One of my favorite parts of this job is getting to interview brilliant filmmakers like writer/director Michael Gracey (who also directed THE GREATEST SHOWMAN). If his latest film BETTER MAN is any indication, it is impossible for the man to create anything other than a spectacle. Much should be said for the fact that the film has some of the best choreographed dance scenes of the year… in a year full of incredible movie musicals like WICKED and EMILIA PEREZ.
Based on the life of legendary British popstar Robbie Williams, what may initially seem like a traditional warts-and-all musical biopic quickly takes a hard pivot by having Robbie portrayed as a CGI chimpanzee. Now I know that may sound weird, but strangely enough, the idea totally works. The film uses this conceit to metaphorically show how Robbie sees himself because he was treated as a dancing monkey his entire life. This perspective had dangerous repercussions throughout his entire life, leading to substance abuse issues and untenable relationships with family members and love interests.
But even though this is a musical biopic, do not feel like you need to be a Robbie Williams diehard to be able to enjoy this movie. While I think you will be surprised that you recognize some of Williams’ songs, the film’s larger themes of learning to deal with problematic loved ones and overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles are pretty universal.
I could have spoken to Michael Gracey for hours about the intricacies of the film, and he teased we would be getting some killer special features in the Blu-Ray release. I am a movie nerd at heart and loved hearing him break down the rehearsal process that went into filming “Rock DJ“, where they shut down one of the busiest streets in London (Regent Street) for four nights! I also appreciated hearing him talk about what the real people in Robbie’s life, such as Nicole Appleton and members of Take That, thought of the film. So buckle in, and enjoy my interview for BETTER MAN!
I really enjoyed the film and something that I really appreciate in your filmmaking is how fast it is and how the camera is moving with the musical numbers. It really makes it look like it’s one take even if there are small little takes that you do in there. So I was interested first in talking to you about the filmmaking process of those musical numbers. Does it just require so much more rehearsal because there are long takes?
Gracey: Yeah. It’s just… the rehearsal process, if you didn’t enjoy what I call the sketching—where you sort of can’t expect anything to just land. Like, when people talk to me and they’re like, “Oh, I tried this and it didn’t work. And I was so frustrated.” And I’m like, that’s every time. It’s never going to work straight off the bat. You have to do it, look at it, refine it, do it again, look at it again. You go how do you do this better? There’s a great quote, and I’m paraphrasing of course, but it’s something that Walt Disney said where he was like, “You gotta do drawings. You gotta keep doing. You gotta have meetings of minds and meetings of hearts. You gotta keep doing drawings, throwing drawings away, doing more drawings, make it so good they have to want it.” If you look it up, it’ll be much more eloquent than that. But essentially that is at the heart of it, which i I’m always very down for sketching out ideas. Just on your iPhone, grab a couple of friends, block it out. And immediately when you cut it together, you go, oh, this is gonna work. And if it works on your iPhone, you know once you get the crew and all these other people involved, it’s gonna work.
But usually it doesn’t work. And then you go, oh, well, we could do this and we could try that and then maybe that’s going to be better. And then you try it and it’s just the more times you sketch it, the more fluid it becomes, the more connected—sketch it, the more fluid it becomes, the more connected it all becomes, the more you start going, oh, that’s a moment that works. Don’t touch that. And once you get enough of those moments, you’re like, “Okay, this is really it. This is really going to work.”
And so on the day of filming, are you pretty much set in how you guys are going to shoot the scenes, based on the rehearsal, or is there any sort of flexibility?
Gracey: It’s a really interesting conversation. I’ve had this with other filmmakers. They go, “Well, if you’re so preplanned, how do you allow for spontaneity?” Because obviously you want spontaneity. That’s why you have great actors. And it’s such a good question because I find that for me, the freedom comes from knowing that you’ve got it. I literally will have the editor… Patrick Correll, who is the associate producer on the film, he also stands next to me on set and edits as we’re shooting. And he’ll drop what we’re shooting over the top of what we rehearsed to make sure the two things line up and that the timings are locked. And so even if I get a take that I love, I’ll look over at Patrick and he’ll go, “No.” And I’ll be like, “Faster or slower?” And he’ll tell me. He’ll be like, “This camera’s gotta be faster.” But that process is how I know that when it’s all back in the edit suite, it just fits together perfectly. That’s how you know. And that’s how you have the confidence to stand on a place like Regent Street, which you know you’re never getting back onto.
I wanted to ask you about that. How much of that was actually shot there?
Gracey: We shut down Regent Street for four nights. So to do that, you better get it. But then, to your answer, always when you’re filming, an actor will do something different. He’ll jump up higher or he’ll slide over a car bonnet or he will interpret the moment in a spontaneous way and you get something magical. And then you immediately go, oh, maybe the camera should be more over here to catch that moment. You know, it’s right at the edge of frame, but it’s such a great moment! Let’s pull the camera around. When you’ve got the version that locks, that’s when you have the confidence to go, yeah, let’s do that. Let’s try something else. Let’s go handheld more because it’s all been very smooth. Let’s try it with a bit more energy and a bit more handheld. You can actually do those things with supreme confidence that if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter. And that’s what you always want. You never want to be like, if this doesn’t work, I’ll have to come back onto Regent Street…which isn’t gonna happen. So you just gotta be able to go, I know we’ve got it. I know it works. Patrick told me it works. So now we can play.
That’s interesting. And so how hard was it incorporating the CGI element into it? Was that easier because it was motion capture?
Gracey: Yeah, I think that there is nothing easy about the way… the shooting style that we had for this film is not usually how you do a big visual effects film. So there’s lots of vintage lenses with lots of flares, with lots of lights flaring out the camera, with dry ice in the concerts on the floor that the digital character has to interact with. You know, it’s just a mess in terms of it breaks all the rules that you would usually say as a visual effects supervisor, which is “No, don’t do that. No, don’t do that.” And it’s handheld cameras. You know, there’s backdrops that have got, you know, glittery curtains that you can’t put tracking markers on. And with the handheld camera, you’re like, what are we tracking off of? I don’t even know what we’re tracking off. So it comes out of witness cameras. They have lots of cameras outside of what we’re shooting with. There’s an array of cameras around us that they can they can look at from different perspectives and work out exactly where the camera is.
So were these all the considerations that you anticipated could create problems… I don’t know if “problem” is too strong of a word.
Gracey: No. I mean, I think that the truth is we are very fortunate. Wētā have a great history of doing incredible characters. And digital characters, you know, when I say digital characters, I mean ones that are the lead of the film. Whether it’s Avatar or the Planet of the Apes films or Gollum in The Hobbit. You know, characters that have to impart real narrative, real expression, real empathy. They are so good at what they do. And I’m obviously grateful that they set up an office in Melbourne, Australia to do this film. That office is gonna stay there, which is incredible for Australia…to have a home base in Australia. And, they they just were very on board with, “Let’s try and do it the way Michael wants to shoot it, and let’s find a way of making that work technically. Let’s not let the technical drive the creative.” And that was… you have to be a world class facility to have that confidence.
Wow, that’s amazing.
Gracey: It really was amazing. And we even did stuff like… the whole time you’re fighting to make something not look digital. Right? But then you then sort of have to admit, well, we’re shooting on digital cameras. We’re putting a digital character in a digital plate. And then all the time we’re going, “How do we make this not look digital?” And you’re just in a digital world. And so what we did is at the end, we took the digital files and we printed it out to film. So it went through the romance of being printed to 35mm, going through the baths, being processed, and then rescanned back in. And then that’s what you’re watching in the final film. And the difference is night and day. It is phenomenal.
I want to see this on the special features when the film comes out. I would love to have a side-by-side.
Gracey: Yes! It’s just all the things that film gives you. Right. It’s just the romance of film. And even creatively, because it was with photo cam, and they were like, well, you can choose different print stocks. And we’re like, what? So all of a sudden we were choosing more vibrant stocks like Ektachrome for the nightclub stuff. It just made all of the colors go <keeejsh>. But amazing… and being able to choose different stocks for different eras of the story. So if you really if you sit there, you’ll notice. Grain structure at the start is kind of more crunchy than at the end. And then you can kinda track the arrows that way.
Oh, that’s so cool! Since you also wrote the film, in your writing process, was there anything that Robbie said, this has to be in there? Because I really liked that it was a warts-and-all portrayal and there were key elements, like his relationship with his grandma, mom, and of course his dad. So was there one thing he said he definitely wanted to include?
Gracey: The amazing thing was he was more the other way around. Once we started getting into the writing of it—Simon Gleeson, Oliver Cole and myself—we would sit there and the whole time we were hopeful that Rob wasn’t going to say, you can’t put that. Because there’s a lot of very personal stuff in the film. There’s a lot of scenes that he doesn’t come off particularly well in. And a lot of stars would just be like, I don’t want that up on a big screen. And credit to Rob because he’s an over-sharer, which is why I think his interviews actually are quite interesting because people sit down and go, “What’s he gonna say now?” But he was so supportive. There wasn’t one thing he took out of the film. And I was amazed.
Were you scared for him to read the script the first time?
Gracey: Yes, but I was more scared for him watching the film the first time because it’s one thing to read words on a page. It’s another thing to see it up there on an enormous screen.
But it seems like Robbie has been very moved by it all.
He was yeah. He’s very emotional, you know. He watched it a few times. I think the very first time he watched it, he was just shell shocked. It was just like what? Which I mean, if someone played you your life up on a big screen, you would also be like, what are we watching? Particularly if it was warts and all, you’re like I’m really not sure I want the whole world watching this. But by the time we got to TIFF, I think it really landed for him, you know? I think it was a really moving screening because I sat here and next to me was Rob, and next to Rob was Jonno Davies who plays the most phenomenal performance of Robbie in the film.
He was beyond!
Gracey: That guy is gonna go on to become a superstar because he is so… his study of Robbie and his portrayal of Robbie was breathtaking… like to the point where when he did some additional motion capture down at Wētā, when he went in there, the animators were around him like like they were meeting Brad Pitt. They were just freaking out. They were like, oh my god, it’s that guy we’ve been staring at for years! And they were all in awe of him. As am I. But at this screening, it was me here, Rob there, and next to him was Jonno. And in the really confronting moments or the really dark moments of the film, Rob would just reach across and sort of put his hand on Jonno’s knee, like, “Thank you for going through that.” It was a really beautiful screening.
And so did they talk a lot to each other before filming?
Gracey: They did. They got to catch up before filming. But I think it’s like everything. I think Rob had no idea that Jonno was gonna put himself on the line that much. There was nothing that he was just portraying; he was in it. The scene with his dad… after he performs and they’re backstage in the change room and his dad walks out on him and he just sort of breaks down. Throughout the whole crew, you could hear a pin drop. I don’t want to call cut because it’s amazing, but I also want to check that he’s okay. I’m very grateful to Jonno and the rest of the cast because it was the people who came together to make this film, from Steve Pemberton, to Damon Herriman, to Alison Steadman (who plays his nan), to Kate Mulvaney (who plays his mum). With such little screen real estate, you just feel for her so much. So there are just powerhouse performances and I think the sum of all those parts is really what makes the film so special. And the Take That boys all became best friends. You know, they’re still on a WhatsApp group together.
And so to that point, I’ll end on this question. What has been the feedback from the people in Robbie’s life portrayed on-screen, such as the Take That members and Nicole Appleton? I really felt the film was a love letter to the women in Robbie’s life.
Gracey: Yeah, so because that was such a personal part, and this goes back to your earlier question, what did Rob say had to be in there? He just said anything that is in there about Nicole, you have to make sure that she approves. And so very early on, we would share script pages with Nicole. We showed rehearsals to Nicole of “She’s The One.” But it’s very personal to her. And so we just made sure that she was in step with us the whole way and she was phenomenal. She’s the sort of person that when you meet after 5 minutes, you’re like, oh, I understand why people fall in love with you. You are so charming and so charismatic. Nicole has seen the film. She’s watched it with her mum and her sister. She loved it. I mean, deeply moving, obviously. And then Mark [Owen] from Take That has watched the film. The other Take That boys haven’t watched it yet. So we’ll see. I know Mark loved it. The thing is, I know it was a really difficult time… particularly between him and Gary. But also when you watch the film, you’re like, I’d be annoyed if I was Gary as well.
And I think that comes off too when Robbie apologizes in the film. And it seems like that might also be Robbie’s apology to him in real life a bit too.
Gracey: And those those guys are in a good place now, which is great.
Well, it was great meeting you. I could talk to you about this forever, and I can’t wait to watch the special features on the Blu-ray when it comes out.