Ryan Gosling took flying lessons for First Man and found it too hard

It was almost 50 years ago that the first man to walk on the moon returned to awe and adulation on earth.

That man was US astronaut Neil Armstrong, and the new movie First Man tells the story of the journey of the Korean War fighter pilot who, in 1969, led his team to arguably the biggest achievement of mankind in the modern age.

The daring of the mission, the tragedies along the way, the incredible spirit that caused the adventurers to potentially sacrifice everything in the quest to go where no man had gone before has been brought to life in the movie, which opens here on Oct 18. It is the latest from US director Damien Chazelle, whose earlier hits include 2016's La La Land.

CHALLENGE

Canadian movie star Ryan Gosling plays Armstrong as a man of few words and little drama, a challenge for any actor who has to convey the inner strength of the reclusive character.

English actress Claire Foy plays his first wife Janet, an important supporting role as the story focuses as much on their lives as his career.

The screenplay is based on James R. Hansen's 2005 book First Man: The Life Of Neil A. Armstrong. It took Hansen more than two years to get Armstrong's permission to write the official biography.

Armstrong died in 2012 at 82.

At the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, where we had our interview, Gosling, 37, recalled how he tried to learn to fly a plane, on top of space camp and astronaut training.

"Neil learnt to fly before he could drive. Flight was very important to him. So I thought, 'Okay, I will learn how to fly. How hard could it be?' Well, turns out it is hard; it is very, very hard," he said with a laugh.

"Early into my lessons, my flight instructor asked me to take the plane into a self-imposed stall, which is to intentionally stall the plane. And I thought in that moment, 'This is a terrible idea. I want to land immediately, and I will spend my time learning other things.'

"I learnt there is a reason why Neil Armstrong was destined to be one of the great pilots of all time and why I was not.

"It takes a very specific kind of person to get into aircraft he has never flown and intentionally push himself to breaking point so we can further our knowledge of aeronautics.

"I needed to learn those fundamental differences between him and myself to play him."

In the course of Gosling's preparation, there was more to learn about the astronauts, not just the dangerous missions.

"I was surprised at the extremes of their lives - that the nuclear payload of a missile would be replaced with people, be fired out of the atmosphere, they would use this kind of comparative flashlight of scientific knowledge to explore the mysteries of the universe. Then they would come home and mow the lawn and take out the trash."

REWARDING

The experience was particularly rewarding and "incredibly enriching" for Gosling, though he considered this one of the hardest jobs he has ever done.

So I thought, 'How hard could it be?' Well, turns out it is hard, it is very, very hard. Ryan Gosling, on learning to fly

He said: "The more you learnt, the more there was to learn. And on a personal level, just learning the sacrifices that were involved by the people in this mission, specifically Janet and Neil - the amount of loss and grief they were enduring over the course of these missions, and their extraordinary ability to live outside of their own self-interests and dedicate themselves to a higher ideal."

Gosling did not grow up wanting to be an astronaut.

He said: "I was six years old when the (1986) Challenger disaster happened, and I don't have a specific memory of that.

"But in retrospect, I think there might have been a sense of tragedy around space flight when I was younger that was very different from this time that we are representing.

"Damien's instinct was right to remove the gilded nature of the accomplishment as though it was always going to be a success and show it could have gone wrong at any moment. And there was an extraordinary amount of sacrifice of human life and resources at the hands of hundreds of thousands of people."

The writer is the president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a non-profit organisation of entertainment journalists that also organises the annual Golden Globe Awards.