Arab Times

For ‘First Man’ team, their mission was to get it right

Story of real men, with real families and real danger

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MBy Lindsey Bahr

aking a movie about Neil Armstrong may not necessaril­y be on par with, say, successful­ly landing on the moon but the pressure involved isn’t a giant leap from that either.

There are astronauts who were there, for one, in Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, in addition to all the people who were on the ground at NASA ready jump on any inaccuraci­es.

There’s the near-mythic weight that that achievemen­t of being the first man to walk on the moon holds. For film fans, there’s the “2001: A Space Odyssey” factor. And then there’s the fact that Armstrong, who died in 2012 at age 82, while a stickler for facts, didn’t like to talk much about himself – even to his own family.

But it was a challenge director Damien Chazelle (“La La Land”) and screenwrit­er Josh Singer (“Spotlight”) were willing to take on. Chazelle envisioned a documentar­y-style approach to telling Armstrong’s story in “First Man”, now playing nationwide, with Ryan Gosling in the lead role. He wanted to strip away the glossy romanticis­m from early space travel and make it about the real men, with real families, and the very real danger of this dream to go to the moon.

“If ‘2001’ is the grand movie-movie treatment of space and the greatest possible version of that, you’re never going to beat that,” Chazelle said. “(We thought), could we do the documentar­y version of that? Could we do the gritty, camera on the shoulder, 16 mm, cinema verite version of space and make it feel like D.A. Pennebaker had crawled into the capsule with the astronauts?”

To achieve this goal, production designer Nathan Crowley (“Dunkirk”) and his team built full-scale replicas of capsules from Gemini and Apollo missions, the X-15 aircraft and the multi-axis trainer – practical sets so Chazelle could put his star, camera and the audience right in the claustroph­obic action and shake them all a little while space imagery played outside the windows on LED screens.

Challenges

“Contrary to what you might think it was fun,” Gosling said with a chuckle.

Beyond the physical challenges of the role, Gosling had to also embody the man, without much to work with.

“Even though it was hard to learn personal things about him, I respected it every step of the way. He was the most famous person on the planet and somehow managed to keep the focus on the missions themselves, on the hundreds of thousands of people who helped make it possible,” Gosling said.

“I don’t think it was just to be evasive, I feel as though he had this incredible ability to see everything within its larger context. He could see one giant leap in a small step.”

They weren’t flying blind, either. They had James Hansen’s official biography, “First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong” to work from, but there was a lot of sifting that needed to be done to find the story.

“The good news with Jim is the book got everything right. The bad news is it’s a little encycloped­ic,” Singer laughed. “It’s not the easiest read.”

So Singer set out trying to distill and dramatize (but still accurately depict) a seven-year period, starting with the death of Neil and Janet Armstrong’s 2-year-old daughter Karen, and ending with the moon landing. Singer realized that tragedy surrounded Armstrong. He’d lose a number of friends and colleagues in a short period of time, from plane crashes to the Apollo 1 fire, and have a few near-death experience­s himself, including the less-remembered Gemini 8 mission.

There was also an army of astronauts ready to fact-check along the way. In Singer’s first draft, he made up “all sorts” of stuff in the lunar landing.

“(Astronaut) Dave Scott got really angry,” Singer recalled. “As Rick Armstrong likes to say, ‘You mess with canonical history at your peril’.”

So, he went back to the drawing board and the 1,000-some pages of transcript and took another pass. For Singer, Chazelle, Gosling and the hundreds of people involved in the production, accuracy was their first mission. (AP)

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