The youngest winner of the Academy Award for Best Director, Damien Chazelle is only 33. But already he’s staked a claim as one of the most visionary directors in generations. His latest film First Man, the boldly-imagined story of Neil Armstrong's lunar conquest, is his grandest yet—and marks a stylistic departure from his two previous movies, Whiplash and La La Land. Chazelle talks with GQ’s Jim Nelson about his boyhood aspirations to someday make movies; about how he managed to pull off the early projects that changed his life; and about what makes filming a giant space epic so damn daunting (and alluring).

Damien Chazelle

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