Author: Kristopher Tapley / Source: Variety
Damien Chazelle had just completed “Whiplash,” the 2014 film that would put him on the map, when a project called “” crossed his desk. He wasn’t that interested in astronaut Neil Armstrong, per se, or even NASA history, but after taking a look at James R.
Hansen’s biography of the first man to set foot on the moon, and digging into a few documentaries to see if there was a story he wanted to tell on the screen, everything got reframed for him.“I don’t know what clicked but at some point I was just like, ‘Wow, how have I taken it for granted that in order to have the success story we grow up with of people walking on the moon, people had to turn fantasy into reality and completely put their lives on the line in order to do that,’” the 33-year-old Oscar-winning director says at the Telluride Film Festival, two days removed from the North American bow of his latest. “How do you get from 1961 to 1969, from barely getting into orbit to walking on the moon? It’s 32 times the size of the earth, from the earth to the moon. It’s an insane magnitude. You look at it on a plot and it’s mythological. Suddenly it was like Orpheus going into Hades. You’re going where humans are not supposed to go, and everything about the natural world is telling you that this is not where humanity is supposed to go. And they did it.”
He was immediately gripped by the possibility of crafting a truly immersive, even scary movie about this landmark event that we somehow take for granted today.
“It’s so gilded in triumphalism in the modern perspective, almost as though it was such a shining moment in history that for a few years, it was easy,” Chazelle says. “I wanted to do away with all of that and make it seem as hard and scary as it was.”
After hammering out a 72-page treatment, Chazelle confesses he wanted to leave the “heavy lifting” to another writer. In early 2014, he and the producers brought in Josh Singer, who was coming off of Bill Condon’s “The Fifth Estate” and Tom McCarthy’s “Spotlight,” which was launching into production. Chazelle went off to shoot “La La Land” and Singer got to work on cracking a story.
“The first piece was really nailing down where you’re going to start, because Neil has a whole career before he gets to NASA,” Singer says. “Neil’s first love was planes. He was a taciturn guy but he would talk a blue streak about the X-15, and there were some pretty wild X-15 flights like the one we depict that happened right as his daughter Karen was struggling [with a malignant tumor] and kind of going downhill. So that felt like an interesting place to start.”
In sketching out a skeleton for the script, Singer next zeroed in on the Gemini 8 mission as a midpoint, during which Armstrong and fellow astronaut David Scott completed a successful docking test in orbit before things went haywire and the mission nearly killed them both. Then of course the Apollo 11 moon landing would be the finale. Throughout, a theme of loss began to surface.
“I was just so blown away by the fact that the second group of astronauts, two of them die and they happen to be Neil’s closest friends,” Singer says. “Elliot [See] and Ed [White], they both die within the calendar year. And in the middle of that, Neil goes up only two weeks after Elliot’s death and he almost dies. That is a crazy year. So that is the center. Ed is the end of the second act and Elliot is sort of the lead-up to the midpoint. It all sort of fell into place.”
Armstrong’s arc ended up being rather atypical. He starts at this heartbreaking moment with the loss of his daughter, then finds some joy going back to work with the NASA community in Houston, only to have it all stolen from him again by tragedy and loss and, in that Gemini 8 went off the rails, failure.
In November of 2015, as Chazelle was in post-production on “La La Land,” Singer finally had a 150-page first draft. Whittling it into shape was a joy, he says, because he was collaborating with a writer-director “who is such a true North.” Dozens and dozens of drafts later, they finally had their story on the page. It would follow this American hero, an emotionally clenched individual who lives for his work but buries the compounding pain of his life, and who would one day — at least based on conjecture from Hansen, backed up by Armstrong’s sister — pay tear-jerking tribute to Karen on the surface of the moon.
From there Chazelle went to work with his Oscar-winning “La La Land” cinematographer Linus Sandgren to find the visual identity of the film. They talked early on about shooting the whole thing with 16mm film, because the movie was meant feel like you’re emotionally close to the characters. It would be a very different aesthetic from the more innervated one employed on Chazelle’s previous two endeavors (“Whiplash” was shot by Sharone Meir), one inspired by documentary filmmaking and notes of cinéma vérité.
“Doing tests, we realized 16mm doesn’t really hold up in big, wide shots,” Sandgren says. “So going to NASA and the big shots in that environment, it felt like we wanted to stay in the gritty, raw realm, but 16mm isn’t sharp enough for that.”
The ultimate solution ended up being a combination of formats. So the beginning of the film, depicting one of Armstrong’s harrowing X-15 flights, and everything that would be shot inside spacecrafts, was done on 16mm. They settled on that format as the visual language of intimacy and being close to the characters. Moving into the world of NASA, they opted for 35mm.
“We have this sort of world where they lead this pretend good life in the suburbs,” Sandgren says. “We decided to do that with…
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