Going For It
This past September, I had the privilege of seeing the film Better Man at the Toronto International Film Festival. In attendance were both the director Michael Gracey and Robbie Williams, the pop star the film is based on.
This film is a musical biopic of Mr Williams, from his early days of wanting to get into show business, to his rise and fall in the acclaimed boy band Take That, and his messy rise to a solo career and finding himself. The film is live action, and using the latest in video technology, the main actor who portrays Robbie Williams has been animated to be a monkey. Included in the movie is a musical number filmed on one of the main streets of London involving dozens of actors undertaking complex choreography.
If this sounds like a lot, well…it is. And I watched it with Robbie Williams in the theatre.
Personally, I think the movie is fabulous, but that’s not really the focus here. What I want to mention is that the directory Michael Gracey had an idea for a film showing the life and career of a major performer, ups and down, and this person was going to be portrayed by a monkey. Add to that the high production value of a modern movie musical (with a large cast set in various parts of England to boot) and you may get a sense that, at least conceptually, this movie was a pretty risky, unusual idea. Based on interviews with various folks on the cast, getting funding and permissions to film were certainly seen this way.
And Gracey went for it.
One thing that I simply love about art is that anyone can make art. If you want to paint something, paint it. If you want to create some audiovisual extravaganza, go right ahead. There’s something wonderful about creating, regardless of the outcome. Sometimes the outcome is the best part, and sometimes not. There are journeys, and there are destinations, and so on.
Better Man is an example of a wild idea that seems almost ridiculous conceptually — an expensive film about a pop star who is played by a fake primate — but was done anyway. Michael Gracey and company went for it. They looked at the risks, thought about the benefit, and decided to go for it. The film was made. The concept was realized.
Sometimes decisions require taking some great leap of faith and trusting your instinct, even if the data is incomplete or the risk is high. Good artists are intimately familiar with this. I watched a video of a painter who completed a lovely classical portrait of a woman painted with oil paint. As soon as she finished the face, she put on a glove, placed her hand just above the head of the person in the portrait, and smeared her hand downwards. This distorted the painting, creating an even greater effect of a person who looked downtrodden, not even a person but more of an expression of depression and sadness. I thought about the hours such a painting took and in a single moment, the work would be made remarkable or made worthless. The artist went for it.
We don’t know if taking a huge creative risk will pay off, which is almost the whole point. This is true beyond making movies or paintings: Spotify Wrapped was (in)famously created by a Spotify intern in 2019 who received no formal credit for this despite being an annual success that inspired many other products to follow suit with annual recaps. There are plethora of examples from other less-creative industries as well.
Sometimes there comes a moment where you simply have to make a decision and go for it.
