Middleburg Interview: Michael Gracey of “Better Man”

Director Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman) has a background in visual effects, and it shows in his latest project, the musical biopic Better Man, which tells the rags-to-riches, success-to-crisis-to-success-again tale of British pop star Robbie Williams, who got his start in the British boy band Take That. In it, he imagines Williams as a chimpanzee (everyone else is human)—Williams sees himself as something of a performing monkey—showcasing how his subject’s simultaneous towering ego and low self-esteem have affected his life and career. Though the movie traffics in many of the well-worn tropes of the genre, it still proves engaging through and through. I had a chance to interview Gracey at the recent 2024 Middleburg Film Festival (where I also reviewed the film), and what follows is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed: Before we talk about the chimpanzee thing, how did this project first get started? Whose idea was it to do a biopic about Robbie Williams? Yours? One of your co-writers? Robbie’s?

Michael Gracey: It started back when we were doing The Greatest Showman. Hugh Jackman kept referencing Robbie Williams whenever I’d talk about P.T. Barnum. At the time, I thought it was a really odd reference. You could choose any entertainer in the world, and he would say, “Yeah, like Robbie Williams!” And I’d be like, “What?” But Hugh grew up in Australia and Robbie was very big in Australia.

And there was a moment when Hugh had a lot of people in his ear about the music not being good enough and he started to question whether we should start again on the music. And this was just before we were meant to start filming, so that would have been a very big decision to rewrite all of the music for a musical.

And I had met Robbie once before, at my lawyer’s house, because my lawyer’s daughter is best friends with Robbie Williams’ wife.

CLR: I think I followed that. (laughs)

MG: So I knew that I could get to Robbie if I asked my lawyer to ask his daughter to ask Ayda—Robbie’s wife—if I could meet with Robbie. And it was sort of one of those “Hail Mary” phone calls where if I could get in touch with Robbie, play him the music, and get him to convince Hugh that the music was great, I could get everything back on track for The Greatest Showman.

So I called my lawyer on a Saturday and said, “I’ve got to meet with Robbie Williams,” and he said, “I’m not sure I can do that.” (laughs) But he asked his daughter, who asked Ayda, who then agreed that I could go around on a Sunday and meet with Robbie. That day, Robbie answered the door, sort of bleary-eyed, like he had just gotten out of bed, and was like, “Sorry, what do you want?” So I thanked him for agreeing to see me and said, “I’m doing this original musical and it’s quite theatrical and quite pop, which is very much your style, and I would love it if I could just tell you the story and play you the songs.”

And he was like, “Look, the kids are up. Why don’t we go downstairs? I’ve got a recording studio. We can listen there, uninterrupted.” And I said, “Great!” So that’s what we did. I sat in the recording studio in his house and told him the story of The Greatest Showman and I played him the music. And I could see he was getting into it: he was clapping along, tapping his foot. So at the end I said, “The only thing more bizarre than me showing up at your house on a Sunday is what I’m about to ask you to do now. It’s one thing for me to tell Hugh what Robbie Williams thinks of the music. It’s another thing for you to tell him, yourself.” And I grabbed my iPhone and asked him to talk into the camera as if he were talking to Hugh Jackman. And he said, “Sure.”

So that video that I sent Hugh is kind of the reason that I got to do The Greatest Showman. And it’s how I started a relationship with Robbie. And when I would then later catch up with him, he would tell stories. It’s the same whenever you are getting to know someone for the first time: you tell them stories about your life and they tell you stories about their life. And as time went on, not only did I love these stories but I loved the way he told them. He’s a great raconteur and a great entertainer. The way he narrates his own story was just really compelling.

At that time, I had no interest in making a film. I just wanted to record those stories with Rob telling them. And since he had a recording studio at his place, I said, “When I’m in L.A., why don’t I come over and record you telling your story?” That’s what we did for a year-and-a-half before I ever thought of turning those stories into a film.

CLR: So, you get Robbie to tell his story. At what point did you—or Robbie, or one of your collaborators—decide that in the film, he should be portrayed as a chimpanzee?

MG: So I was taking those clips of his recordings that I would chop up, almost like a radio play, as I tried to figure out if there was a way to arrange these stories into something like a narrative. And then I thought that if I was going to do a film, it would be great to maintain his actual voice, narrating. Because he was very off-the-cuff, very conversational, and I really enjoyed that. And in the final film, it is those actual voiceovers, although we did change them some of them, even though it was really difficult to get him to re-record and have that same casual, conversational nature. Because it’s very different to say to someone, “This is the voiceover for a film and this is what we want you to say.” It’s not the same laid-back delivery.

CLR: I’ve made a number of documentaries, and any time you say to someone, “That was great! Can you say it again?” it ends up very differently the second time.

MG: It was exactly that! So, after I had done those recordings, I was then thinking about existing musical biopics and I didn’t want to just come at it from the same point of view as Elvis or Bohemian Rhapsody or Rocket Man. There had to be an interesting lens to put on this. And the difference between this film and those other films was that we would have Robbie narrating. So I started thinking that it would be interesting to tell the story from his point of view, and rather than how we see Robbie Williams, show how he sees himself.

And so, to solve how to come at this in a different way, I went back to those recordings, and as I listened to them, I clocked how many times he referred to himself as a “performing monkey.” He said it enough times where I was like, “That’s how he sees himself.” And it’s not just a performance on stage, but it was performing for the kids where he grew up, who were much tougher than he was; it was performing for his dad, who was just obsessed with Sinatra and the Rat Pack. And I thought, “That would be an amazing conceit to see him in the whole film as a performing monkey.”

CLR: And you have a background in visual effects, so it wasn’t as big a technological leap as it might be for someone else.

MG: Yeah. I started in animation and then moved into visual effects. I was very fortunate: I know this film would never exist if WETA in New Zealand hadn’t come on board, set up a studio in Melbourne, Australia, and supported the film 100%, from the pitch stage. We did a whole bunch of pre-viz, where we would block out, in really crude animation, the musical numbers. But that’s how I saw the film, and I would show people the feel and style of the film and I would show that to investors to try and sell them on the idea.

CLR: Speaking of the blocking, what is the ratio of live action to digital effects in your amazing dance sequences. I particularly loved the Piccadilly Square “Rock DJ” number. How much of that was choreographed with live action and how much did you assemble in post-production?

MG: So that was literally going down to Regent Street, in London, and just blocking it out in the middle of the night with people yelling at you, “Is this for TikTok?” And we would go there with a handful of dancers and just work out, with Ashley Wallen, the choreographer, and Jenny Griffin, the assistant choreographer, how to block it. To me, it’s about sketching; you can’t conceive these things in one hit. So, you sketch it out, you dance down the street, you work out what actions they might be doing, like dancing on top of gumballs or on Pogo Sticks. You start working out where these moments would occur as you come down the street.

And narratively, what’s going on is that they’ve just signed their record deal. They are nobodies, so they come out onto the street and everyone’s ignoring them; they’re just a bunch of rowdy lads, which is not uncommon on Regent Street. And they make their way down the street and by the end, the whole world knows about them. People are chasing them down the street, grabbing at their clothes. Over the course of the song, you basically watch Take That’s rise to fame, but you’re watching it inside Rob’s head, which of course has him at the center, even though Gary Barlow is the lead singer of Take That, not Robbie. And “Rock DJ” didn’t even exist at that time. So it’s all in Rob’s head, how he sees the signing of that record deal playing out.

And so we’d sketch it out, we took it into 3D and did an animated version of it, which helped us work out numbers. Because you needed to ask, “How many people will we need at the end, for the closing shot, to see a sea of people down Regent Street?” And the answer is 500. (laughs) And how many buses and taxis will we need, to stop and start, in terms of interacting moments with Rob? And so it’s all very much planned out in 3D after those sketches.

And then we go back into the studio and we start choreographing to the moments and the timing that exist in the pre-viz. And then once you’ve got it all on lock, you get a huge studio space and you tape out Regent Street, because you obviously can’t rehearse on the street. But you need to rehearse not just with the cast, but also with the camera crew because it’s all so highly choreographed. And so that’s what we did. The shoot was over 4 nights. Each section of Regent Street, we’d tape out in the studio space—every bus stop, every curb, every shop front, every entrance, every exit—and we would run it over the course of a week before we then went out to the street and started filming.

The only problem was that we got to the end of that week of rehearsal—with all the crew, all the cast, the 500 dancers, the double-decker bus, the taxis, everything—and I was told that the night before, the queen had died and we wouldn’t be filming. So we got shut down, because there are 10 days of mourning after the death of the queen. We then had to wait for the funeral and the coronation. And there’s no insurance for the death of the queen, so we lost all of the money for that musical number, which we had already outlaid.

CLR: Oh, my God!

MG: We had bought out those shops, we had paid for the street, for the dancers, the crew, the gear, everything. So it was an unbelievably expensive moment. And of course you have producers who go, “Let’s just cut the number!” And as a filmmaker you’re just like, “No, no, no! You don’t understand how important this is!” And they go, “We understand how important this is but we also understand how expensive it is, and we’re not doing that. We don’t have the money!” And it was an independent film, so it’s not like we had a studio that would just write the check. So not only did we then have to go out and raise that money, but because it took us so long to get back onto Regent Street, it delayed our entire post-production process, because it’s such an enormous number. It delayed the delivery of the film. It’s one of those numbers that when I watch it now, I am so grateful that we all fought for it, but it was such a fight.

CLR: Well, I’m grateful, too, because it’s a moment of great energy in the film. I mean, you have many of them, but I really like it.  

MG: It’s what propels you into the story.

CLR: Absolutely. Well, Michael, I want to thank you so much for talking to me and I wish you all great things with the film.

MG: Thank you very much!