All language subtitles for Module 42

And now let's have a

look at the opening scene from First Man.

It was important for us to.

Really start with a bang.

Start with something very forceful,

you know?

Damien Chazelle.

Really believes that.

And this probably won't be the last time
you hear me talk about this.

He really believes that your. Your

last scene

in a movie
or your last section should be your best.

And that your second best scene
should be your first.

And that's very subjective.

But I say it just to just to say that
Damien is someone who really believes

that you should start the movie,
start your story with with a bang.

And so

what's interesting about First Man
is that in the script,

which was a very powerful,
great script written by Josh Singer

in the script,
it used to begin differently.

It used to have a sound montage
of different voices.

There used to be it was over black.

And you heard

Russian voices

and you heard American voices talking.

And it was meant to give

the context of the time,
the 1950s and early sixties,

when when the United States was in
in a competition with the Soviet Union.

It was meant to to tell you the history
give you a history lesson.

And it was something

that was supposed to build sonically.

The sound of it was supposed to build

and build to a crescendo,
showing this tension,

um, of of war between these two countries.

And then out of that sound, crescendo

was going to come the scene.

We were going to launch right into it.

Well, we did a rough version
of that sound montage, and it just felt

too conventional.

It felt too familiar.

It felt like too familiar

in a Hollywood movie way.

It felt
it didn't feel very specific to our story.

And and also it it

it worked on paper,
but it didn't work cinematically.

There was just too much black
and there was too much, um,

it wasn't engaging enough. So we thought.

Wouldn't it be more exciting
if you just heard the sound of an engine?

You don't really know what it is,
but you hear the sound of something

and that can kind of pique your interest.

Well, that's what that's what we had here,
where we over the studio logos.

But we wanted that first cut.

We wanted
that first cut to really hit you.

And we made a point of coming in
with our main character.

You don't know who it is.

You don't know what it is.
You don't know where he is.

But we made a point of coming in on

on a close up of his face,
even though you don't see it.

And in fact, it was lit this way, but
we darkened it in the editing even more.

We wanted to have this character
be mysterious.

We wanted to

take our time and introduce

the character of Neil Armstrong
in a very specific way.

We didn't we wanted it to be dramatic
as an introduction,

so we chose the shot to come in on.

And here you see

one of the key ingredients to.

To the filmmaking in First Man,
you see a face,

you don't see the details of it,
but you see a close up

and you see the point of view
of that person.

You see what they're looking at.

So we see this is his view,
and that's a key ingredient

that's going to factor
in to most of the big action scenes

in First Man.

So we cut back.

We can so we make it clear
that that's his point of view.

We learn more information, we pan over,
we don't know what it is.

But now we we actually see
and get the impression that

that there's something larger going on.

In fact,
Neil Armstrong is inside a craft, inside

something that seems to be tethered
to a larger aircraft.

Again.

We don't need to see all the details.
We don't need to see.

We don't need to know everything.
We see a detail.

We still don't know what it is.

But there are these very specific views.

We start hearing the voices of
of radio comms

communications from somewhere else.

We also hear

20 seconds to drop,

important line to hear,
even if it's somewhat abstract.

Important line to start setting
the tension 20 seconds to something.

We don't know what it is.

But it's important to know
that we're counting down to something.

Again, we continue with the ingredients
that are going to play such a key

role in cinematic, key role in the film,
making a first man radio comms.

The voice is coming over the radio,
telling us something,

giving us pieces of the mystery.

Also a very important

cinematic device,
the insert shot of a gauge.

Again,
we don't know exactly what it means.

This says altitude, how high he is.

It doesn't matter

that it's 44,000 feet.

It could be something else.

It could be 20,000 feet.

What matters is that
it says something here and that later

you're going to see it either
rise or go lower.

So whatever
it says in actuality is somewhat academic.

But what matters is to set this up
as as something that is going to change.

Still mysteries we still don't see.

We still don't get a clear picture
of who it is.

But that's okay. That's what we wanted.

Tensions building.

Sonically, the sound you can hear it
building.

And this is another key ingredient
that's going to play another.

In other elements, the sound of the craft
that they're in.

The creaking, the rumbling of it.

That is something that was very important

to set up in this first scene,
because it's going to play out

in different scenes
and different spacecrafts.

And now since we've set up
these little cuts,

we can hold on this shot
as this aircraft is is released

at 10 seconds.

We added the sound of the breathing.

That's something that was not done
initially in the dailies.

That's something that in the case
of a rough cut with Damien Chazelle,

I gave him a microphone and he did it
for the rough cut just to get a template.

He did this breathing. This is not him.

Ryan Gosling later replaced it

so that every sound you hear is from
is actually from Ryan Gosling.

But for my rough cut,
for our rough impression.

Damien did the breathing and he did it in
a way to express and to help the buildup

to lead up to this shot. Now.

Now we have the transition.

Now there's a change. Now
the aircraft has dropped away.

Now we can see the light change and we can

we can show introduce
Ryan Gosling's face for the first time.

And so it was very we made a point
of turning that into a moment

and we turned it into a moment.

By showing his face
and then by punching into his eyes,

introducing another important ingredient
that we will come back to

in this scene and in other scenes eyes.

And by the way, I should point out that

all of these windows.

Were captured.

The backgrounds out here were captured
in camera.

Damien Chazelle.

Does not like green screen or blue screen.

He just didn't want to work that way.

So he wanted to

have backgrounds

play on set through the windows.

So they had this set
and they had next to it a huge LED screen.

And on the LED screen, our visual effects
supervisor, Paul Lambert, created.

He and his crew created these backgrounds

by shooting plates
and then enhancing them digitally.

They created these backgrounds
that they projected on these LED screens.

So when Ryan Gosling
is sitting in the mockup of the craft,

he is actually seeing
what his character supposed to be seeing.

He is seeing this.

And so when I get the dailies,

unlike other visual effects movies,
where I get the dailies

and there's green screen, and then I
or my assistants or my visual effects

editor have to have to composite
something together.

I see this. This is what I'm seeing.

All these reflections on the helmet,
on the visor are all in-camera.

They're not they're not added later.

Now, here

is one of many inserts
that Damien Chazelle shot for this film.

And this is something we wanted
the audience to get used to,

the idea of pieces of fragments
to tell our story.

The use of an insert shot

makes we like the way that
that made a great cut by by having a cause

and effect the flick of the switch
and then the jet the jet fires.

We see the reaction and again.

Key. Is Ryan

Gosling's face in his performance.

It was important
to really always linger on him.

Just enough to see.

To tell our story.

His eyes look down.

We pull on the stick.

Very elemental.

Very simple, but also very important.

Now we see the reaction.

We see what happens.
He pulls on the stick.

He's going up.

And this was

something that Damien was very clear
about in certain scenes.

He didn't want to go outside of the craft,
except for some what he called

craft mounted shots where the camera would
appear to be mounted on the spacecraft.

Most of the time in first man,
in most of the scenes,

not all of them,
but in most of the scenes,

we stay inside the craft
or at least have the feeling

that we're inside, because that's
something that Damien wanted to. To

accomplish.

He wanted the audience to feel like that.

He wanted you to feel
like you're inside the craft.

And again, another element,
the mark meter, which tells you

how fast we're going.

And now, again, we see that.

We see he's going up.

And how do we know?

Because we see the numbers are going up.

This is an important piece.

And he wanted to do that not by going
outside and showing the aircraft going up.

You want to do that through the insert
shots or our sound designer,

Eileen Lee, who we worked with on Lala
Land, worked on First Man.

She provided me a library of sounds
that she thought would be useful

based on reading the script.

She read the script and said,
I think you're going to need this.

I think you're going to need this.

Here's something you can use
just a template to create your template.

She gave me
sounds she'd pulled from a library.

She and her crew
also went to record a Space X launch.

They also went to record

the sound of Helmet's

closing of of gloves
being put on all these ingredients there.

So she gave this to me.
So I had things to work with.

So I had these jet sounds of the X-15.

But in addition
to that, Damien Chazelle and I to

continue with a certain impression.

We took other sounds like animal sounds,
sounds of animals

screaming and sounds of animals
clawing at things.

And we edited this into the soundtrack
to give it a different feeling,

too, to make it feel gritty and visceral.

And now.

Only now the importance of the breathing.

But also now.

We can bring in Justin Hurwitz

as music for the first time.

And this reflection is captured in camera.

But important to start the score here

because this is a key moment.

He's he's now.

In space is outside
of the Earth's atmosphere.

And we wanted to really underline
this how important this moment was, how

this moment was was distinct.

Here.

He grabs the pen.

This shot here,
the background was in camera.

The shot here, the pen.

This pen was actually initially

when they
filmed it, they had the pen on a wire,

which the visual effects company actually
ended up replacing the pen with a CG pen.

But it's something that they worked
really hard on in terms of getting.

Getting Ryan Gosling to interact.

And that's another thing
that is really key about doing in camera

what Damien chose to do
because and I as an editor,

I really felt
that the performances of the actors

were that much better because they did
not have to imagine what they were seeing.

They could react to what they actually
were seeing, the backgrounds.

And in the case of the pen,
he actually had a physical pen.

He didn't just have to pretend
or pantomime that he's grabbing something.

We can see by this insert shot
that something is not going as planned.

That's why it's important to check in
with his his looks.

He looks around and the sound tells you
that he's no longer moving.

You don't know exactly what's happening,
but it doesn't matter.

You know, it's not something is happening
that is not as planned.

You know, you're probably going

to have a terrible.

And again.

It's not we felt it not important

to know exactly why this was happening,

but just to know that something
was happening not as planned.

And the other thing I'll say
is that initially based on the script.

And the way they shot it.

Neil Armstrong,
Ryan Gosling used to talk in the scene.

There was dialog.

He used to he used to respond to the radio
and what was being said.

That's something that Damien and I

early on decided to try to work without.

We wanted the scene to play pictorially,
to play cinematically.

And the very specifics about it.

Why is this happening or why is this
why is he doing this?

Or I need to do this switch
in order to do this.

We didn't want the scene
to become overly technical.

We wanted it to remain experiential.

So we removed his dialog.

It has more impact when you start wider

on the insert shot and you punch in.

That underlines it.

If you just cut to the already close up,

it may have an effect,
but it will have more effect

if you start at a certain size
and you go in even further.

And again, rhythmically, this is something
Damien really loves to do.

He loves to set up little pieces,
a click here, a switch there pieces

so that you can then pay off
with an explosion or a single shot.

And this moment
Damian wanted to sonically play up.

He wanted to crescendo the sound
in such a way with

with the sound of the aircraft
in the breathing,

so that we could then do what
we've what we do in other scenes.

We take the sound out completely, and
that is to draw the audience's attention.

That is to create a showstopping moment
where you have all these different

elements happening, and then in an instant
you clear the intersection.

And that is one of the most powerful ways
to get your audience's attention.

And then you follow it up.

You answer with an explosion,
it comes back in.

We're pre lab,
and now we go to this wide shot.

Now we go outside.

Now we go wide.

That's the the visceral scene is over.

Now we go wide.

We can see.

The entire craft.

We set the date.

California.

Now. It's okay for us to see everything.

But it was important for that first scene

to not only be powerful
in the way that Damien.

Wanted it to be powerful,
but it was important that cinematically.

Then it used the language,
the cinematic grammar

that we were going to,
that we're going to use in other places.

It was important that it was visceral.

It was important that it was experiential.

It was important that it felt dangerous.

And it was important

that that it was, again, a road map,
a cinematic road

map to what we're going to do
in other parts of the movie.