After today's Telluride premiere of Better Man, the cat will be out of the bag. Or, more appropriately, the monkey will be out of the barrel. Th
After today’s Telluride premiere of Better Man, the cat will be out of the bag. Or, more appropriately, the monkey will be out of the barrel.
The film covers Robbie Williams’ larger-than-life ascension from the bad boy in the Brit boy band Take That to superstar solo artist – with all the drug and alcohol use, struggles with depression and anxiety – is captured in its decadent glory befitting a superstar who pushed every envelope. Directed by Michael Gracey, Better Man is as much a full-blown musical as his last hit, The Greatest Showman. Only here, all of the characters are depicted by humans, except for Williams. He appears throughout the film in the form of, as Williams says, “a cheeky chimpanzee.”
In this interview, Gracey discusses this massive creative swing he, Williams and the film’s financiers and the distributor Paramount Pictures have taken. I met Williams at a Telluride brunch this morning. He’s slim and has the healthy look of one who has put the bad boy days behind him — “still naughty, just sober.” He felt not only has the movie accurately captured his crazy journey, but that it might succeed enough that a receptive US audience might propel the kind of same that has been his reality since teens, in places like the UK and Australia, where he still cannot go to a mall or walk down the street without being mobbed. The film covers his excesses, and his craving for approval from his father, who got Robbie bit by the showbiz bug, then left the family to pursue his own dreams. It left a whole Williams filled in all the wrong ways.
“To say I was blown away wouldn’t do it justice,” Williams told me about seeing the whole film for the first time. “But then I go into this existential, well do I think it’s amazing because I’m narcissist, or is it actually amazing? Because it feels pretty fucking mind blowing.” There is a lot depicted that a narcissist would not love, particularly the drug use and mental health woes that are somehow easier to watch when a chimp going through it.
I’ve had this problem that has sometimes been a strength, where I don’t know when to stop oversharing. And this is a movie full of classic oversharing, whether I look good, or look bad. But it’s got a fantastic portrayal of what happened in my life. It’s honest.”
Williams hopes a new audience in the US will want to hear more from him. He lived in LA for many years, and could walk down the street or go to the mall like a normal person. “I am completely anonymous, and I didn’t plan to change it until now. And now I’m kind of desperate for that to change. I moved [to LA] so I could be Bruce Wayne in America and Batman everywhere else. It worked for me because there were periods in my life which were pretty risqué. I needed a place to retreat and not be known, and I got that. But now I’m old and wise enough to want the experience of incredible success again. And maybe that would be in America. I’d like to enjoy that kind of success as an adult now instead of a teenager that couldn’t experience any sort of joy because of what was happening mentally. I said to Michael yesterday, one-quarter joking, as we got off the chair lifts that took us over the mountain, and walked through the town here…I said, mate, I hope I can’t fucking do this in 18 months time. I know mentally what that invites into your life, but America’s a place that I’ve lived in for 24 years, and it’s a place that I’ve dreamed about all of my life. I’ve been happy being anonymous in America. But now I would like to show off for America, and I would like to be received with love. Maybe I can do that. But it all depends on the film.”
DEADLINE: Explain the magic trick. As we watch the Regent Street dance number or the one on the yacht, what are we looking at? Do you have somebody in a suit for the singing and dancing?
GRACEY: Jonno Davies plays Robbie for the majority of the film. He is an astonishing actor you’re going to be hearing a lot more about because the guy is crazy talented. So he was there in the motion capture suit, just like Andy Serkis when he plays Gollum or Caesar. And it’s all the same tech that Weta built up over the years to really capture the most minute details of performance, facial performance along with body performance. And so that’s what Jonno is doing on a set.
DEADLINE: You put it all together and show it to Robbie. How nervous were you and what did he say?
GRACEY: I’d shown Robbie rehearsals and previews, but I didn’t show him Jonno in the gray suit [before it was complete]. It’s too hard to wrap your head around even for me, and I know exactly how we’re going to replace the guy in the gray suit, with the monkey. It wasn’t until afterwards that I really understood when the monkey is in a scene, it is the truest depiction of what it is to have a famous person in the room. Everyone just stares at the monkey.
It doesn’t matter who’s talking in frame, your eyes are so fixed on Robbie, even if he’s just standing in the background or sitting at a table, you are still staring at him. And that’s what you do with stars, with celebrities. You stare at them. Even if someone else is talking to you, they draw you in that way. And so I only ever showed Rob sequences that had the monkey in them. I never showed him gray suit Jonno performing. And that was very intentional because I just felt it was too hard for him to wrap his head around. I mean, it’s hard enough for him to wrap his head around a singing and dancing monkey version of himself, let alone seeing a guy covered in dots and a gray wetsuit and a camera sticking out the front of their face. Rob watched 20 minutes of the film at a Cannes screening for international distributors.
The next time he watched it was the finished film.
DEADLINE: What did he say?
GRACEY: First time, it was like watching someone who was shell-shocked. It was so much to take in that I think it was very hard for him to process. He was hugging me, and he just was like, that is a lot to process. I got it completely. It’s not just the fact that it’s a monkey depicting your life. There were such extreme experiences that he was reliving while watching it, and not all of them were good. It took till the third watching of the film before he really could take it in. So he’s watched it three times now, and I think he finds it more enjoyable each time. The first, that was just an assault on all fronts.
DEADLINE: How was it for you, watching him watch himself, as a monkey…
GRACEY: I’m watching some of those scenes and I’m holding my breath, and to be watching it as yourself must be incredibly
AUTHOR: The World Screen
COMMENTS