‘Better Man’ director Michael Gracey on turning Robbie Williams into a monkey: ‘That decision took years of my life away from me’
Director Michael Gracey is the first to admit that “Better Man” is a big swing.
After all, his leading man is a monkey — a CGI monkey, to be precise. But when it came to making a film about British pop singer Robbie Williams, Gracey had gotten immersed in recordings he’d made with Williams recounting stories about his life. And then it struck Gracey: “It’s interesting how many times he refers to himself as a performing monkey,” Gracey tells Gold Derby. “And so I just got to the place where I thought, ‘It would be kind of amazing if the story was told from his perspective — to show Rob as he sees himself, not as we see him.’ And that decision took many years of my life away from me.”
“Better Man,” which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and will be released later this month, follows the familiar music biopic formula of charting the rise and fall and rise again of a singular talent, struggling with fame, addiction, and mental health issues. And while his family, friends, and colleagues are all played by humans, Williams himself has been transformed into a CGI chimpanzee, embodied by actor Jonno Davies using motion-capture technology.
“It didn’t make sense to a lot of people,” admits Gracey. “So it took a lot longer to convince people that it would work. But I’m very happy.” Critics have indeed embraced the film, which currently holds a 89% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes; the film also landed a record-breaking 16 nominations from the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts, the most ever by a single film in the awards body’s history. An original song from the film, “Forbidden Road,” was also recently nominated for a Golden Globe Award.
The technical adventure all began when Gracey was filming “The Greatest Showman,” and star Hugh Jackman kept referencing Williams as his “go-to” great showman. “It came to a head at a moment where Hugh had a lot of people in his ear about the music not being good enough, and he wanted to start again on the music,” he recalls. “And I was like, ‘If we start again on the music, the film’s dead.’ So I panicked. And the only thought I had is, ‘I’ve got to get to Robbie Williams.’”
A few degrees of separation later, Gracey found himself on Williams’ doorstep, who then invited him into his studio to listen to the songs. Luckily, Williams not only loved the music, he agreed to record a video for Jackman telling him so. “I’ve spent the last 12 months working on an album which I would scrap to sing these songs,” he told Jackman.
With that, a lifelong bond was forged between Gracey and Williams. And as Williams would regale the filmmaker with entertaining, freewheeling stories about his misadventures, Gracey thought they were worth capturing. “I wasn’t thinking about a film,” he says. “I just was like, ‘I have no idea how he remembers all of these details for someone who’s done so much drugs and and consumed so much alcohol.’ It wasn’t for quite a while that I was like, ‘There could be something in this.’” In fact, much of the voiceover in the film comes directly from those recordings.
As proof of concept, Gracey cobbled together a computer-game-style animation of the film’s opening and closing songs, and shopped it around. “I said to people, ‘If you feel something, if you engage emotionally with this little plastic monkey, when it’s all fully rendered and beautiful and photo-realistic, it’s going to be this times a hundred,’” he says. The sales pitch worked.
Once he got the financiers on board, it was just a matter of getting Williams himself to sign off. “I did that thing that directors do, which is you try and make it their idea,” recounts Gracey. “So I said, ‘What animal do you see yourself as?’ And he immediately said a lion. Not the answer I want. So I went, ‘Really?’ And he went, ‘Well, if I’m being honest, I’m more like a monkey, a cheeky monkey.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, so why don’t we do that?’”
The filmmaker then recruited renowned visual effects company WETA (“Avatar,” “Planet of the Apes,” “The Lord of the Rings”) to breathe life into the simian version of Williams. “They’ve got such a history in creating emotive performances,” praises Gracey. “And the level of detail which they capture is just breathtaking. There would be no film if it wasn’t for the artistry that that team brought.”
But beyond all of the technical wizardry, Gracey credits Davies with making the magic trick work. “It’s Jonno dancing, it’s Jonno acting, it’s Jonno going down Regent Street,” he says. “Even Robbie was blown away. [Jonno’s] going to go on to become a huge star.”
The first time the three of them all screened the film together was at the Toronto Film Festival. “And at the end of those emotional moments or some crazy performance stuff that Jonno absolutely nailed, Rob would reach across and tap him on the knee,” recalls Gracey. “It was really sweet. It was just like someone saying, ‘Thank you.’”
That approval meant a lot not just to Davies, but to Gracey, too. “I was really worried because I don’t think any other star on the planet would let us show them in such unfavorable situations,” he says. “It was a very unique position to be able to make a film with someone who is alive and is willing to allow you to portray them warts and all. But Rob watched the film and didn’t cut a single scene. I have an enormous amount of respect and gratitude to the fact that he just let me make the film.”
But in the end, the reaction that matters the most is that of the audience. Gracey recalls one viewer telling him that after seeing the film, he called his father — whom he hadn’t spoken to in seven years. “I called him because I realized it wasn’t about him changing or about forgiving,” Gracey recounts the viewer telling him. “It was about me just accepting him. I don’t know if I ever would have called him had I not seen a ‘Better Man.’
“As a storyteller, that’s fascinating. And that’s the joy of what we get to do.”