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Making a film about Neil Armstrong is not necessarily a way to go with, say, on the moon.
There are astronauts who were there, for one, in Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin, in addition to all the people who were NASA ready jump on any inaccuracies.
There's the near-mythic weight that that makes you feel better. For movie fans, there's the "2001: A Space Odyssey" factor. And then there's the fact that Armstrong, who died in 2012 at age 82, while a stickler for facts, did not like it.
But it was a challenge director Damien Chazelle ("The Land") and screenwriter Josh Singer ("Spotlight") were willing to take on. Chazelle envisioned a documentary-style approach to telling Armstrong's story in "First Man," now playing nationwide, with Ryan Gosling in the lead role. He wanted to take a closer look at the real men, with real families, and the very real danger of this dream to go to the moon.
"If '2001' is the great movie-movie treatment of space and the greatest possible version of that, you're never going to beat that," Chazelle said. "(We thought), could we do the documentary version of that? Could we do the gritty, camera on the shoulder, 16mm, cinema verite version of space and make it feel like DA Pennebaker had crawled into the capsule with the astronauts? "
To achieve this goal, production designer Nathan Crowley ("Dunkirk") and his team built full-scale replicas of capsules from Gemini and Apollo missions, the X-15 aircraft and the multi-axis trainer – practical sets so Chazelle could put his star , camera and the audience right in the claustrophobic action and shake them all a little while space imagery played outside the windows on LED screens.
"Contrary to what you might think it was fun," Gosling said with a chuckle.
Beyond the physical challenges of the role, Gosling had to also embody the man, without much to work with.
"Even though it was hard to learn personal things about him, I was the most famous person on the planet and somehow managed to keep the focus on the missions themselves, on the times of people who helped make it possible, "Gosling said.
"I did not think it was just to be evasive, I thought it was possible to see it in a larger step."
They were not flying blind, They had James Hansen's official biography, "First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong" to work from, but there was a lot of sifting that needed to be done to find the story.
"The good news with Jim is the book got everything right The bad news is it's a little encyclopedic," Singer laughed. "It's not the easiest read."
So Singer is a seven-year-old, with the death of Neil and Janet Armstrong's two-year-old Karen daughter, and ending with the moon landing. Singer realized that tragedy surrounded Armstrong. He had a number of friends and colleagues in a short period of time, from plane crashes to the Apollo 1 fire, and have a few near-death experiences himself, including the less-remembered Gemini 8 mission.
"We're trying to puncture a narrative that's been around NASA for a long time that said this was superhero business," Singer said. "No, this was an ordinary American guy and his ordinary American wife trying to make this incredible moment."
A key factor was getting support for Armstrong's sounds, Rick Armstrong and Mark Armstrong, who were always available to Singer and Gosling and who else had any questions, about theirs (who was played by British actress Claire Foy) and their dad.
"One of the biggest challenges of the movie was that they were going to see a movie about historical figures, they would see their parents and themselves," Gosling said. "It was also an invaluable asset to have them there.
Rick and Mark Armstrong were the most important filmmakers of the movie, when Neil Armstrong tells us that it's a chance that he might not survive. But they're most excited about hearing themselves – their dad's humor.
"He was a pretty funny guy and I was really glad that came through," said Rick Armstrong. "He had a very dry wit."
As Gemini and Apollo Trainer Frank Hughes described it to Singer, "If you were not paying attention, you'd miss it."
One of the funnier scenes was not even initially in the film. It was Gosling who stumbled on the fact that Armstrong was a fan of music and wrote one in college. He asked Singer why that was not in the script. After 10 minutes of writing, it was.
"Gosling said," I felt like it helped me add a little bit to a person who was very, very, very, very much in love with me.
There was also an army of astronauts ready to check-in along the way. In Singer's first draft, he made up "all sorts" of stuff in the lunar landing.
"(Astronaut) Dave Scott got really angry," Singer recalled. "As Rick Armstrong likes to say, 'You mess with canonical history at your peril.'"
So, he went back to the drawing board and the 1,000-some pages of transcript and took another pass. For Singer, Chazelle, Gosling and the hundreds of people involved in the production, accuracy was their first mission.
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Follow AP Lindsey Bahry on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr
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