Director Damien Chazelle has explored the cost of a major goal in award-worthy films such as "Whiplash" and "La La Land," but to deepen this theme, the filmmaker has gone into space.

In a world premiere Monday night at the Toronto International Film Festival, Chazelle's "Prime Man" (in theaters on October 12) tells of the difficulties and victories that led to NASA's 1969 landing by Neil Armstrong ( Ryan Gosling). It's not just the biggest canvas he's ever had to tell a story, but the Oscar-ready film is also the first to emerge from his own experiences.

"It took a lot of imagination and it took a while to get used," says Chazelle at USA TODAY. "But the raw research material – the archive images (as well as) the wealth of information and data that you can get if you want to dig not only Neil himself, but entire moment in time . "

The director acknowledges that he was "surprised by my love" to dive deep into the history of the space race. What struck Chazelle was that it was unlikely that the whole program would be successful: there were all sorts of mishaps, such as Armstrong's death in a lunar landing training vehicle in 1968 – an incident that Chazelle included in "First Man".

"It's more and more a miracle that everything has worked, the more you look at it," says Chazelle. He has learned many close disasters, such as Armstrong's first mission in space with the Gemini 8 in 1966, "a situation that Apollo 13 considered scary, even scariest and closer to death. never had. "

Chazelle was also fascinated by what Armstrong, other astronauts and the nation were willing to sacrifice for landing on the moon before the Russians could go there, as well as the problems and controversies that have arisen in the race. He wanted to communicate the toll that the landing on the moon had had on his main actors. (Chazelle has Flak, conservative critics and even astronaut Buzz Aldrin, for not showing the moment when Armstrong plants the famous American flag on the moon's surface.)

"The people of my generation, in particular, take it almost for granted, you know?" Says Chazelle, 33. "Yeah, we landed on the moon and if you look at the pictures, it sounds like fun and shiny, but to go back and take you back to a moment before that is a reality, when the idea of ​​stepping on the moon was a ridiculous fantasy, there was a huge cost – not just financial but physical (and emotional), a cost to families and a cost to women and a cost to Neil surely.

Automatic reading

Thumbnails poster

Show captions

Last slide next

Read or share this story: https://usat.ly/2x1M538