First Man

I'm Damien Chazelle, the director.

Josh Singer, the writer.

Tom Cross, the film editor.

Right now you're hearing the beginnings of a buildup crescendo wail of sound that

one of our brilliant sound designers, Ai-Ling Lee, created.

But this was actually described in Josh's script, I think.

It was sort of... Earliest drafts, I think, described this

slow buildup of plane sounds that would eventually thrust us into the X-15.

Yeah, we talked a fair amount about sounds

and sound design as we were coming up with the ideas,

sketching things out, but certainly not anywhere near as

detailed as what Ai-Ling and her team did.

Originally, there was actually more.

This finished scene is a lot...

It's different from what it originally was gonna be,

in terms of dialogue and in terms of starting...

I forgot, yeah.

Neil used to talk through the whole thing.

-Yeah. Right.

-Yeah, yeah. -Right.

-We went off to Edwards... -I forgot.

And did a ton of research up there,

and spoke to Gene Matranga who had worked with Neil on the X-15,

spoke to Joe Eng/e, one of the last X-15 pilots, got the comms for this.

This particular flight as well as the pilot notes and pilot comments.

So, we had fully fleshed it out, on the page at least.

Yeah, I remember,

a few drafts in, we were starting... 1 think, early on we 'd kind of...

Yeah, it must have been very early on because

I remember this also being described in the script,

the fact that the camera, for the most part, wouldn't leave the cockpit.

And then we do do craft-mounted shots,

but I think the big challenge we had here both in

storyboarding the scene and shooting it and editing it

was this sort of rule we set for ourselves

that the camera would never go outside the vicinity of the spacecraft.

So, again, exteriors would be completely craft-mounted.

So, you'd never get a God's eye view are Wide view,

where you could sort of see. For instance, right now,

his plane is pretty much vertical, going up.

So, you can suggest that with these craft-mounted shots.

You can suggest it with the profile of him sort of going 90 degrees.

But you can never see it from afar,

and the really tricky part is later when he starts to bounce.

Sort of clearly enough communicating what exactly is happening.

This sort of attempt to descend

and then kind of starting to skip across the atmosphere

without the benefit of any true exteriors, any wide shots.

And having to just rely on things like the altimeter.

You know, gauges and views out the window.

Limited views that Neil himself would have had.

I think, in a way, this was a great test for us, in terms of editing,

in terms of putting stuff together to figure out

what is the bare minimum that we need to tell the story.

We rely heavily on Ryan's face.

That says quite a bit, I think, when you have someone like Ryan,

where his eyes tell you so much.

You can hang your hat on that, to a certain extent.

You had preplanned this so well, like all the other scenes.

But I seem to remember us

really kind of hanging our hat on Ryan to a certain extent,

and seeing his looks, seeing his reactions,

that was a really important thing.

Now, the one thing we miss here, because we lost a lot of the comms,

is the fact that, in actuality, Neil was focused on the g-limiter,

which was something he was testing, it was supposed to kick in

when enough g-forces hit as he was descending into the atmosphere.

And he was so focused on the g-limiter that he neglected to notice

that he had started to balloon.

We get, beautifully, I think, in the editing,

the shooting and in Ryan's performance that he's missed that.

And how he starts to sail up

to a place where he has no aerodynamic control.

Yeah, that's kind of the main issue here.

What gets Neil in trouble is that

the aircraft goes high enough, as you see, gravity starts to

slip by when he gets to a certain height,

that the aerodynamic controls, the ordinary ways of maneuvering a plane

don't work anymore, so he has to rely on RCS,

essentially, thrusters on the wings and on the nose

to sort of guide him up or down or left or right to pitch, roll and yaw.

Now, of course, the problem here is that because he sailed, he winds up

far downfield,

20 miles away from where he's supposed to land.

And this craft doesn't land with thrusters,

it lands via dead-stick landing.

So, now he's got to glide a plane that doesn't glide very well at all

much farther than he would normally have to do and do a straight-in approach.

Yeah, they would often refer to it as basically "landing a brick."

It's essentially what it is.

It's this heavy... It was amazing kind of seeing some of these actual...

There was sort of an X-15 carcass in Edwards when we went to visit it.

And kind of seeing that kind of pile, it was kind of a scrap heap of metal.

And imagining that, again, without the benefit of an engine,

'cause, you've used up the engine by the time you pitch over at high altitude.

Trying to glide that down to a landing without the whole thing coming apart.

And which sometimes it did come apart.

It's worth mentioning this was not a particularly safe aircraft.

-Yeah. -Yeah.

It was actually much more dangerous to be a research test pilot at Edwards

than it was to be an astronaut,

and we know it was pretty dangerous to be an astronaut.

By the way, I love that classic Armstrong understatement

which Ryan does so well of, "I'm down," as the last line there.

Actually, yeah, that, I think, if I'm remembering correctly,

was one of the reasons we decided to forgo Neil dialogue in the first scene.

Because, it wasn't only in the script.

We shot it, Ryan performed all the dialogue

that Neil initially said in that scene.

Which ended with, "I'm down."

And then suddenly, I think it felt that that would be a much better entrance line

than a closing line.

Well, we thought it would be more like his character to be a little bit stronger.

Yeah.

And all the other comms you hear in the background just

kind of serve as sound effects in the way of sound design.

-It's just texture. -Yeah, yeah.

By the way, we shot this all at a dry lake bed, it was at Edwards,

not far from where Neil had flown the X-15 and landed.

And it was a gorgeous, gorgeous day.

-And we got great footage. -It was our last day of shooting.

-Yeah. -Yeah, it was pretty glorious.

And this is the cobalt machine.

It's pretty much what the real thing looked like,

how it operated and sounded.

It's pretty awful. But it was kind of a predecessor to...

Is that right?

Basically a predecessor to many more modern forms of chemo.

Yeah, it was a new form at the time. It's pretty rugged.

Karen made it through two sessions of it, and then it was just too much for her.

So, we're trying to illustrate some of the havoc that it would wreak.

This flight actually took place in April, which was after she had passed.

But Neil did a similar flight in December.

He just didn't balloon before she had passed.

But we wanted to get to meet her, so you get to feel the real loss.

And so, we sort of combined the two flights.

She passed in January of '62.

She was two and change.

Does that fly in the sky?

Yeah.

How?

I see the moon

The moon sees me

Down through the leaves of the old oak...

And the Whole family lived together in this cabin in Juniper Hills.

Really rustic, small cabin,

as you get a sense of in a later scene. They all slept in the same bedroom.

Karen's bed, the parents' bed,

and young Rick, his bed, was an in one room,

sometimes separated by clothing sheets. It was that kind of a cabin.

And actually, 1 remember after an Edwards Air Force Base scout,

we went around looking for Neil's cabin. We'd ask Neil's family, Rick, Mark, Janet.

We were able to spend time with them.

And they were incredibly helpful through the whole process

in giving us insight and feedback.

Rick actually drew a floor plan for us for their house in Houston.

And we kind of built the house based on what he gave us.

But for this cabin in Juniper Hills, we knew it was still standing.

But it didn't really have an address, a street address of any kind.

It truly was up tucked away at the top of the hill, on its own.

80, Rick told us roughly where it would be, and we started driving around

and trying to find it, and with no luck.

We would just encounter a lot of trespassing signs with, like,

pictures of rifles and things like that.

And we sort of circled around for about half an hour, an hour or so,

kind of getting a sense of topography

but losing faith that we would actually find the actual cabin.

And then at some point, Nathan and I, the production designer,

we started walking and then a car pulls up...

No, no, no, car passes by,

and Nathan says, "I'm gonna go knock on that guy's window and ask him."

And I'm trying to dissuade Nathan from doing this.

Nathan's a British guy with a thick British accent,

and I've just seen a bunch of these rifle signs

and I just think this is a terrible idea.

And Nathan says, "No, no, no, I'm going to go do it."

And he goes and he knocks on the window.

And guess what, the guy driving the car lived in Neil's cabin.

80, Nathan asks, "Do you know where Neil Armstrong's cabin was?"

And the guy says, "Yes, actually, I live there."

And so, he said, "Come with me."

And he leads us to the cabin that we built pretty much an exact replica of.

So, that was how we were able to get in the cabin, walk around it,

take a ton of photos, figure out what had changed

since Neil and Janet lived there.

It was obviously a new family living there now.

And then, in Atlanta, where we shot the bulk of the movie,

Nathan Crowley and his incredible team rebuilt it from scratch.

Pretty much as an exact replica.

Yeah, couple little fudges...

Neil didn't have an office, so we built one for him,

so he could get away to have that call with Jack Hoffman.

Yeah, in fact, that's the irony. We made the cabin actually

slightly less tiny and rustic than it really was.

-It was even more. -Yeah.

This was our first day of shooting here.

The first day of principal photography. We did about two weeks of

kind of non-principal photography rehearsals

with Ryan and Claire Foy, who plays Janet,

and the kids in some of the house sets.