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LOS ANGELES, Jan. 10 (UPI) -- Instead of casting an actor to play Robbie Williams in the biopic Better Man, in theaters now, director Michael Gracey represented the singer with a computer-generated animated monkey. In a Zoom interview with UPI, Gracey said using the monkey heightened the biopic even further, when it was already a musical in which characters break into song.
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"Add a monkey to that, you're in an even more heightened reality," Gracey said. "What that allows you to do is step between a heightened reality and the world of pure imagination. It's quite a fluid distance between those two."
The film follows Williams from childhood through his time with the British boy band Take That, to his relationship with Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) and his solo career.
Jonno Davies performed the motion capture and voice for the monkey effect for Williams as a teen and adult. Carter J. Murphy and Asmara Feik play young Williams, with Murphy also performing the song "Feel."
"The monkey idea is the only reason I wanted to make the film," Gracey said. "I knew I wanted to explore someone's external life and internal life."
The movie also touches upon Williams' fraught relationship with his father (Steve Pemberton), who had performing ambitions of his own. Like many artists depicted in biographical films, Williams indulges in drugs at the height of his fame.
Gracey said many biopics simply recreate moments in artists' lives, which can be so similar that the 2007 comedy Walk Hard satirized them. To give Williams' story more depth, Gracey said he wanted to use artistic techniques to depict Williams' feelings.
"It's not often you really get the exploration of someone's internal thoughts and feelings as you examine their life story," Gracey said. "That's not usually part of the musical biopic landscape."
Representing Williams as a monkey was one of those techniques, and Williams sees other monkeys as his inner voice judging his actions. Gracey said the musical format, performing "Feel," "Angels," "She's the One," "Better Man" and other songs allowed Williams to reflect on his biopic moments.
"By the very nature of a musical, you get to sing your thoughts and feelings, sort of like Shakespeare with soliloquy," Gracey said. "It's sort of a perfect format, I feel, for exploring what is going on both externally and internally."
Still, Gracey said it was challenging to convince others the monkey would work, though Williams supported him. Gracey recorded hours of interviews with Williams, who sings new recordings of the songs in the film.
Since Williams frequently referred to himself as a monkey, Gracey thought a movie could vividly realize how Williams saw himself. Gracey said many producers and financiers resisted the idea, but he made the film independently and Paramount ultimately agreed to release it.
"It was definitely the case of just persistence, just finding the right people to believe in it," Gracey said.
Weta FX, the company behind the visual effects in the four recent Planet of the Apes films, designed the monkeys for Better Man. The difference, Gracey said, was the Williams ape had to sing and dance, a problem Weta solved.
Gracey acknowledged he also had to consider romantic and sexual scenes between a monkey and human co-stars.
"They're staged in a way to make it more appealing," Gracey said. "There's quite a small audience for bestiality but we weren't really trying to tap into that. We were very much looking at how do we make this more accessible."
The singing, dancing ape is joined by background dancers, up to 500 by the end of "Rock DJ." Gracey, whose prior film was the hit musical The Greatest Showman, said he learned during that film to choreograph the camera along with the dances.
"That means that he can get the camera in the exact right position for that moment in the song," Gracey said. "Sometimes it's crane. Sometimes it's two people running with the camera."
Gracey had choreographer Ashley Wallen operate the camera to perform those choreographed movements. Cinematographer Eric Wilson ensured "that we get all of those moments framed just perfectly."
For his next film, Gracey is in talks to potentially direct Disney's live-action Tangled. That would be his first musical that previously existed in a musical form, although he was not ready to confirm or comment on details like Rapunzel's magic hair.
"I think you should only do it if you have a point of view that makes it worthwhile," Gracey said of considering his next project. "I think for Better Man, it was taking existing songs and crafting them for the narrative that was being told at that moment in the story."
