First Man

In 2018 I received another call, this time to work on the stunning Damien Chazelle biopic First Man.

 

In the opening scene the audience are hit straight away with the drama and risk of being a test pilot at the start of the space race in the early 1960's. 

The scene puts us in the pilot seat of the X-15 with Neil Armstrong  (Ryan Gosling). The X-15 was a rocket-powered aircraft that was specifically designed to test altitude endurance and every pilot who flew above 50 miles in it qualified as an official astronaught.

Only three X-15s were built for the programme, one of which crashed and was destroyed. The remaing two are kept in museums in the states.

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My job was to liase with the art department and design the entire interior of the X-15 cockpit for a specific flight that Neil Armstrong took. (The X-15 underwent constant alterations and changes to the instrumentation and layout of the cockpit and as such significant reseach was needed). Neither of the two surviving aircraft were available to be measured or researched in person.  Every panel, switch, instrument and lever was researched, designed, and built. Many of the instruments were bespoke to the X-15 and as such each instrument face was designed and the instrument, with working needle(s) was built.

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Very unusually the X-15 also has three control sticks, a conventional central stick with control column used in conjunction with a second grip on the right of the cockpit for high-G manouvers. The third stick sits on the left side of the cockit and was used for the Reaction Control System. I designed and built each of these as well.