“Better Man” Director Michael Gracey on Monkeying With Robbie Williams in Bold Bio-Pic

Australian director Michael Gracey skyrocketed to success after releasing his debut feature, the 2017 Hugh Jackman-led musical The Greatest Showman. For his second narrative feature, Better Man, which is also a musical, he has tackled the life story of English pop singer Robbie Williams. There’s a twist, though. For the entirety of the film, Williams is portrayed as a CGI-animated chimpanzee. Gracey co-wrote the film and has a producing credit, with the story based on over a year’s worth of interviews with Williams, which he originally conducted without the making of a film in mind. As a result, the pop star’s experiences with addiction and mental health are related in an unfiltered and authentic way that makes for a compelling musical drama. 

The idea of using a chimp as Robbie Williams is in part because the self-described cabaret singer has always seen himself as less evolved than other people, and it is actor Jonno Davies, performing in motion capture, who brings the pop star-as-chimp biopic to believable and dramatic life.

The Credits spoke to Michael Gracey about his unusual storytelling device and how he pulled off that eye-popping musical number with hundreds of performers in the middle of London’s Regent Street.  

How did using a chimp to portray Robbie Williams work, practically speaking? 

This film wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the support of Wētā Workshop, which is in New Zealand, but they set up a studio in Melbourne, Australia, to do this film. They were unbelievably supportive. David Conley, who was the head of Wētā at the time, put together this team of incredible artists, and it became a passion project for them.

Jonno Davies was the man behind the chimp/Robbie—how important was it to find someone who could inhabit Robbie in that way? 

His work was instrumental to the film. It’s his voice and motion capture. Besides the singing, which is obviously Rob, that performance is all Jonno, and it’s breathtaking. His study of the nuances and little things that really get at who Robbie is was just spot on, and Jonno’s just a beast when it comes to the evolution of teenage Robbie through to the end of the film. 

There’s an incredible dance sequence that was actually filmed on Regent Street in London. How did that come about? 

I used to walk down Regent Street, and I always thought, “Why has no one done a musical number down this street? It’s wide, it’s curved, it’s so iconically London, and it’s the bus route, so you’ve got all the double-decker busses going down.” Well, there’s a reason no one’s done a musical number on that street. It took a year and a half with Westminster Council and the backing of the Crown Estate, because it’s Crown land, to pull that off.

What was the process to get to what we see onscreen in that number? There must have been hundreds of performers and crew involved. 

We would go down the street at 2 am, grab our iPhones, and just dance it out, and then we would just iterate and figure out how it could be better. There’s a gumball machine outside of Hamley’s, and since we go past it, we can have the gumballs go across the street, which sparks another bit of choreography as people are trying to get their balance. We’d use the environment to inspire the moments. There’s a souvenir shop, and they grab pogo sticks from there. Everything was a collaboration between Ashley Wallen, the choreographer, Jenny Griffin, the assistant choreographer, Joel Chang, the production designer, and Simon Gleeson and Oliver Cole, who were writing on it. We would watch these very rough iPhone nighttime rehearsals, and we’d keep iterating and do it again and went from that to actual rehearsals for real because we had four nights where we were shutting down Regent Street, but we didn’t have time to rehearse, we’d just have to go shoot, shoot, shoot! We had to rehearse the camera crew, too, because it’s so choreographed. 

So you rehearsed somewhere else and then brought it to London when it was ready?

We went into the studio space outside of London, and we taped out Regent Street, every bus stop, and every doorway we were running in and out of; we brought in the taxis and the double-decker bus. We brought in the full camera crew and 500 dancers. It was an enormous rehearsal. We spent a week just running it over and over, in the exact time we had each night. We had Patrick Correll, who was associate producer, sitting with his laptop overlaying what we rehearsed with what we shot, to make sure it was a lock. If it wasn’t, we’d go again. So we did that all week in prep to shoot on location. Then the Queen died, and we were told we couldn’t film. We’re an independent film. We’d already paid everyone involved. There’s no insurance for the death of the Queen. We had 10 days of mourning where we couldn’t shoot, then the funeral, and the coronation. It took another 5 months to raise the money again to get back onto Regent Street. We came incredibly close to that number never happening at all, but it was essential to the story of the boys going from nobodies to having people chase them down the street. 

The film deals with issues around addiction and mental illness, which is definitely something a lot of people can relate to, even if Robbie is far more in the public eye than most. 

Yes. Rob talked a lot about his mental health during that time, the anxiety, depression, and self-medication, all the forms of abuse he was into to numb the voices in his head, and how much he fought himself. You would think a moment like Knebworth would be the highlight of a career, with 125,000 people screaming your name. He doesn’t remember any of it. That’s how plagued his thoughts were at that time. It was just terrifying. I wanted a way to illustrate that battle. It’s a very real battle, and it used to be one that was confined to famous people who felt constantly judged by the world and who were reliant on others to validate their self-worth, which is a very dangerous place to be. 

Those feelings of being constantly surveilled or judged have been amplified by social media, too.

Exactly. Thanks to social media, now that includes anyone who puts an image up online of themselves and hopes for a like or a thumbs up. They hope the comments aren’t derogatory. The battles Rob goes through as someone in the public eye are now battles anyone who is a teenager might go through. I see it in my nieces and nephews. Rob put it very simply. “If you don’t love me, neither do I.” That’s a dark place to be in, and because now Rob has had some distance from it, he’s very articulate about what it was like for him then. He had a feeling of worthlessness, and anything someone said about him would torment him, adding to his depression. 

How did you approach those subjects without sensationalizing them? 

It’s a really important thing to talk about and get across on film. We didn’t want to sugarcoat it, and we were really fortunate that Rob let us go to those places. It’s also fortunate for viewers who see it, who might know someone dealing with those challenges. That’s why there’s a warning at the end of the film: You never know who might be feeling those feelings and having those issues. There’s a scene with Robbie standing in the snow, bleeding out, and that’s a true story. He has no idea how he got there; he just remembers looking down and seeing it. We wanted to show it without glorifying or making it cinematic. Again, the credit goes to Jonno because he really went to those places. There were moments we were filming traumatic scenes, and during Jonno’s performance, you could hear a pin drop. The whole crew was mesmerized. Everything, the performances and what you see onscreen, is all born of taking on the statement, “If you don’t love me, neither do it.” It’s a devastating statement, and I was very protective of that and what it means for people who struggle with those feelings, whether they’re in the public eye or not. 

Better Man is in theaters now

Featured image: Jonno Davies as “Robbie Williams” in Better Man from Paramount Pictures.