Author: Brian Davids / Source: The Hollywood Reporter
Damien Chazelle knew First Man would be his most technically challenging film to date. However, the bigger challenge for the Oscar-winning director was finding a personal connection to an American hero’s historic feat that took place long before he was born.
The film stars Ryan Gosling as astronaut Neil Armstrong, whose story Chazelle initially was hesitant to tell, particularly because through Whiplash and La La Land he’d established himself as a filmmaker who prefers to conceive of and write his own personal stories. With First Man, it would require him to adapt the 2005 book from James R. Hansen.
“I didn’t have any real connection to Neil or the space program. It felt so far removed from me,” Chazelle told The Hollywood Reporter by phone this week. “I was intrigued enough to start reading the book and start looking at a few documentaries. Then, one thing led to another, and suddenly I just became obsessed. I kind of realized that not only is there this untold story, but it’s an untold story that actually is personal to me.”
Chazelle assembled a team that included production designer Nathan Crowley, known for working on Christopher Nolan films such as the space drama Interstellar.
“I really wanted Nathan because of all his work, not just with Nolan. I knew he’d bring the practical approach, the same approach he brings to all of Nolan’s movies,” says Chazelle. “He relies on in-camera effects, miniatures, full-scale replicas, gimbals, motion control and also sets, down to the smallest detail, that feel lived in, that doesn’t feel overly clean, that feel like they’ve got dirt, grime and a real texture to them. Nathan is the best in the world at doing all that stuff, and I was really overjoyed to get him. I certainly spent a lot of time asking him about tricks he had used on movies with Chris like Dunkirk and Interstellar.“
Read the full conversation with Chazelle below, in which he discusses meeting Nolan for the first time during post-production and why frequent collaborator J.K. Simmons doesn’t pop up in First Man.
After making First Man, are you more interested in traveling to space someday, or is Imax still your preferred method of space travel?
I think Imax is my preferred method. You get the scope, grandeur and sensation –– but you don’t have to worry about getting killed. (Laughs)
We’re nearly the same age, and like you, I was amazed by how little I knew about the Armstrong family as well as the preceding missions that culminated in Apollo 11. I even surveyed some of my own friends, and sadly, they knew more conspiracy theories than facts. So, was separating fact from sensationalism one of your many reasons for telling this story?
Absolutely. It was also removing the veneer of mythology that I think has separated us and people of our generation from those events. We kind of think of it as though it were superheroes or Greek mythology. We don’t really think of people like Neil Armstrong as an ordinary, [at times] uncertain, doubtful, scared, happy, sad, going-through-stuff human being. Rooting it at the human level, especially the family level through Neil and his wife Janet and what they were going through together, is what interested me. It felt like that would be the perspective through which we could then tell the audience a lot of things they didn’t know. Because Neil was so private, we know so little about his private life, emotional life or all the emotional upheavals that he went through, that Janet went through, during that time. We also don’t really know about what actually went on behind closed doors at NASA, and in those spacecrafts. The image of NASA propagated to the world was so gilded. It was designed to curry support. But, the actual dangers, the way in which the whole program existed at such a proximity to death at all times, the deaths that the program resulted in, I think all those things are part of this untold story that we just wanted to lean into.
The photography in First Man is such an achievement. In fairness, I could say the same of every department. But, what you accomplished alongside your director of photography, Linus Sandgren, is a testament to why celluloid should forever be an option for all filmmakers. With 16 mm, you transported the audience to the 1960s, while your use of Imax elevated our own experience on the moon alongside Neil Armstrong. In terms of testing, how long did it take to find the look and feel that you ultimately wanted for each facet of the film?
It took a while. I was really lucky that I was able to re-team up with a lot the people from La La Land, like Linus Sandgren, [composer] Justin Hurwitz, some of the same sound engineers (Ai-Ling Lee, Mildred Iatrou) and Mary Zophres on costumes. With all those people, and others as well, we talked really early about both broad strokes and granular details. Everyone, whether they were a NASA history nerd or a space geek before starting on this movie, all of us kind of became one during the course of making it. The look of the movie, everything from production design to photography and costume design, all of it was inspired, more than anything, by the archival materials that we found through our research. The actual photography taken by the astronauts themselves in space, the LIFE magazine photography of the families, the old home movies and photo books that some of the astronaut families would show us, visiting their homes and workplaces, seeing the actual capsules, talking to people Mark, Rick and Janet Armstrong, as well as David Scott, who flew with Neil on Gemini 8, [astronauts] Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins –– that’s what fed into the look. It all started with trying to capture the reality of it. And then finding a way to make that reality captivating to an audience, and leaning into the stuff that wasn’t as well known, the in-between moments. Everyone kind of knows the Apollo craft, but very few know or remember the Gemini craft, the LLRV that Neil almost died on while training for the moon landing, the…
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