For the 'First Man' team, their mission was to get it right

ENT

For the 'First Man' team, their mission was to get it right

2018-10-12 23:29 Last Updated At：10-13 09:02

Making a movie about Neil Armstrong may not necessarily be on par with, say, successfully landing on the moon but the pressure involved isn't a giant leap from that either.

There are astronauts who were there, for one, in Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, in addition to all the people who were on the ground at NASA ready jump on any inaccuracies.

There's the near-mythic weight that that achievement of being the first man to walk on the moon holds. For film 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, didn't like to talk much about himself — even to his own family.

But it was a challenge director Damien Chazelle ("La La 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 strip away the glossy romanticism from early space travel and make it about the real men, with real families, and the very real danger of this dream to go to the moon.

"If '2001' is the grand 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, 16 mm, cinema verite version of space and make it feel like D.A. 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 respected it every step of the way. He was the most famous person on the planet and somehow managed to keep the focus on the missions themselves, on the hundreds of thousands of people who helped make it possible," Gosling said.

"I don't think it was just to be evasive, I feel as though he had this incredible ability to see everything within its larger context. He could see one giant leap in a small step."

They weren't flying blind, either. 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 set out trying to distill and dramatize (but still accurately depict) a seven-year period, starting with the death of Neil and Janet Armstrong's 2-year-old daughter Karen, and ending with the moon landing. Singer realized that tragedy surrounded Armstrong. He'd lose 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 easy or this was superhero business," Singer said. "No, this was an ordinary American guy and his ordinary American wife trying to make it through this incredible challenging moment."

A key factor was getting the support of Armstrong's sons, Rick Armstrong and Mark Armstrong, who were always available to Singer and Gosling and anyone else who had any questions, about them, their mom (who is played by British actress Claire Foy) and their dad.

"One of the biggest challenges of the film was knowing they were going to see it in the end and they weren't going to see a film about historical figures, they would see their parents and themselves," Gosling said. "It was also an invaluable asset to have them there. I can't really imagine doing it without them."

Rick and Mark Armstrong were relieved that the filmmakers cared about accuracy (technical and emotional), and helped provide crucial details for one of the film's most heartbreaking scenes, when Neil Armstrong tells his young sons that there is a chance that he might not survive. But they're most excited about audiences getting to see something else — their dad's humor.

"He was a pretty funny guy and I was really glad that 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 weren't paying attention, you'd miss it."

One of the funnier scenes wasn't even initially in the film. It was Gosling who stumbled on the fact that Armstrong was a fan of musicals and even wrote one in college. He asked Singer why that element wasn't in the script. After 10 minutes of writing, it was.

"I felt like it helped add color to a person who was very, very layered and complicated and fascinating and was too humble to share that," Gosling said.

There was also an army of astronauts ready to fact-check 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.

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr

Venice tests a 5-euro entry fee for day-trippers as the Italian city grapples with overtourism

2024-04-26 00:14 Last Updated At：00:20

VENICE, Italy (AP) — Under the gaze of the world’s media, the fragile lagoon city of Venice launched a pilot program Thursday to charge day-trippers a 5-euro ($5.35) entry fee that authorities hope will discourage visitors from arriving on peak days and make the city more livable for its dwindling residents.

Visitors arriving at Venice's main train station were greeted with large signs listing the 29 dates through July of the plan's test phase that also designated separate entrances for tourists, and residents, students and workers.

“We need to find a new balance between the tourists and residents,’’ said Simone Venturini, the city’s top tourism official. “We need to safeguard the spaces of the residents, of course, and we need to discourage the arrival of day-trippers on some particular days.”

Not all residents, however, are persuaded of the efficacy of the new system in dissuading mass tourism, insisting that only a resurgence in the population will restore balance to a city where narrow alleyways and water buses are often clogged with tourists.

Hundreds of Venetians protested against the program, marching festively though the city's main bus terminal behind banners reading “No to Tickets, Yes to Services and Housing.” Protesters scuffled briefly with police with riot gear who blocked them from entering the city, before changing course and entering over another bridge escorted by plainclothes police officers. The demonstration wrapped up peacefully in a piazza.

Tourists arriving at the main station encountered almost as many journalists as stewards on hand to politely guide anyone unaware of the new requirements through the process of downloading the QR code to pay the fee.

Arianna Cecilia, a tourist from Rome visiting Venice for the first time, said she thought it was “strange” to have to pay to enter a city in her native country, and be funneled through separate entrance ways for tourists. She and her boyfriend were staying in nearby Treviso, and so downloaded the QR code as required. But she was still caught off-guard while soaking in her first view ever of Venice's canals by the sight of the entrance signs and her boyfriend telling her to get out the ticket.

On the other side of the entrance ways, workers in yellow vests carried out random checks at the train station. Transgressors face fines of 50 to 300 euros ($53 to $320), but officials said “common sense” was being applied for the launch.

The requirement applies only for people arriving between 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. Outside of those hours, access is free and unchecked.

Venice has long suffered under the pressure of overtourism, and officials hope that the pilot project can help provide more exact figures to better manage the phenomenon.

The city can track the number of hotel visitors, which last year numbered 4.6 million and is down 16% from pre-pandemic highs. But the number of day visitors, which make up the majority of the crowds in Venice, could only be estimated until recently.

A Smart Control Room set up during the pandemic has been tracking arrivals from cellphone data, roughly confirming pre-pandemic estimates of 25 million to 30 million arrivals a year, said Michele Zuin, the city’s top economic official. That includes both day-trippers and overnight guests.

But Zuin said the data is incomplete.

“It’s clear we will get more reliable data from the contribution” being paid by day-trippers, he said.

Venturini said the city is strained when the number of day-trippers reaches 30,000 to 40,000. On peak days, local police set up one-way traffic for pedestrians to keep the crowds moving.

Residents opposing the day-tripper tax insist that the solution to Venice's woes are to boost the resident population and the services they need, limiting short-term rentals to make available more housing and attract families back from the mainland.

Last year, Venice passed a telling milestone when the number of tourist beds exceeded for the first time the number of official residents, which is now below 50,000 in the historic center with its picturesque canals.

“Putting a ticket to enter a city will not decrease not even by one single unit the number of visitors that are coming,’’ said Tommaso Cacciari, an activist who organized a protest Thursday against the measure.

“You pay a ticket to take the metro, to go to a museum, an amusement park. You don’t pay a ticket to enter a city. This is the last symbolic step of a project of an idea of this municipal administration to kick residents out of Venice,” he said.

Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro declared the launch day, coinciding with an Italian holiday, a success, registering 15,700 paying visitors, 50% more than anticipated.

More than 97,000 others had downloaded a QR code denoting an exemption, including to work in Venice or as a resident of the Veneto region. Hotels in Venice, including in mainland districts like Marghera or Mestre, provided a QR code for visitors to attest to their stay, which includes a hotel tax — accounting for 40,000 of those.

Venturini, the tourist official, said that interest in Venice’s pilot program has been keen from other places suffering from mass tourism, including other Italian art cities, and municipalities abroad such as Barcelona, Spain, and Amsterdam.

But Marina Rodino, who has lived in Venice for 30 years, doesn't see the fee as the cure-all. Neighboring apartments in her residential building near the famed Rialto Bridge once inhabited by families are now short-term apartment rentals.

The corner butcher shop closed. Yet she noted that the new entrance fee requirement will still allow young people to flood the city in the evening for the traditional aperitivo, which can grow rowdy.

She was passing out mock European Union passports for “Venice, Open City,” underlining the irony of the new system, and challenging its legal standing with citations from the Italian Constitution guaranteeing its citizens the right to “move or reside freely in any part of the national territory."

“This is not a natural oasis. This is not a museum. It is not Pompeii. It is a city, where we need to fight so the houses are inhabited by families, and stores reopen. That is what would counter this wild tourism,’’ Rodino said.