“I’m Damien Chazelle. I’m the director of “First Man.” In this scene is Neil Armstrong played by Ryan Gosling with Janet Armstrong played by Claire Foy sitting down with their kids, basically explaining to them what’s about to happen on the eve of Neil’s departure for the famous mission to the moon. And the idea for this scene came from time that Ryan and Josh Singer the screenwriter and I spent with Janet and with Rick and Mark — these two kids — of course, now grown up — recollecting this moment. Janet had to convince Neil to sit down with his kids before he left and actually explain to them, not just what he was doing, but the fact that he might not come back. At this point in the movie, this is a family that’s been slowly chipped away at in many ways by the pressures and the needs of the NASA program and the mission to the moon. And so this kind of forced assembly of the family, this almost formal alignment of them at this table, where everyone is kind of forced to look at each other, that’s kind of dictated the look and feel of the scene for me and Linus Sandgren, the DP, at a time in the movie where there’s a lot of movement, there’s a lot of forward momentum. We’ve seen missions. We’ve seen training maneuvers go wrong. We’ve seen action set pieces. We’ve seen deaths. It felt like here was a moment for the movie to actually just grind to a halt for these few minutes and just exist in more or less static shots of these four faces at this table, this kind of quadrangle of people who have to basically stare each other down.” “Does anyone have any other questions?” “Do you think you’re coming back?” “We have a real confidence in the mission. And, ah, there are some risks, but we have every intention of coming back.” “But you might not.” “And Neil, at the center of it, who is not going to be let off the hook. Janet is going to make sure that he tells the cold hard truth to his boys.” “That’s right.” “And something that Ryan and I talked a lot about, and Ryan really sort of had a huge hand in shaping the scene and finding different ways to play it. And Claire Foy who plays Janet was very much the same. One thing we all talked about was the fact that Neil is someone who somehow seemed to not be overly scared by the idea of strapping himself to a missile and blasting through the atmosphere and blasting into the void of space and going further physically from the Earth than any human being in history. But this is something that scares him, the idea that the one thing that can really scare Neil Armstrong is this kind of conversation on the eve of a mission, this enormous and this important, to actually sit down and confront his children about the fact that he may not return. That that would actually be in many ways the hardest mission of all.”