‘First Man’s’ foray into moviemaking

METRO ATLANTA

ATLANTA — As Ryan Gosling re-created Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind during the climactic moon landing scene in “First Man,” the audience at Atlantic Station was fully engrossed in the awe-inspiring moment.

It was slightly disorienting when the movie theater lights came on a few minutes later, transporting the viewer from outer space back into the advanced screening. That jet-lag feeling intensified when Gosling and Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle came in and divulged that the “moon” was actually a gray rock quarry just outside Atlanta.

Gosling and Chazelle were in Atlanta to promote the film, a deep dive into the decade leading up to the 1969 Apollo 11 flight told through Armstrong’s notoriously private point of view.

The metro area was able to re-create a “host of topographies,” according to Chazelle, including space, the moon and circa-1960s Houston, California and Florida.

The production team found an empty lot in Roswell to replicate the family’s home, brick by brick, during Armstrong’s tenure at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Chazelle and Gosling remembered neighbors passing space-themed cookies around to crew members during a night shoot.

Georgia didn’t always cooperate, though. Chazelle wanted to avoid using computer-generated images, no easy feat when you’re shooting scenes of men walking on the moon. The team sculpted the landscape at Stockbridge’s Vulcan Rock Quarry one January but ran into an unexpected issue: snow on the moon. The actors had to shoot other scenes back at Tyler Perry Studios while the satellite thawed out.