STACK #168 Oct 2018

CINEMA FEATURE

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ONE GIANT LEAP Two years after director Damien Chazelle and Ryan Gosling cleaned up award season with La La Land , the dazzling duo reunite to create movie magic again with First Man . Words Gill Pringle

R eturning to the awards race with Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk the moon, and The Crown ’s Claire Foy as his wife, Damien Chazelle takes an intimate look at the private drama behind the space-race. “When Ryan and I met for the very first time, it was initially to talk about First Man . I was in the early stages of getting La La Land off the ground,” Chazelle tells STACK when we meet him at the Toronto International Film Festival. Now 33, Chazelle, would make history as the youngest winner of the Best Director Oscar for La La Land , although it was his 2014 film Whiplash which first announced his arrival, netting him a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nod and a Best Supporting Oscar win for JK Simmons. “After Whiplash , I saw First Man as an opportunity to explore a similar theme; the cost of a goal and the cost of certain kinds of ambition, but when I met with Ryan and talked about it, the conversation segued to Gene Kelly pretty quickly, so then we did La La Land together. But, right from the get go, I knew I wanted him for First Man ,” he says of this biopic

“In some ways I’ve always been interested in people who have a hard time communicating their emotions. With Neil there was such poetry, for me, just looking at his life in the story of someone who seemed to sublimate his emotions into his work and this passion

charting Armstrong’s path from his entry into NASA’s astronaut programme in 1961 to his Apollo 11 mission and historic moon walk on July 20, 1969. Given that neither its director or A-list stars were even born before the moon landings – excluding Australia’s own Jason Clarke, who was born three days prior – Gosling professes to a long fascination. “I think as soon as I knew what the moon was, I learned that a man named Neil Armstrong walked on it. He was always synonymous with the moon but, like the moon, I knew very little about him. “So when I met with Damien and he told me he wanted to uncover the man behind the myth, and I started to learn about Neil and his wife Janet, I realised that this incredible life was really deserving of the tribute that Damien wanted to pay to it. I understood it was an enormous responsibility,” says the actor, looking every inch the movie star in a grey plaid suit.

he had ever since he was a little boy,” says Chazelle, explaining how Armstrong’s lust for

[Neil Armstrong] was a man who needed to find answers up there, even if he couldn't understand why

aviation resulted in his learning how to fly before he learned to drive. “I spent some time in

the cornfields of his old farmhouse in Ohio where he grew up. It’s not in the movie but it informs the movie where you just see this sea of flat cornfields and this giant sky. You

immediately understand why Ohio produces more astronauts than any other state in the US or any other part of the world. He was a man who needed to find answers up there [in space] even if he couldn’t understand why. That became the real through-line for us in taking this peak behind the curtain,” says the director who

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OCTOBER 2018

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