“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.”
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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.”
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 curb, 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.
The Rock DJ sequence was filmed over four nights on London’s famous Regent Street. Credit: Village Roadshow
“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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