Better Man director Michael Gracey spoke to ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese about the acclaimed musical biopic. Gracey discussed Robbie Williams’ openness as a collaborator, using his music to tell his story and much more. Better Man is out on digital on February 11, 2025, and will arrive on 4K UHD and Blu-ray on May 13, 2025.
“Better Man is based on the true story of the meteoric rise, dramatic fall, and remarkable resurgence of British pop superstar Robbie Williams, one of the greatest entertainers of all time. Under the visionary direction of Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman), the film is uniquely told from Williams’ perspective, capturing his signature wit and indomitable spirit. It follows Robbie’s journey from childhood, to being the youngest member of chart-topping boyband Take That, through to his unparalleled achievements as a record-breaking solo artist – all the while confronting the challenges that stratospheric fame and success can bring,” says the synopsis for Michael Gracey’s Better Man.
Tyler Treese: One thing I really admired about Better Man was that the songs really show a passage of time taking place and are very much a metaphor for moving the story forward rather than just people breaking into song and dance, which is also fine and fun, but I feel like the key to a good musical is that the songs are moving and propelling the story. Can you speak to just deploying that throughout the film and really mapping the music to these key moments in Robbie’s life?
Michael Gracey: Yeah, it’s so true. We would look at the narrative first always, and we never wrote into a song. Not once. We sort of wrote the narrative and then looked at those sort of emotional highs and emotional lows, right?
I always say you sing when words no longer suffice. And so they tend to be moments of extreme joy or the depths of despair. Like, “I can’t articulate this in any other way, so I’m gonna sing.” And you know, I think that then we just would go through Rob’s catalog and say, “What’s lyrically leaning into this feeling, this idea?” You know, he’s spiraling out of control. He’s just got kicked outta the band, “Come Undone.” Like, lyrically, that tells me everything that’s going on inside the guy’s head.
And that is the joy of musicals, right? The joy of musicals is that you get to articulate what’s going on inside someone and so they can verbalize it. Then, at the end, when he gets through recovery — “Better Man.” You know, “As my soul heals the pain, I will grow through this shame.” All of this lyrically sort of made sense.
“Rock DJ” was just a straight-out moment of euphoria. So we were like, well, let’s not lean into the words as much as just the feeling of celebration. I think you can get away with that. You know, it’s like “Hot Lunch Jam” in Fame. That song doesn’t tell you anything, but it’s the iconic song that they dance out onto the street and on top of the taxi. So, I think you get away with leaning into just pure emotion.
But I think everything else should sort of speak to “Feel.” “I wanna feel real love” as his dad leaves him. “She’s The One” when he meets Nicole. Like it’s sort of yeah, when you look at it, it is all very narrative based.
You mentioned leaning into elation and despair, and the montage for “She’s the One” touches on both. When I watched the film the first time, it just absolutely broke me when it got to the scene about the abortion. Could you speak to using the same song to convey both pure elation and love and then also heartbreak?
Man, Tyler, that’s a freaking great question. I haven’t had that one and I’ve done a lot of these.
What’s really interesting, and you sort of picked up on that, which is what’s amazing, is on a song in real-time, he’s falling in love, and that’s what “She’s the One” is. Then you contrast that by jumping ahead in time and, obviously the reference point was Up [the Pixar movie]. You sort of watch an entire relationship between two people play out in minutes, and yet it couldn’t be more moving or more informative, and it sets up the entire film and makes us just care deeply, you know?
So this was a bit different in that we had a real-time moment, him meeting Nicole and falling in love over the course of a night, and then we were transitioning forward in time to moments in their life. And those moments become quite dramatic and heartbreaking. So what’s great about that is that there’s something really powerful about the contrast of joy coupled with tragedy. And by the end of the song, it’s a conflicting feeling that you have because you go, “I’m so happy that he’s found this girl, and they both have fallen in love, and I feel so much for them because I know what they have in front of them.”
That’s the song out of every song, the one that we iterated on the most. It’s the one we edited the most. It’s the one that we tried different ideas the most. In rehearsal, Ashley Wallen and Jenny Griffin – the assistant choreographer – just kept dancing it out again and again and again. But the contrast of the music playing these sort of big, sweeping strings and cutting back to the smiles on their faces with the contrast of what the two of them are gonna be confronted with in the future. It’s, yeah, it’s heartbreaking.
One thing that also strikes me about the film is that when the actual person that the biopic is about is involved, sometimes they wanna shy away from flaws and gloss over everything, but Robbie’s been just so open. You see this in this film a lot of positive traits, but you also see all of his failures, and he’s really willing to go there and show his growth and flaws. It just makes for such a more personal and interesting portrait, even though it’s an ape in the film, it feels so human because of that. Can you speak to just his openness to allow you to go anywhere in his life, even the negatives?
Yeah, I agree. I think it is the power of the film. The power of the film isn’t the conceit, the power of the film is being up to tell something that is so unfiltered that it becomes way more human.
Because when you watch the film about the rock god who is flawless, you go, “well, I can’t relate to that.” But when you watch it about someone who has self-loathing and doubts and struggles and says things that they regret, that is incredibly relatable.
We’ve all said things we wish we didn’t. We’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t, and we can all look back on those moments where we’ve failed. And so there’s something unbelievably human about that portrayal. And credit to Rob, it’s one thing to sign off on a script and say, “Yeah, okay, you can tell these stories about me.” It’s another thing to watch it large on screen. It’s quite confronting.
And I was terrified that after Rob watched the film that he was gonna make us cut certain scenes. I really was. Even having gone on this journey with him for six years, I was completely convinced he was just gonna be like, “Michael, that’s too much.” You know? And he didn’t cut a single shot from this film.
Thanks to Michael Gracey for taking the time to talk about Better Man.
