises, like Shackleton and Cortez. And we will never do that again.
"They'll send a bloody robot, or a computer will do it. So it's the end of a heroic age and a beginning of a rather duller, electronic age. And you can see that, on the film, the controls in the control room are half steam and half computer, you know?"
The Dish is currently on general release).