The audacious approach to the upcoming Robbie Williams biopic “Better Man” began when the British singer-songwriter referred to himself in an interview as a sort of performing “monkey.” That quip inspired “The Greatest Showman” director Michael Gracey to take a bold approach to his original and entertaining film: telling the story from Williams’ perspective while showing viewers how Williams saw himself—as a performing chimp.
To do this, the production enlisted “The Lord of the Rings” visual effects studio Weta FX to create an emotive computer-generated monkey as the lead character. The studio knows a thing or two about CG simians, having created stunning characters for Peter Jackson’s “King Kong” and the latest “Planet of the Apes” movies, but every story has its own unique requirements. In this case, Williams has the appearance of a photoreal chimp but is an otherwise human character who interacts with other human characters and shows a range of human emotions. “We could have created the best looking digital ape ever, but if everyone around him is not convincing, then the whole thing sort of falls apart,” explains VFX supervisor Luke Millar, who with key members of the team recently sat down for an exclusive interview with Variety at Wellington-based Weta.
To create the drama, the filmmakers effectively decided to shoot the Paramount release — which opens in select theaters on Dec. 25 before a Jan. 10 wide release — as if it were any other live action film, but with Jonno Davies, who plays Williams, in a mocap suit while performing alongside his co-stars. “We didn’t ever want the visual effects to get in the way of the performance,” Millar emphasizes.
On that performance, Variety’s chief film critic Peter Debruge wrote in his review that Davies’ “simian CG counterpart proves far more expressive than most human actors, meaning the movie is built around an animated performance powerful enough to wring tears.”
The look of their synthetic simian started with a scan of Williams for key features, but incorporated the proportions of Davies (for instance, his height so that the actors could look at each other, rather than tennis balls or sticks to create eyelines.).
Ensuring that the range of human emotions could be presented within the ape framework was also key. “We wanted the audience to get swept up in [the film] and just forget they’re really watching the monkey,” explains animation supervisor Dave Clayton. “To do that, we kind of dialed proportions and his facial structure to include enough elements of the real Williams, to make him feel familiar and be able to capture those mannerisms, but enough of a monkey that he didn’t feel like you were shying away from this concept of him being an ape.”
They tried numerous iterations of the design, finding that when they leaned too far toward human, it started falling into the uncanny valley, so they opted for a sort of blend. Some features were “very Robbie” and other features were “very ape.” Millar explains that Weta focused in particular on Williams’ eyes — eyebrows and the color and shape of the eyes would be “100% Robbie Williams.” And then in the other areas, that’s where we could sort of use more of the chimp features, such as the muzzle and ears.”
Among the trickier features to figure out was his teeth. Millar relates, “[Chimps] teeth always look very brown and dirty and not particularly attractive. But he’s a multimillion album-selling pop star who can afford the best dental care available. “So that was definitely one of the sort of mindsets — we go chimp, but it’s the most cared for version of a chimp.”
“It’s quite a complicated model,” Clayton adds, noting that in the eyes the audience needs to “know that the character is really thinking, every time the character closes its eyes or flexes its eyelids.” Weta gave him eyebrows, though those are unique to humans; and various “hairstyles” to match the roughly 225 costume changes. The VFX team worked in close collaboration with the costume design department to recreate all costumes in the computer. And on some shots, one might even get a glimpse of one of Williams’ tattoos, shaved into the chimp’s fur.
Millar relates that the team briefly considered leaning into an ape’s movement, but that was quickly dismissed. “It just instantly popped you out of the movie,” he says. “We interact with humans every single day, and so even though visually he looks different to the other people within the frame, the way we relate to him is incredibly familiar.”
The movie was shot largely on location and on stages in Melbourne, with additional location work in the U.K. and Serbia.
Davies wore a mocap suit with white dots with flashing LEDs inside of them, allowing the the mocap cameras to capture them in low light situations. “We would go to sets the day or a few days before to rig up cameras around the ceiling. If it was a location, we would still go the day before and try and rig up cameras,” Millar says. In other instances, such as while shooting in outdoor locations where it would be impossible to put up the cameras, Davies wore a passive suit with black and white markers.
To capture his facial performance, the actor also wore tracking markers on his face, sometime with a camera hovering in front of his face or other times further away so as not to distract the actors (a system with similarities to the one Weta developed to make “Avatar: The Way of Water.”)
Williams himself briefly got into the act, donning a mocap suit to film reference footage for select scenes.
All of the musical numbers were carefully previsualized. Davies performed nearly all of the dancing in the film including a number lensed on London’s Regent Street with 500 extras. The exception was a quieter number, set to “She’s The One,” which required a classically trained dancer to perform with Raechelle Banno, who plays love interest Nicole Appleton.
In all, the film has 1,968 VFX shots, including the shots with the monkey. For the concert scenes, Gracey wanted to film real crowds whenever possible (though the movie does include CG crowd work). “There’s a very organic nature to crowds and the way they react to the music, and it’s very hard to capture that digitally,” Millar says, sharing in a lighthearted way his recollection about a shoot at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Williams had two concerts coming up so the filmmakers planned to use the performances to capture live crowd plates in a short window of just minutes on each night.
“We had about 12 cameras rolling simultaneously, trying to cover off all the different angles that we needed to,” he relates, noting that the audience was informed upon arrival that they were going to be in the movie. “It was slightly problematic, though, because the first night was Sunday night, and the British public had been drinking since about lunchtime. We basically finished that first night and we got nothing.” Fortunately, the second concert was on a Monday. “Everyone had been at work. So, you know, people were more sober.” It was a nail biter — but they got the shots.
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