Dancing in “La La Land” clearly didn’t prepare Ryan Gosling for what he would have to do upon working with Damien Chazelle again for “First Man.”
In June, it was reported that Gosling had sustained a concussion while filming action scenes for the Neil Armstrong biopic, but in a new GQ cover story profile of the actor and Chazelle, Gosling said the injuries he sustained were only “mild.”
The piece describes Gosling shooting a sequence inside a “multi-axis trainer” made to simulate pitch, roll and yaw, causing the real gravitational effects you see on Gosling’s face in the film. It also said that in another moment, the on-set crew pushed the capsule Gosling was filming inside too far, causing it to shake so violently that in dailies for “First Man,” you can hear crew members audibly yelling “Stop!”
“Yeah, I don’t remember much from that entire time,” Gosling said. “You start making sounds that no person should hear themselves make.”
Gosling filmed scenes strapped into several devices used by astronauts during training designed to simulate g-forces and space travel — and he did so all in the same week.
The article also addresses the American flag controversy that has dogged the film since even before its release, with Chazelle weighing in on the conspiracy theory that the moon landing might’ve actually been faked by Stanley Kubrick.
“If it’s this hard to literally re-create, like, a five-minute version of this event 50 years later… To re-create a live stream, basically, of hours of this event in 1969? I’m of the mind-set it would’ve been harder to fake this than to actually do it,” Chazelle said. “At that point, you might as well send people off in a rocket.”
Gosling covers the November issue of GQ, which hits newsstands Oct. 23. “First Man” opens in theaters October 12. Read the full profile here.