The sights and sounds of ‘Better Man’: How Robbie Williams was transformed into a monkey we can believe in
The high-concept conceit of Better Man may seem a bit, well, bananas — its leading man is portrayed by a CGI monkey — but director Michael Gracey and his team of creative artisans pull off an impressive magic trick. Just a few minutes in, you somehow manage to suspend disbelief, and accept that yes, British pop star Robbie Williams is an ape, and no one around him seems the slightest bit bothered by it. The result is a surprisingly emotional journey as Williams — otherwise portrayed by actor Jonno Davis in a motion capture suit — navigates the ups-and-downs of fame, fortune, failure, and ultimately redemption.
Gold Derby reunited the filmmaking team — visual effects supervisor Luke Millar, cinematographer Erik A. Wilson, costume designer Cappi Ireland, and supervising sound editor Will Files — in an exclusive video interview to get a peek into the process that brought the monkey to life.
The credit, they all say, goes to Gracey. “The biggest challenge of any director is how do you get all these artists to make the same movie,” says Files. “And I think that says a lot about who he is as a cheerleader, and he’s really good at marshaling a lot of creative energy in the same direction.” The film was recently included in the Academy’s shortlist for visual effects.
Millar and the VFX team at WETA had had experience with monkeys before, having worked on the Planet of the Apes films. But here, they faced one big difference: In Better Man, Williams is human. “The way he talks, the way he sings, the way he dresses, the way he styles his hair, the way he interacts with everyone — everything he does is essentially human,” says Millar. “That was something we were very conscious of. We did experiment at one point with trying to make him more ape-like, especially when he was on drugs and alcohol. But it just started to snap you out of the character. That’s one of the big reasons as to why when you buy into it — the digital makeup falls away and you just see Jonno’s performance.”
Ireland and her team were integral to starting the production process. Since Davies was in a motion capture suit, costuming actually meant first drawing what the clothes would look. Her team went back and forth with Weta, ultimately creating physical versions of what Williams would be wearing in each scene — and sent the Weta team a thick ring binder dubbed “the costume bible.” “It was no small feat, I might add,” she admits with a laugh.
To counteract the VFX bells-and-whistles that he knew would be added in post-production, Wilson approached his work from a far more grounded perspective. “I treated it like a low-budget, kitchen-sink drama,” he says. He simply let the camera follow Davies-as-Williams, ensuring that the heart of the film remained the character — and that viewers were able to forget they were watching a monkey. “The emotion is my favorite part of the film,” says Wilson,” a sentiment they all echo. “Everything else is great, of course — the world, the spectacle, but the emotion of this character I find absolutely mind-blowing.”
Millar insisted that his VFX team – even though they were one of the largest on the crew— be as anonymous as possible. “We can create the best-looking Robbie, but if the actors around Robbie aren’t convincing, then the film doesn’t work,” he says. “I didn’t want tennis balls on sticks. We didn’t want to stick fake eye lines on Jonno’s chin. Jonno as he was on set is the person that’s in the movie. And then that makes our job of integrating Robbie the ape into the photography that much easier because he just naturally fits into that space. And that was definitely the MO for this picture.”
Files calls the film a “beautiful, messy reality.” He applied that same aesthetic to the sound. “We put a lot of effort into making things sound like they look, which is to say that they’re swinging with the music,” he says. His goal, he says, is that “the audience should never have to think about it. It’s like we do all this work in service of the audience feeling a certain way without hopefully noticing the strings moving.”
Each have their own proudest moment from a singular production they won’t soon forget. For Ireland, it’s the seamless transition for Williams’ costumes. “I’ve had people comment who’s seen the movie and just can’t work out how the costumes look so real,” she says with a laugh. “I haven’t told anyone how we did it because that’s not for me to say. But watching the fabrics and the textures and the movement of all the clothing on Robbie is just mind-blowing for me, knowing how we did it.”
For Millar, unlike other films he’s worked on where a single set piece stands out, it’s the consistency of the film overall. “It’s just that whole journey you get, from young Robbie all the way to Robbie standing on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall,” he says.
For Wilson, it was finally wrapping the elaborate shoot on Regent Street — which was postponed for months after Queen Elizabeth died. “I felt almost as elated after shooting it as I do watching it,” he says.
And for Files, it was finally solving the way to approach Williams hearing voices in his head — a problem he resolved with one of those “3AM epiphanies.”
“Knowing Michael’s previous films, I knew it was going have a lot of heart,” he says. “But I have to say, I wasn’t prepared for how moved I was going to be throughout the process of making the film. Every damn time we watch this movie, he admits, I lose it. And I think that says a lot about what kind of film this is.”