Screenwriter Josh Singer has made meticulous research his hallmark, but Damien Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong biopic required even more of the Oscar winner.
You can check Josh Singer’s homework; in fact, the Oscar-winning screenwriter would love nothing more than that. In an awards season that has exalted fact-based features like “Green Book” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” that have been dogged by claims of inauthenticity and fact-stretching, Singer’s “First Man” screenplay provides a compelling counterpoint: a rigorously investigated script that was vetted by experts, family members, and friends, and one that still offers a fresh take on the mythos of astronaut Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling).
Singer is no stranger to turning true stories into lauded features — while his 2013 debut film, the Julian Assange-centric “The Fifth Estate,” was hardly a smash hit, it opened the door for his follow-up projects. Two years after “The Fifth Estate,” Singer earned his first Oscar for “Spotlight,” which dramatized the true story of the Boston Globe journalists who uncovered the Catholic Church molestation scandal. In 2017, Singer and co-writer Liz Hannah took on another major story about the power of journalism, earning a Golden Globe nod for their script for Steven Spielberg’s “The Post.”
But even for a screenwriter well-schooled in the art of fact-based feature writing — and with a law degree to boot — tackling the story of Armstrong, the early space program, and the literal ascent to the moon for director Damien Chazelle came with plenty of new challenges. It wasn’t just that Singer was taking on an American icon, but that his approach to the story, based on James R. Hansen’s exhaustive Armstrong biography of the same name, was never going to yield to expectations.
Read More:‘First Man’ Review: Damien Chazelle and Ryan Gosling’s Thrilling Neil Armstrong Biopic Has the Right Stuff — Venice “I think this was different in that Neil is not only a household name, and so has that level of ‘everyone knows who the guy is,’ but he’s also an icon,” Singer said in a recent interview with IndieWire. “In being an icon, people have a set of expectations and assumptions about who he is, and what he was like, and what he was good at.” Those expectations and assumptions have long formed a so-called “master narrative” around Armstrong and his accomplishments, a paint-by-numbers approach to history that Hansen also rebuffed in his book. “When there’s any great moment in history, a master narrative around that moment tends to evolve,” Singer said. “There’s a master narrative around the American space program, which is a triumphalist narrative… and one of the key ingredients is this set of these swashbuckling, manly, stoic astronauts, a la ‘The Right Stuff.’ From the outset, Damien and I knew that we wanted to blow that all up, because that’s exactly what Jim’s book did for us.” The result is a deeply human, often internal film that explores Armstrong’s remarkable life through his own eyes, a life that was indelibly shaped by tragedy. The emotional center of the film is not Armstrong’s eventual space walk, but the early loss of his daughter Karen to childhood cancer, a story few people knew. Singer and Chazelle worked closely with Hansen, and frequently consulted Janet Armstrong (who passed away last June), Armstrong sons Mark and Rick, and fellow astronauts and NASA brass Mike Collins, Buzz Aldrin, Dave Scott, Frank Hughes, and Joe Engle. Mark Armstrong, Rick Armstrong, Bonnie Baer, Al Worden, James R. Hansen, Josh Singer, Patrick Fugit, Olivia Hamilton, Corey Stoll, Kyle Chandler, Claire Foy, Ryan Gosling, and Damien Chazelle at the “First Man” TIFF premiere Eric Charbonneau/REX/Shutterstock “When you get into the details of Neil’s life, when you talk to the sons, when you talk to [ex-wife] Janet [Armstrong], you wind up with a narrative that is much more human, frankly,” Singer said. “It doesn’t have that sheen, it doesn’t have that glow that your traditional space epic has. We knew that we were going to be taking this on. … I think for that reason it was incredibly important to get it right, because we were doing more than just telling a good story. It was actually pushing the needle on the history.” Karen’s first act death signals that “First Man” is not at all interested in presenting a swaggering tale of fated success as it applies to Armstrong or the other early American astronauts. Singer ticked through the various tragedies that informed Armstrong’s life, not just Karen’s “shocking” death, but the loss of some of his best friends in the space program, including Elliott See (Patrick Fugit) and Ed White (Jason Clarke). “They were not the Life magazine image, they were something else,” he said of the Project Gemini crew the film follows. “The amount of suffering that they and their families had to go through – which was totally obscured by NASA for good reasons, because they needed the funding, there was a reason why they were propagating this myth – but if you look at the reality, it was nuts.” Singer’s desire to stick to the reality of Armstrong’s experience pushed him to be even more “obsessive” than he typically is with his work (which he readily admits is already pretty obsessive), resulting in not just the script for Chazelle’s film, but a recently published annotated screenplay in which he and Hansen meticulously go through every single page of the work. The book is fascinating as a companion piece to the film, but it also stands alone as a compelling insight into the twinned process of historical authenticity and artistic creation that go into making biopics.
