By Karl Quinn
The key scene in Michael Gracey’s Robbie Williams biopic Better Man is a sprawling sequence set to the singer’s hit Rock DJ, which required shutting down London’s famous Regent Street for four whole nights.
It is, says the Australian-born director of The Greatest Showman, perhaps the most important scene in the film. And yet, it very nearly didn’t happen.
The 4½-minute sequence, edited to look like a single shot, took 18 months of planning, endless meetings with Westminster Council and the Crown Estate, involved 500 dancers, a couple of hundred crew members, and a solid week of tightly choreographed rehearsals.
But, Gracey explained in an exclusive anatomy of a scene interview filmed for this masthead, “two nights before we were meant to start shooting, the Queen died. It’s 10 days of mourning, so we couldn’t go ahead.”
That delay set the independent Australian production back massively, and blew a hole in an already tight budget.
“It was in the millions,” Gracey says. “We lost all of that money – all the shops we’d bought out, all the dancers we’d paid, all the crew, everyone we’d booked for that four nights of filming. And we had to go out and raise it again.”
The Rock DJ sequence was filmed over four nights on London’s famous Regent Street. Credit: Village Roadshow
His producers and backers wanted him to simply move on, but he was insistent. Though the film is often funny, and grabs attention by its depiction of Williams with the face of a chimpanzee, the story is also frequently dark.
“This is the only time it’s pure joy,” says Gracey of the number, which captures the moment Take That, the boy band of which Williams was the youngest member, has just landed a recording contract.
“In every other musical moment, there are the voices in Rob’s head, the images he’s seeing of himself, looking on in disgust, self-loathing, all of that. This is the only moment in his entire film that he is just on cloud nine, and it is just sheer joy – and you need that to offset all of the darkness that is about to come.”
Gracey had been dreaming about one element in the sequence long before he’d even thought about making a biopic of Williams.
About 30 seconds into the number, someone crashes into a gumball machine, spilling gobstoppers across Regent Street, causing the Take That boys to teeter precariously backwards as they try to stay upright on the rolling surface.
Gracey originally conceived the idea for a live-action remake of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that he was developing, but which never happened. He then pitched it again for The Greatest Showman, but it was cut from the script for budgetary reasons.
“So this is my third attempt at bringing this idea to life, and I’m very excited,” he says. “It has finally had its moment.”
The balls were added digitally, but the boys in the band are actually rolling backwards. “They are wearing wheelies [sneakers with wheels in the heels],” he says. “That’s how they’re doing the off-balance stuff.”
Michael Gracey, director of Better Man.Credit:
It’s just one of the many interlocking elements of a hugely complex scene. And to capture it all in just four nights, everything had to run like clockwork.
“We were allowed on at 7.30pm, and we had to be off by 6am,” Gracey says. “And if we went over, we weren’t allowed to shoot the next night.”
The only way to pull it off was to rehearse every single step, over and over, many miles from the actual location.
“We had a hangar outside of London where we taped out each of the sections of Regent Street – every doorway, every kerb, every bus stop – and rehearsed each of our four nights. And we had to do it all to time because we were constantly seeing if we could actually pull this off in the allocated window that we had. We just had to keep getting faster and faster and faster and making sure we were so well rehearsed that we could just go straight onto Regent Street with our 500 dancers, all of our crew, with our taxis, motorbikes and double-decker buses, and just shoot.”
In February 2023, five months later than planned, Gracey and his team were back. And they pulled it off, spectacularly.
“I have such fond memories of actually shooting it,” he says. “But every time I watch it, I’m like, ‘People have no idea we were this close to it never happening’. It was such high pressure.”
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