The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
MISSION CONTROL
When ‘La La Land’ director settled on the best way to make Neil Armstrong drama ‘First Man,’ it was all systems go for launch Director Damien Chazelle came about as close as anyone can come to seeing his or her film win the Academy Award for best picture without actually winning it. ¶ As you surely remember, his 2016 musical romance “La La Land” — starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as young lovers trying to achieve success in artistic fields — was announced at the 2017 Oscars ceremony as the winner of that year’s top prize. ¶ The good times were short-lived, however, as the truth — that another film, the drama “Moonlight,” actually had won the award and that an awkward mistake had been made — poured a cold drink of water on the celebration. (Don’t feel too badly for Chazelle — he did take home the statuette for best director that night.)
Of course, it’s onward and upward, relatively literally, for Chazelle, who’s followup, “First Man,” landed in theaters last week. Adapted by screenwriter Josh Singer from the James R. Hansenpenned biography “First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong,” the drama tells of the journey of the nowfamous astronaut to set foot on the moon and balancing those high-minded efforts with the late Armstrong’s life at home with wife Janet (Claire Foy) and two young sons.
Recently, Chazelle, along with Neil’s son Mark, visited the Cleveland area to promote “First Man.” In a phone interview during that trip, he spoke about making the film, and Mark touched on why “La La Land” star Gosling was the right man to portray his father. Q Damien, timing-wise, it doesn’t sound like you made “La La Land” and then decided to do something really different. Why when you were making “La La Land” did this “First Man” project — a Neil Armstrong film — appeal to you?
CHAZELLE: Well, I was given the book “First Man” by Jim Hansen and was just sort of amazed when I started reading it. I think I thought at first that I wouldn’t have a way in to Neil’s story — it was a story that I thought I knew, a story of this preordained success where everything went perfectly and it all felt super-heroic and not really downto-earth, pardon the pun. And what’s amazing about Jim’s book is that it really grounds it, it really reminds you in a visceral way that these were human beings, these were ordinary people going up into fragile rockets to a distant land, so to speak, not knowing what they would find. Just the immense courage, the bravery, the sacrifice, the loss, the failures that kind of peppers the road to the success. I think all those things marked me and made me want to tell that story from the personal angle, to (not make) a big history movie or another Space Race movie. This needed to be a movie about family — movie about a marriage, about Neil and Janet and what they went through as a couple on the road to the moon. Q It is that, but it also has these visceral, affecting re-creations of mission sequences. Can you talk about the challenges of filming those the way you did and how they turned out?
CHAZELLE: In keeping with the first-person, kind of subjective style I wanted the whole movie to have, I felt ... they should feel — like the family sequences — they should feel really, really intimate and really, really up-close-and-personal and not give the audience that safe distance that history movies or epics sometimes do — not rely on the big wides or the big God’s-eye view but really put the audience inside the capsule, almost as though a documentary crew crawled in that capsule with Neil. And so we see what he sees, we hear what he hears, we take those first steps on the moon, we get hurled into outer space, we go spinning like crazy during (the Gemini 8 mission). (We were) just trying to communicate those things to an audience in a really real-time, visceral, kind of gut-wrenching way.
“The subject matter was really different, but in both cases, I guess, for me and Ryan (Gosling) especially, it was kind of about telling the story about what it means to go after a dream and how hard that can be — the cost behind that on a human level.” — Director Damien Chazelle, on making “La La Land” and “First Man”
Q Not that they look the same, but “La La Land” and “First Man” both look as if they’re purposely not exactly modern, possibly from a different time period. What did you want to do visually with this film, specifically?
CHAZELLE: In both cases, we definitely were drawing from older sources. I think in “First Man,” what we were drawing from the most visually was actually was just the authentic archival footage that Neil and the other astronauts took during their missions — stuff you can find in documentaries like “For All Mankind” or “Moonwalk One” or “Footprints on the Moon.” Or stuff you can find online, on YouTube. NASA opened their doors, also, to their vaults of unscreened archival, never-before-seen archival (footage) to us. It was just kind of amazing seeing the raw footage. It’s hard to emphasize how raw it it is; it’s the opposite of the clean, sleek space travel that I’ve seen in movies before. It’s roughhewn and grainy and hand-held and just feels, I think, both scarier and more emotional and more beautiful all at the same time than I’d ever imagined space travel was.
It gave me a new perspective on it, just seeing that archival footage and made me want to try to make the movie feel like that but also, of course, like a big, immersive epic for modern audience. In both “La La Land” and this, I’d say, one similarity was just trying to bridge the old and the new and trying to ground our inspiration in the stuff from the generation we’re depicting but really bring it in to now and make it feel visceral and alive for young audiences and old. Q You’re obviously a filmmaker who understands the importance of sound, and this movie makes sound a big part of the opening sequence. Can you talk about that element of the film and what you wanted to do?
CHAZELLE: Especially, once we decided that the camera was going to stay inside the cockpit for a lot of these missions, it felt like sound had to then tell us the rest of the story. We’re getting a limited visual viewpoint — we’re looking out through windows, we’re looking at dials and gauges, and we’re looking at the astronauts’ faces, but what can the sound tell us about what’s going on? And how much scarier can sound make it? It felt like sound would really three-dimensionalize the movie.
It’s funny — I actually remember spending some time talking with Mark here and his brother, Rick, about, for example, just the sounds of a Saturn 5 launch. I remember Rick kind of describing it as this sort of just louder than you can ever imagine, otherworldly, crackling mixture of sounds that was just really unique. And, obviously, they’re not launching Saturn 5s anymore, but we tried to get as close as we could to maybe what some of those sounds might have been like. Q You obviously worked with Ryan Gosling on “La La Land” — and maybe Mark can speak to this, too: Why was he the right man to portray Neil Armstrong and what do you feel he ultimately brought to the part?
ARMSTRONG: Ryan brings a lot of facets of my dad’s personality to the (movie). That was something that was really important to my brother and me, because Dad’s sort of been ... mischaracterized over the years in a lot of ways, and it was important to us that we bring this really well-rounded guy that we knew as our dad to the screen.
We really emphasized his sense of humor, his dry wit, his love of music ... and each time we kind of described these different facets of Dad’s personality, what we found we had in Damien and Josh and Ryan a group of people (who) wanted that information. They wanted to try to figure out ways to work those things in. And it’s challenging because ... there are a lot of very difficult and tragic things that happened in the movie, and all of those beats make it very hard to show all those different facets of Dad’s personality because it’s always very serious circumstances. So they had to work very hard to have these in-between moments, with the family and interpersonal relationships between Dad and some of the other astronauts in backyard and at barbecues and things like that to try to get at these other moments, and I think they did a fabulous job at that. I tell Damien I only wish the movie was four hours long so that they could hit a bunch of other things. And, in fact, it would have been that long if they’d put in all the scenes that I wanted, but nobody would actually go see the movie, so I’m glad for his director’s eye.
CHAZELLE: (Laughs.) Q Lastly, “La La Land” and “First Man” both seem like very challenging films but in different ways. Can you compare and contrast the experiences of making both of them?
CHAZELLE: Obviously, the subject matter was really different, but in both cases, I guess, for me and Ryan especially, it was kind of about telling the story about what it means to go after a dream and how hard that can be — the cost behind that on a human level, how it can affect a relationship, for example.
With both movies we wanted to combine two movies in one. I think with “La La Land,” we were always trying to combine the modern relationship drama, realistic relationship drama, with the fantastical musical. I think here it was really about trying to combine this big space epic with a really intimate, almost sort of family documentary. I think it was a tough needle to thread, but I think what really made it possible for us ... was people like Mark, was the family — Mark, Rick, Janet — people who knew Neil in a way that no one else ever did and could help steer us, as Mark was saying, to the in-between moments, the details, so that those things would have as much weight in the movie as the big space stuff.