In Venice hit ‘First Man,’ another day of sun for Chazelle
NEW YORK — Damien Chazelle’s last movie, “La La Land,” was about a man clinging to nostalgia. His new one, “First Man,” doesn’t merely flirt with the past. It throttles back in time.
But Chazelle’s reason for revisiting NASA’s 1969 mission to the moon isn’t to polish the shining legend of Neil Armstrong. It’s to jolt our collective memory of it — to rip it out of the history books and plunge us back into the harsh, anxious reality of what at the time was far from a fait accompli.
“Our generation grows up in a world where people have walked on the moon and you see the photos. They’re all kind of glossy and burnished and we think of this idealized past and there’s a sort of pure nostalgia that comes with that,” Chazelle, the 33-year-old director, said in an interview. “But the more I dug into the research the more fascinating it was to find out, A, just out hard it was to pull this off, and B, how unlikely it was, how close to failure.”
“It was a much more complicated thing than I think today we tend to remember it as,” he adds. “I think that’s because we have the benefit of living in the aftermath of the success.”