Mary Zophres, Ryan Nagata on Making Neil Armstrong X15 Suit for Ryan Gosling in 'First Man'

Hollywood Journal

Zophres earned her third Oscar nomination for costume design this year for 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.' She was previously nominated for 'La La Land' and 'True Grit.'

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00:00I didn't know anything about Ryan until I started prepping First Man and my set

00:05costumer Mark Avery was doing some research and he came across Ryan's

00:11Instagram account and all I remember is like scrolling down at all the photos and

00:17and being blown away when Donna the costume supervisor first approached me

00:34about the X-15 suit I wasn't that interested in doing it but part of the

00:38research for it and we were looking at the costumes they made for the right

00:41stuff and Sam Shepard wore a suit that I think was supposed to be in the same

00:47silver suit at the end of the movie and I saw the one that they had made it was

00:51one layer which was very surprising because this is like maybe five layers

00:55and it was just kind of like silver vinyl and it looked kind of chintzy looking so

01:02I thought I could do a much better job making this suit so I think maybe that

01:07challenge was part of what compelled me to take it on

01:17we knew that Damien wanted to be like very historically accurate and we wanted

01:21to get him as close to looking like they came from NASA as possible and so we

01:26reached out to Ryan and he was an invaluable source throughout the whole

01:30film I thought I knew a lot about the space program but he has an encyclopedic

01:35knowledge of it

01:36one of the technical consultants on the movie was Joe Engel he he was the last

01:43living X-15 pilot he said that I did a really good job yeah when this arrived

01:52for the first time when we fit it on Ryan I was just like blown away it's just

01:57badass like he just you could tell like he felt like this dynamic kind of pilot in

02:03it there were certain things that especially if I knew they were going to

02:09get a close-up if he can only make so many pieces it would be better to have

02:13him make something that went on and that surrounding the actor's face and so you

02:17made the Snoopy caps for us and these gloves the gloves were like the Apollo

02:22gloves yeah there's that shot where he's climbing down that one too if I had my

02:28choice I would have had to make all of the spacesuits in the movie but obviously

02:31we had like 22 suits to make and it was too much for one person he's a one-man

02:36operation it was just trying to like pick your battles and realize like this is

02:41where we we we want to spend some money but in the end

02:46did we ever pay you for this suit oh well you rented it we rented it but I got to

02:51keep it but I think that was part of why I was able to do it was because I

02:54wanted to keep it I always had this interest in space suits ever since I saw

03:01Apollo 13 so I made a really accurate Apollo suit and how old were you well I

03:08made the first one when I was 14 years old and I made it for a Halloween costume

03:14contest so when you contacted me about this I thought well that movie inspired

03:19me so much to do what I do now that I thought maybe there's some other kid or

03:23something somewhere who will see this movie and maybe think that the suits look

03:28really cool and so it was like a way of kind of continuing the tradition

03:32I guess

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