In “First Man”, Ryan Gosling sets foot on the moon in front of Damien Chazelle’s camera. During a poignant and authentic scene, the interpreter of Neil Armstrong discusses the dangers of the Apollo 11 mission. And in case of failure, the Nixon administration had planned a eulogy.
First man : intimate portrait of Neil Armstrong
After the triumph of La La Land in 2017, Damien Chazelle reunited with Ryan Gosling a year later for First Man – The first man on the Moon. The filmmaker entrusts the actor with the role of Neil Armstrong and transcribes the astronaut’s entire journey until the major event of July 20, 1969.
The feature film is an adaptation of the eponymous biography by James R. Hansen, for which Neil Armstrong had given his consent before his death in August 2012. It opens with one of the dramas in the life of the aviation pioneer and his partner Janet (Claire Foy): the death of their daughter Karen, died of a brain tumor in 1962, at only two and a half years old.
A loss that resonates throughout the film and from which arises an overwhelming scene during the immersive and breathtaking finale. Silent and particularly rigorous, Neil Armstrong never mentions this disappearance. He invests himself body and soul in his work, which becomes a real escape route in addition to being a vocation. If he immerses the spectator in his family unit, First man also looks back on his development within NASA as well as on certain failures of the American agency, including that of the Gemini 8 mission or the death of Ed White and two other astronauts during training for the Apollo 1 program.
Corey Stoll, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Christopher Abbott, Ciarán Hinds, Lukas Haas and Pablo Schreiber complete the cast of this spectacular work awarded with Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
Feel the danger
One of Damien Chazelle’s wishes on First man is to show how perilous NASA programs, starting with Apollo 11, are. By focusing on the tedious preparation of Neil Armstrong, but also on certain failures, the filmmaker increases the spectator’s expectation until take off, filmed from inside the cockpit to capture the intensity. Asked by Premiere, the director declares on this subject:
What interested us was to show how dangerous this objective was. It was crazy! We know that the mission was a success, that these men really walked on the moon, but we wanted to bring the public back to that time when traveling in space was an extremely risky bet. The astronauts had to solve the problems little by little, they were throwing themselves a crazy bet without having all the answers. I wanted to tell this from the perspective of someone who was there. How did they do it? How much did it cost them? The more I researched the subject the more I was stunned by the dangerousness of this project.
A poignant scene
Risks of which the meticulous Neil Armstrong was obviously aware. Before leaving for the moon landing and pronouncing one of the most emblematic phrases of the twentieth century on the star, the astronaut has a conversation with his sons Mark and Rick in the feature film. He explains to them that the feat he is about to accomplish is not without danger. A moment for which Neil Armstrong’s two children have appeals to their memories, as Rick assures us of USA Today :
This scene comes from us. So what Ryan (Gosling) said is pretty much what I remember from that conversation. (…) When he said: ‘We think we’ll come back, but there is a risk’, that’s about what he said.
The eulogy of the Nixon administration
The White House had also anticipated the possibility of a dramatic conclusion. In “the possibility of a lunar disaster”, William Safire, then in charge of public relations and drafting of presidential speeches, had written a eulogy for Richard Nixon. Supposed to be spoken on television, this text states in particular:
Fate decreed that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace would stay on the Moon to rest in peace. (…) They will be mourned by their families and friends, they will be mourned by their nation, they will be mourned by the people of the world, they will be mourned by Mother Earth who dared to send two of her sons into the unknown.
William Safire had also advised the President of the United States to join the widows of the astronauts. But the big step for …
