One Giant Leap
Oscar-winning virtuoso Damien Chazelle reteams with his La La Land star Ryan Gosling to reach for the stars in his most ambitious project yet: revealing the untold story of Neil Armstrong in a space epic set to take audiences to the Moon. TF gets a mission briefing from the director and cast of the year’s first big awards contender.
Ryan Gosling is encased in a stuffy metal can, his outerwear bearing Nasa insignia. An air-conditioning unit hums loudly but ineffectively in the background. As the heat becomes unbearable, Gosling clambers over to a small, shuttered window and yanks it open for a gasp of air. Relieved, he slumps back into his seat. Thankfully, we’re not on a shuttle in the dark recesses of space, but in a stainless steel trailer on the Universal Studios Lot in California, where TF has come to talk to the 37-year-old Canadian about his role in upcoming Neil Armstrong drama First Man, a leading contender for the upcoming awards season.
Gosling’s not wearing a spacesuit today, though his attire is fitting. His denim jacket has a small Nasa pin on the front, and a huge embroidered Nasa patch on the back. Less suitable for space travel are his trademark busted-up workboots, and while his hair’s still clipped closely at the sides, it’s now a little spikier on top. Seemingly by a stroke of serendipity, the day we meet – 20 July 2018 – is exactly 49 years to the day since Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon in 1969. Intentional? “I wouldn’t put it past Universal,” smirks Gosling, his drawl barely audible above the hum of the air-conditioner. “But no, I think it’s a strange coincidence.”
Unlike Gosling’s last film, Blade Runner 2049 – a film so shrouded in secrecy he couldn’t even speak about the opening five minutes – First Man is a story that, although never yet portrayed in a mainstream film, everyone the world over knows inside out. Or do they? Besides Armstrong’s name, and his unforgettable (but misheard) declaration (“One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”), do you really know much about the man behind the mission, or the mission itself for that matter? “Neil Armstrong was obviously someone I thought that I knew about,” says Gosling, his words always considered and deliberate. “I knew his contribution to history, but it turns out that was about it.”
So if your knowledge of the Apollo 11 is limited to the soundbite, you’re not alone. Director Damien Chazelle – the Oscar-winning wünderkind behind Whiplash and the Gosling-starring La La Land – was in the same boat when he was pitched the project back in early 2014, when drumming drama Whiplash had just taken the Sundance Film Festival by storm. “I actually didn’t know if I was interested,” he tells TF from the editing suite that’s been his home for the past few months as he rushes to frantically finish (“It’s always more of a mad dash than I think you expect”) in time for the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival. “I certainly didn’t feel like I wanted to do a biopic. But I think when I started diving into the materials, almost kind of by chance… the mission to the Moon, and the idea of what that mission meant and what it took and what it cost: that started really fascinating me.”
Lift off
First Man marks a change of pace for Chazelle, whose previous films, including the lesser-seen Guy And Madeline On A Park Bench, are very much music-focused. “Certainly, I felt the change,” says Chazelle. “I mean, this is
‘This is the first time I’ve made a movie that’s not, in some ways, reflecting my own experiences’
Damien Chazelle
the first time I’ve made a movie that’s not, in some ways, reflecting my own experiences. I’ve obviously never been on a spacecraft. I didn’t live in the ’60s.” There’s also the change of music not being the subject matter. “It was sort of liberating, to be honest,” he continues. “I felt the need to do something new. This was definitely, in all respects, something new for me. And it’s still with my close creative collaborators, including Justin [Hurwitz], the composer who
I work with. So music was still a huge part of this project, and he was composing the score before we started shooting. We’d play some of it on set at certain times to set the mood.”
It marks another stratospheric leap for the 33-year-old Chazelle, who has taken considerable bounds in terms of scale with each new project since his micro-budgeted debut. Whiplash was snare-drum tense and pulled off the miraculous feat of making jazz music gripping, earning five Oscar noms (winning three). La La Land was a full-on musical in the tradition of classic Hollywood, and earned a recordequalling 11 Oscar noms (winning six, including the directing prize for Chazelle). Now he’s shooting for the
Moon in a quite literal sense. “It’s amazing to see someone’s career like that,” beams Claire Foy, who plays Neil’s wife Janet, of the precocious prodigy. “He’s younger than me! Argh!”
“It’s the sort of subject matter where the more you dive into it, the more you want to dive into it even more,” continues Chazelle of First Man. “So I think I quickly went from at first not thinking I wanted to do that story, to feeling like I had to do that story.”
With Josh Singer (Spotlight) adapting a script from James Hansen’s definitive biography of Neil Armstrong, Chazelle would make La La Land first, but he actually met Gosling for First Man before casting him opposite Emma Stone in the musical. Rather than going down the cradle-to-grave biopic route, First Man zooms in on the space-race decade leading up to the Apollo 11 mission that would eventually find Armstrong setting foot on the Moon.
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“[Gosling] was the only person I ever thought of for Neil,” says Chazelle of his leading man. “They share a certain physique, the short, blond hair, the blue eyes, the sort of stoic presence. But there’s a quietness, a quiet kind of magnetism to Ryan that I think does justice to Neil more than any other actor I can imagine. Neil was a notoriously introverted, withdrawn person. You need an actor who can tell a story with just his eyes.” Even after Armstrong reluctantly became the most famous man on (or off) the planet, his private life remained just that. “He was a very private person,” concurs Gosling. “His wife, Janet, as well. It’s really a testament to them that they managed to keep their personal lives so out of the spotlight at a time when people were ravenous for details.”
It’s easy to draw comparisons with Gosling, one of the world’s most famous actors, who successfully manages to keep his family away from red carpets and paparazzi lenses. “I think there are certain parallels just in their character and in their personalities,” explains Chazelle. “Neither of them are the type to actively crave that kind of fame or spotlight, and sometimes they actively seem to want to run away from that. But of course, it’s the paradox that the work they do brings them exactly that fame, and they love the work they do. Ryan loves cinema and acting, obviously, and Neil lives to fly. So I don’t think you could get Neil right without fully trying to grapple with and convey just how profound his love for aviation was.”
Armstrong himself opened up to Hansen for the autobiography in the later years of his life, and the First Man team had access to a number of sources to enable them to get a grip on the man between the myth. “The book was extremely helpful,” says Gosling. “An incredible resource. James Hansen was a friend of Neil’s. It’s very extensive and dense and very, very thorough. But we were given such incredible access by his family. His sons were extremely helpful and very involved. His late ex-wife Janet was extremely helpful. I met with his sister June at the farm he was born at. Childhood friends. Nasa, and people who worked with him. Just a really incredible amount of resources.”
This level of research and detail was unprecedented for Gosling. “I’ve never had this amount of help,” he says, taking another thoughtful pause for a sip of black coffee. “There’s so much of his life, in this period of time, that was documented. Everything that happened over the comms on his mission was recorded. I had access to all of those records. Somebody gave me a recording of an interview that I think was never released, but was a private interview done at his home. I actually pulled some pieces from it, and used it as dialogue.”
The film’s subjective style extends to both the internal and external aspects of Armstrong’s experience. “A lot of that is done in the mission sequences in order to put the audience in the pilot’s seat, so that they can experience the mission for themselves,” says Gosling. “We tried to extend that language to a certain degree into the more personal aspects of the story, so that the audience might experience some of what was going on for Neil emotionally, in a subjective way as well.” Gosling’s exhaustively researched and internalised, unshowy performance is exactly the sort that tends to be recognised by awards bodies. Expect him to be recognised by the Academy again, to add to his two Oscar noms to date.
In bringing Armstrong back into the spotlight, First Man will contrast that quiet homelife with the singularly
‘I think that cliché is there for a reason. Neil could never have done what he did if it wasn’t for Janet. There’s no way’ Claire Foy
ambitious – and unfathomably dangerous – mission. The Crown star Foy (who’s continuing a stellar streak as the new Lisbeth Salander in The Girl In The Spider’s Web, see page 72) will be grounding the domestic side as Janet, Neil’s wife at the time. “In lots of films, there’s always the [idea of]… you know, behind every great man there’s a great woman… Bleurghhh!” says Foy in her typically funny and spirited style. “I think that cliché is there for a reason. Neil could never have done what he did if it wasn’t for Janet. There’s no way. The trajectory of their life, and therefore the history of the United States and American space travel, is, in a really weird way, those two people, and that family, and that environment.”
The ‘wife left at home’ can often be a thankless role, but it’s unlikely that Foy would have time for anything like that in this white-hot point in her career. But how do you avoid that pitfall? “Unfortunately, Janet didn’t go to the Moon, otherwise it’d be perfect!” laughs Foy. “She didn’t. No women did for a long time. But that doesn’t mean that stories like this, and of women who were involved, shouldn’t also be told. Damien was, from the off, [concerned with] the importance with her – not just to Neil. And also, the debt that these women are owed, in a way.”
Foy’s role provided a neat dividing line in terms of filming, as all the home scenes were shot first, before the production started looking to the stars. “Up until Christmas, it was domestic,” confirms Foy. “And then after that, we all went home, and Ryan and all the lads – bloody hell – went through hell and became astronauts. It was like two completely different films.”
First Man is also set to show just how dangerous the mission was, with one critic claiming it will do for space dramas what Saving Private Ryan did for war movies. “The thing that struck me the most – especially compared to how much we almost take it for granted these days – is how insane the whole enterprise was,” said Chazelle. “There has been this directive to try to land on the Moon by the end of the decade, and miraculously, it all worked out. But I think I wasn’t aware of the number of times the programme came this close to failure; the number of times it did fail; the number of lives that it cost; the amount of controversy it caused.”
With a change of subject matter comes a change of style for Chazelle, who adopts a documentarian’s eye here in order to bring the audience onto the spacecraft with the crew. Chazelle looked at documentaries from the ’60s rather than space movies for inspiration. “I think the most important thing to me was if I could really get into the granular, and really get into the realism of it, and make you feel like you’re in the capsule with them. I knew what I’d grown up with as a kid, and the glossy images, and the triumphalist rhetoric. I wanted to get behind that to the messier, real human story underneath, and what it felt like to be in their shoes at that time.”
Choosing not to focus on the tropes of traditional space movies, Chazelle’s approach reflected what he’s done before. “I always think it’s interesting to make a movie about a subject matter as though you’re making it about a completely different subject matter,” he says. “With Whiplash, we wanted to
shoot it like an action movie. Jazz concerts had to be car chases or fist-fights. Here, we know the vast cosmic expanse of space, and we’ve seen that in films, but these crafts were these tiny rickety machines that I would barely feel comfortable going down a highway in, let alone going to space. So how could you make the audience feel that claustrophobia? Yes, we were looking at certain space films, but we were also looking at war movies, submarine movies, tank movies, movies in the trenches, movies in closed spaces, old horror movies, just finding ways to communicate the fear and the uncertainty of that dark void of space.”
To add to the verisimilitude – for the actors and for the audience – Chazelle opted for a Nolan-esque approach, shooting as much in-camera as possible, and opting for practical effects over post-production CGI wherever possible. “Our production designer built full-scale replicas of every craft,” explains Chazelle. “We put them on motioncontrol systems in front of giant LED screens that would play the images that the astronauts would be seeing… And just trying to shoot it like a documentary crew had managed to smuggle cameras into the craft, and were just capturing it at every angle.”
It made for a demanding experience for Gosling, and one that perhaps proved that in real life, he wouldn’t have the right stuff. The least of it was being strapped into the ‘multi-axis trainer’ (or cosmodome) for the training sequence; Gosling spent the best part of the day in the machine that was created to give fledgling astronauts some idea of what it might be like in space. “It was… unsettling,” grins Gosling, relaxing into a chuckle. “But, you know, kind of amazing. I realised I couldn’t [actually cut it as an astronaut]. Any fantasy I had about that was quickly shattered. It’s a very specific person who wants to get in a machine that has never been flown, and fly it for the first time, and to actively push that machine to its breaking point, to see what its weaknesses are.”
Donning an astronaut’s spacesuit and fishbowl helmet isn’t exactly like getting cosy in a onesie either. “In some cases, we were in these suits, breathing only the oxygen that they were providing, strapped into these capsules for six-to-eight hours,” explains Gosling. “It gives you a tiny window or a small taste of how isolating that must have been for them. There’s no comparison. And any time you’re on the verge of maybe complaining, they always had a person that had direct experience with the mission there on set. Most of the reason was for technical accuracy. But I also had a sneaky suspicion it was just to keep us from complaining.”
With the iconography of the American flag downplayed in First Man, the film instead focuses on the mission as an achievement for mankind. “It’s something that really unexpectedly unified the world for a moment of time,” considers Gosling of the film’s contemporary resonance. “It’s an interesting thing to reflect on, the power that it had, the unexpected effect that it had – something that started out of the Cold War and became this unifying experience for the species. The mission was to explore the Moon. But what they ended up doing was discovering the Earth. Leaving Earth and seeing it and feeling its insignificance in the vastness of space brought a really important perspective that had never been experienced really before.”
That’s not to say that First Man will be treating the Apollo 11 mission as an indisputable success story. Like Whiplash and La La Land before it, First Man is also about the cost of ambition, and the ambiguity that comes with wondering if it was all worth it. “Chazelle-ian themes?” laughs Gosling. “Yeah.
It’s very Chazelle-ian in that way.”
“What’s really interesting about looking at that time from today’s perspective is how much sacrifice they were willing to take for this sort of, you could even argue, arbitrary goal,” considers Chazelle.
“Whether that means it’s something to celebrate and commemorate and look at with triumph, or whether it’s something to maybe even question and wonder if it was worth it – I think those are the kind of questions that will never stop being relevant.”
First Man opens on 12 october.
‘It’s a very specific person who wants to get in a machine that has never been flown, and fly it for the first time’
Ryan Gosling