"First Man" starring Ryan Gosling follows Neil Armstrong's journey to become the
first person to ever walk on the moon. No spoilers, but we all know how it turns
out. But how did the filmmakers recreate the moon landing? This is Nathan Crowley,
he's the movie's production designer. He told us: how he made a trip to space seem
real, how he actually staged the moon landing, and how he managed to fit an
entire rocket ship inside a soundstage in Atlanta. A production designer manages
and designs just about everything physical you see in front of a camera
except for costumes. Crowley has a lot of experience with space and flight
[Crowley] Everything in your toolbox you've got to use. [Narrator] Before walking on the moon they
first had to get there. Gosling rides in a variety of spacecraft in the movie.
Crowley built the lunar module and space capsule to scale, meanwhile the Saturn 5
model is only 14 feet tall about 125th the size of the actual rocket - yet it
looks exactly like it. Some of the models could actually move. The backdrop
meanwhile showed a rough image of what would be happening during the scene.
During some scenes, this could help actors get a better sense of what they
were acting against in real time. Crowley and the crew had ample historical
details to draw upon to bring the story to life. One of the most complicated sets
to design were the cockpits. [Crowley] Everyone knows all these cockpits so they have to be exact in
the sequential way that the alarms would go on. [Narrator] An even harder thing to make
convincing; floating in zero gravity. It involves some ingenuity. Some parts of
the zero gravity sequences in "First Man" involved wire work. In other parts they
put the camera on the ground and film from below to give the appearance of
being suspended in the air. This was a technique Stanley Kubrick pioneered on
the set of "2001: A Space Odyssey" which was made long before CGI. Crowley
is all about finding a perfect balance between CGI and practical effects. [Crowley] I have
a fondness for doing things practically until you can't. For practical design
to immerse the audience I believe strongly that you have
to convince them that they're not looking at fakery so to do that you have
to mix your mediums and make it as complex as possible and go unnoticed. [Narrator] So
basically they need to live in perfect harmony with one another and while much
attention was paid to how the NASA crew got to space the movie also had to nail
the actual moon landing. A lot of movies set in space will use natural scenery
for planets. "The Martian" used the Wadi Rum desert in Jordan in place of Mars, and
"Interstellar" used Iceland for its ice planet scenes. [Crowley] We made this film in
Atlanta, Georgia, and anyone who knows Georgia knows it's pretty green down
there. [Narrator] So not an ideal stand-in for a grey rocky surface. Some parts were shot
in a nearby quarry to best capture the horizon line. Other parts of the moon
landing were done on a soundstage where they lit it in just the right way to
capture the moon's unique shadows. [Crowley] In design there's no fixing it later, you've got
to plan it figure it out and then do it and if during that journey you get
something more interesting because you hadn't foreseen something then that
enhances the film. [Narrator] And in a year when everyone seems to be thinking about the
moon-landing... [Cardi B] We went to the moon in 1969. [Narrator] Audiences will be taking an extra close
look at "First Man." [Crowley] The true art of production design is for the audience
not to notice the design and just to be in the story.
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