Gosling arrives as Venice Film Festival’s ‘First Man’
VENICE, Italy — The 75th Venice Film Festival opened yesterday with the world premiere of “First Man,” a big-budget, intricately detailed recreation of America’s 1960s space race with Ryan Gosling as stoic astronaut Neil Armstrong.
“First Man,” which opens stateside in early October, reteams Gosling, 37, with his “La La Land” writerdirector, Damien Chazelle.
Screams greeted a bearded Gosling as he arrived with Chazelle and castmates for the festival press conference, to be followed by his red carpet appearance and a post-screening dinner bash.
“First Man” covers how Armstrong, an aeronautical engineer and pilot, survived a series of potentially fatal tests to be chosen to be the first man on the moon. It’s a biopic framed by a portrait of endurance, courage and skill.
“One of the first things I thought,” Gosling said with his usual understatement, “was that I should learn how to fly when I was preparing for the role. Neil learned to fly before he could drive.
“It wasn’t too long when my instructor asked me to go into a ‘controlled stall,’ which is like having a car stall. And I thought in that moment, ‘This is a terrible idea! And there’s a reason why Neil Armstrong was destined to be a great pilot and I’m not.’
“Neil started as a test pilot before he was in the Air Force, He’s a person who will get into a plane and push it to the breaking point for the sheer knowledge of how that works and I had to recognize how different that is from me.”
Jason Clarke plays doomed astronaut Ed White, the first American to walk in space who burned to death during a pre-launch test for the first Apollo flight.
“Claustrophobia,” Clarke said, was the toughest part of making the film. “Damien and the crew really created capsules that were too authentic, they were so tiny. I had a meltdown doing the burn-up in Apollo 1. We had a hard time, feeling claustrophobic in those spacesuits with three (massive steel) doors closing.”
The festival yesterday honored Vanessa Redgrave, one of the world’s greatest English-speaking actresses, who revealed during her press conference how fluent she is in Italian, which makes sense. She married her “Camelot” lover Lancelot, Italian actor Franco Nero. Now 81, she was presented with a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.