His work was his passion, something that made him a great engineer, test pilot, and astronaut, but perhaps made him struggle in other parts of life. “His sister told me stories how he would be reading…and everybody would know to leave him alone,” says Hansen, “or building scale models that nobody dared to touch and mess them up.”Īs he got older, these personality traits solidified. “Everything you thought you knew about Neil Armstrong, you need to rethink.”
He wasn’t so much a loner as hyper-focused. Even as a child, Armstrong spent a lot of time alone reading and building. The movie depicts Armstrong (played by Ryan Gosling) as aloof, introverted, serious, intensely focused, closed off, and brooding-far from the image we have of the smiling astronaut.
“ was more multifaceted and more complicated than we've ever understood him to be,” says Hansen, who was a coproducer on the film. While that certainly is part of the astronaut’s tale, it isn’t the whole story. For decades, Armstrong was thought of as an all-American hero who achieved greatness thanks to all-American ingenuity.
It allows us to see things that we should have seen a long time ago.” In many ways, this is an apt description of First Man. But it goes to great lengths to get those personal details right and make the entire experience immersive and authentic.Įarly on in First Man, Armstrong tells a group of his colleagues that “space exploration changes your perception. Hansen’s biography of the same name, First Man is certainly more interested in Neil Armstrong than the Apollo program, NASA, the moon landing, or the world at large.
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