Chazelle's "first man" recounts the personal losses behind Armstrong's "giant leap": NPR

On July 20, 1969, about 530 million people watched live television when Neil Armstrong, the commander of Apollo 11, became the first human to walk on the surface of the moon. Nearly 50 years later, Oscar – winning director Damien Chazelle recalls Armstrong 's "giant jump for man", but in a more intimate way. First man, starring Ryan Gosling, focuses on the personal sacrifices behind Armstrong's monumental move.

Chazelle, whose previous films include La La Land and Whiplash, describes the story of Armstrong as one of the "dreams – and the cost of pursuing those dreams". He notes that in the years leading up to the Moon, Armstrong and his wife had faced the death of their young daughter, as well as the loss of several dead friends in the space program.

"The more I learned about Neil, the more I saw this story as a story about the management of grief and grief and how to overcome – or the impossibility of overcoming – some kinds of losses and some kinds of of emotions ", Chazelle. said. "Here's a guy who was not openly cheering a lot, but in many ways, I think it's those feelings that he tried to conceal under him that led him to the moon."

Highlights of the interview

On how the film's space technology looks like advanced technology compared to our current technology

It's pretty amazing that humans have never walked on the moon, but that they did it over 50 years ago with the technology they had. These capsules were not really reassuring to watch when you are about to enter. They are tiny. They are rickety. They are totally analog. Often, they feel more like extensions of the machine age than the era of space. They have the impression of being things that one could expect from a movie about a submarine or a tank from World War II, and that is all the contrary to how at least my generation grew up thinking about space travel, advanced technology. … Really, it was a moment when we were projected into the future before the future happened, and I find it fascinating. You have a group of people literally invented as you go, figuring out how to get there.

During the performance of the Gemini 8 mission, when Armstrong managed to moor two vehicles in space, then almost died in case of system failure.

I think what was interesting about the Gemini 8 mission was, on the one hand, that you realize this incredible feat of two vehicles moored in space – without this feat, the lunar landing would not have been possible. So it was a necessary step and it was the first step America had defeated the Russians in the history of the space program. The Russians had beaten America every other time before.

So everyone feels like kings – as it should be – and right now, almost like a trick of fate, this problem … has begun. And that's not just the fact that it was a problem that immediately threatened life, but also its confusion. So, keep the camera inside the capsule as much as possible, and not wide close-ups that would explain things too much, trying to be really subjective and immersive to what Neil himself and his colleague Dave Scott would live, I think it was really important to us. And again, I think, just try to [portray] … how close these guys are to death. …

I guess it was one of the many cases of what I would call near misses or, in some cases, failures that led to the success of the moon landing. So I think [I’m] trying to remind the public how fragile it was, how dangerous it was, the life it cost almost, and in some cases the cost of living. I think this helps us to understand perhaps how much Moonwalk has been hard earned.

How he filmed the spatial sequences to feel visceral and terrifying

We tried to turn it so that we and the actors would experience it. So, instead of using a green screen or some kind of digital influence to brush the image, we used complete replicas of these capsules. They were exactly the same size and all the details were exactly the same.

Our production designer, Nathan Crowley, did an incredible job rebuilding these elements and we mounted them on motion control systems, gimbals, which would move and swing very violently if we needed them. And we were going to install them against giant LED screens, so it was a bit like being in a simulator. You are sitting somehow inside and you can not see the scenery, you look out the window, you see images of space instead of a movie equipment or a 39, a team or a green screen that we will complete later. You see the Earth spinning again and again. …

Our [cinematographer] had a big light that was on a crane that revolved around the capsule, simulating the sun. … the hope was that if we could feel it on the set, if the camera immediately had an idea of ​​visceral reality and if we did not need digital post-production effects to give this meaning, the audience would be feeling it. The actors will be much more present. The sweat you see on the screen will be real. The shake will be real. Even part of the terror will be real. Nausea will be real. And, by extension, the audience will really feel themselves in this capsule.

On the sound design in the scenes of the space, which includes alarms, strokes and mechanical sounds

You can play with the silence of space itself, that kind of vacuum that sucks the soul, it's the space, juxtaposed with the crazy machinery that makes the sound that these capsules were. … creaky machines make their way to that point. So, something like the spin sequence … we wanted to tackle an emotional reality in the sense that we would increase the sounds you actually hear with sounds that hopefully would help the audience really immerse themselves in the # 39; s experience. …

Trying to continually remind the audience, whether it's just with subtle things like crunches, moans and moans of material to things much stronger, as if things go wrong, to remind them every time that this is possible, it is a room to built, machine.

Recreate historical images of lunar landings

We tried to organize everything according to the archive images, according to each piece of evidence that we could collect. And we filmed it in a giant stone quarry at night with a giant light simulating the sun and we carved this quarry so that it looks like the lunar surface. We had ryan [Gosling] get off a large scale replica of the LEM [lunar excursion module] and we played the [recorded communications] in Ryan's earpiece so that he can somehow listen. And then we took Neil's passage so that Ryan could fit Neil into those [communications]. So we were just trying to match the rhythm, the cadences, the pauses, the silences, the rhythm, the appearance of everything. …

[We were also] filming it on an IMAX film, often filming it from Ryan's point of view, in the first person, so that you really have the impression of being the one walking down the ladder, you are the one who crosses this step, you are the first Crossing the lunar surface, I think that was the key: try to reproduce the story and then make you feel as if you were there in a way that you had never been able before.

President Trump said he would not see the film because it does not show the exact moment when the American flag was planted on the lunar surface

The flags controversy in the film is almost exclusively about people who have not seen the film. … The landing on the moon was an American feat and an incredible feat – and the flag on the moon was a very important part of it. That is why we show it – we show it repeatedly – the flag that stands there on the moon, on the lunar surface.

In terms of mapping each mission beat and showing the physical blockage of the stem in lunar soil and flag support, we made a choice, an entirely aesthetic and non-political choice, to focus on privacy from Neil. moments on the moon during this time.

The film talks about the 10 years before the lunar landing. We spend only about eight minutes on the lunar surface. We really wanted to spend that time looking at things that people did not see, things that people did not know. So, what he would see himself when he would emerge from the lunar module even before the camera fell, and then after his famous aftershock, his unplanned walk to the Little West crater, during which he would spent time alone cameras. So it's a part of walking on the moon that no one really knows.

Heidi Saman and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it to the Web.