Visual Effects Supervisor Luke Millar and Animation Supervisor David Clayton have worked on a number of extraordinary projects in their time with the legendary VFX company Weta, founded by Peter Jackson. Even so, being asked to create a CGI chimpanzee to play the physical version of the British pop Icon Robbie Williams in the film Better Man had to be a huge ask. If all of the other characters in the film are going to be played by actors in human form, how do you get away with having a chimp at the center of a musical biopic? Even the idea sounds ludacrous as a joke, but Millar and Clayton never saw it that way. They understood the challenge, but they never questioned the metaphor of the chimpanzee or doubted Director Michael Gracey’s vision.
In following Gracey’s incredibly unconventional take on the rise/fall/rise of Robbie Williams, they pulled off something of a miracle. The concept could have easily destroyed the film, but instead, it deepens the meaning of everything you see on screen. Better Man is a one-of-a-kind hilarious, moving, and profound thrill ride that stands alone amongst all of the films that were released in 2024, and I dare say, every musical ever made. In a year that saw such raved-about musicals like Wicked and Emilia Perez, Better Man not only stands comfortably alongside them, but in this critic’s opinion, surpasses both of them, in becoming the best musical of the year, and one of the best I’ve ever seen.
The Contending: Is this the craziest concept you’ve ever been asked to deliver? Because I kept wondering if I was hallucinating at times while watching the film.
Luke Millar: (Laughs) Yeah, definitely the most creatively out there project I’ve ever worked on, without a doubt. Being an independent film, I felt like Michael Gracey really was able to push a lot of things: creatively, direction, and just the concept as well. Because we’re usually working on studio films, you don’t usually have that creative freedom. For that reason, I think this one we were able to push the boat out.
David Clayton: When I first heard about the prototype, I was like, what? That’s insane. But it’s amazing how over three years, something becomes normalized and Robbie just looks so normal to you as a singing, dancing monkey.
The Contending: Both of you have a high-quality track record, so I wouldn’t say that your careers were by any means on the line with such an unusual film, but was there any thought that either of you had that there’s a potential embarrassment risk here?
Luke Millar: I’ve thought about this. Someone mentioned this after we’d already done a lot of the work. As soon as I heard the premise, and obviously Dave had done a lot of previous work, I was like, no, this is going to be amazing. It never once crossed my mind that this would ever be anything other than what it turned out to be.
David Clayton: Maybe it’s just that naivete of “It’s going to work. It’s going to be great.” I’m an endless optimist. For me, after working on a lot of fantasy and superheroes, this was just like this little gem of a project that I latched onto, and I fell in love with it instantly. It was an amazing three years, what a ride.
The Contending: Both of you have worked on Simian-related effects before. Dave, with you with the Kong movies, and Luke, with you with the brilliant Planet of the Apes reboot. Did that give you a head start?
Luke Millar: For me, yes, very much so. At the start of this project, Michael put together a sort of a mood reel as to what this film could be and he sourced a load of clips from War for the Planet of the Apes. The clips that he picked were all the shots that I’d worked on or supervised in that movie. It was all the very heavy emotional beat stuff with Bad Ape and Caesar. Having done that film gave me a huge advantage because those were the sort of performances that he wanted, that level of emotion, that level of performance in Robbie. So straight away, I was like, okay, yeah.
David Clayton: For me, King Kong’s obviously a different beast. But I guess Robbie represents a character study. It’s like a movie long character study. And I think maybe other characters that I’ve worked on in the lead-up put me in a better position, like Gollum. That’s a character that has this full range, sometimes spiking within one shot from extreme paranoia to glee. And Robbie has just got this massive range of mental health and life experiences and emotions. So yeah, I think I’ve been set up pretty well through the different characters I’ve worked on here at Weta, rather than specifically monkeys. Of course, he’s a monkey, but at the end of the day, it’s just a living, breathing character that’s driven by a performance from Jonno Davies (as the adolescent Robbie Williams), embellished with Robbie Williams’ actual mannerisms and expressions, and then also just creative license from us as an animation team to tell this story as hard-hitting as we can.
The Contending: Almost everybody I’ve talked to who has seen it has had the reaction of “I don’t know what I just saw, but that was really amazing.” But the common question I get is why did they do it that way? I go back to one of Robbie’s quotes, and I’m not sure I have it exactly right, but he once said something to the effect of “I’m just a performing monkey,” but it’s not as explicitly stated like that in the film. As an audience member, you’re not set up to immediately connect with that. Did that play into your ability to understand what the movie was going for?
Luke Millar: The performing monkey is one aspect of the reason. The other thing, that he does say in the movie, is during the scene where he’s in the rehab circle—his monologue in there about how he became famous at the age of 15 and, because of that, everyone expects him to be that character from then onwards. He gets frozen in time, and he believes that he doesn’t mature and evolve the same way that other people would. Everyone has this expectation as to who this character is going to be and that’s the person he has to be from then onwards, which I think is quite a nice way of explaining it. But yeah, you get three-quarters of the way through the movie, and then they say.
The Contending: I think that evolution remark, because it comes later in the movie, you either go ah, or, maybe you think why didn’t they tell us that up front? But it’s better this way. To lean into it and say you just have to go with us.
David Clayton: That’s why our young Robbie character is super important, that people bond with him and like him and you want them to be backing him from scene one, which I think we achieved. Hopefully, within a few minutes of the movie, you’re swept up in the story and this little kid’s dreams, and you forget that you’re looking at a monkey. That’s the hope.
Luke Millar: One interesting sort of by-product, which definitely wasn’t planned for but just happened as we were making it, is even when there’s a group of people on screen—sitting around the table in the Indian restaurant, for example—you’re always looking at Robbie. Even when Robbie’s not the one talking, you’re always looking at Robbie. We realized this when we were working through the movie, and we’d finished some scenes, but we hadn’t started others, and it would pop back and forth between Jonno and the ape version. People really leaned in on the scenes that we had completed that worked. It added a heightened interest in the character. Michael experienced this firsthand because essentially it is what it is to be famous–to be the famous person in the room. It was when he went to the Cannes Film Festival with Robbie to present 20 minutes of the movie, and he was there talking to the crowd, but he realized that no one was looking at him, they’re all staring at Robbie. And that’s exactly what happens in the film when you watch it, you’re looking at the famous person or the person who the movie’s about, and you’re not as engaged with every other character in the scene. So it was a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Contending: The other level that it works on is that Robbie never feels like he fits in. There’s that sense of self-loathing, personal disappointment, despite his success. Did you also get that sense of it, that Robbie doesn’t know how to just fit in?
David Clayton: He’s set aside from the crowd from the beginning really, isn’t he? Another point there might be that he’s so open, honest, and vulnerable. There are no secrets, really. He’s just out there with any of his kind of primal feelings and addictions and what drives him. It is primal, in the movie. He’s driven by this need to be famous and gain acceptance, but he’s very open about it. It is sort of how I’d imagine a monkey would be.
Luke Millar: It’s also a good reflection of the real Robbie Williams. The fact that everything that you see in the movie is very raw, stripped back. It’s the story that he told, but if you have you ever seen any interviews with him, on the Graham Norton Show or whatever, he’s incredibly honest about some experiences in his life that most people wouldn’t share with the world.
David Clayton: There’s not a veneer of oh, I’m this special person, I’m famous. No, I’m a normal guy living this amazing life, and guess what happened to me…this happened, isn’t that funny? He’ll just put it all out there. That charisma and that easy kind of manner, it’s pretty awesome to be able to funnel that into a digital character as opposed to having a crafted performance that we just have to copy from an actor. Yes, we have a foundation from Jonno who gave a tremendous energetic dynamic performance, but then we’ve got all these historical little tidbits that we’re able to embellish into our guy. I love that about this character that it’s really happened. It’s got that reality to it.
The Contending: What occurred to me on the second viewing was that it is a gift not to have an actor playing Robbie because you need Robbie’s voice, his sense of humor, and his way of delivery. In that way, it was a massive benefit to the audience if they could make the leap past the chimpanzee visual.
Luke Millar: Definitely. Obviously, it would never have been the real Robbie playing the Robbie. It could have been someone who looked similar, or hair and makeup to get them close, but it never would have been him. In taking the character and moving it quite far away rather than close to the person that we know, it breaks that kind of “ah, he looks almost right,” which is what a lot of the music biopics do. It just definitely creates a different engagement with the subject.
David Clayton: It also means we could replicate some historic moments pretty verbatim like when he challenges Liam Gallagher, or when he’s giving interviews. We’re able to take those moments and really carefully duplicate them or transpose them onto our Robbie character. And so they’ve got that spontaneity and that realism and it’s not an actor’s performance that’s trying to copy something. It’s literally taking that real spontaneous moment and bringing it to life on our guy.
The Contending: It may just be that the character was so well inhabited by all the work that you did, and tell me if I’m wrong here, but I felt like there was some effort being made, particularly with Robbie’s eyes, to reflect his own eyes in the chimpanzee CGI, and even some slight use of his own facial features.
Luke Millar: You are a hundred percent on the money. When we first started on the show, we were obviously designing the character and deciding how human to make the chimp. We, at a concept level, explored what would it look like if we put human teeth on him, hairstyles, eyes, and pigmentation in the skin, or do we stay more ape-like? There are all these questions that we needed to answer. Michael was very focused on making sure there was a recognizable likeness, and we ended up going too far. We went too human with it. Then we fell into this place of weirdness, which popped you out of a scene. You started staring at him rather than getting engrossed in what he was doing. Michael wanted to pull it back and take it closer to chimp, but I said to him we should leave him in the eyes. Stay a hundred percent Robbie in that area because, in terms of the emotional connection, so much of what matters is right here. Even without the dialogue, there’s so much going on in the eyes and having that ability to emote and express a human level with a look, an iconic look, that people would recognize, we needed that from Robbie. And then we land into more of the chimp look elsewhere in the face. We still reshaped the lips and the jawline, and we introduced those Robbie features, but the eyes were the bit where we really went with a one-to-one likeness of Robbie.
David Clayton: Eyes, they’re the windows to the soul. And Robbie’s got iconic shaped eyes and eyelashes–quite notable eyelashes. We also added something chimps don’t have: eyebrows, which are an emotional powerhouse of expression. I think they added a lot. I don’t know if people will realize that they’re looking at the first monkey ever to have eyebrows, but this one is it. (Laughs).
Luke Millar: It’s weird to me now. If I see a monkey without eyebrows, I’m like who shaved that poor monkey’s eyebrows? (Laughs).
The Contending: I am taking in the eyebrow revelation as we speak. (Laughs). We’ve been talking a lot about the character-building that went into this, we should talk about some of the scenes, too. It’s one of the most astounding set pieces I’ve ever seen in a film, but the “Rock DJ” sequence when he was in Take That starts in one place, spills into the streets, and goes back into the interiors. I watched it a second time and I know that there are magical ways to hide edits and cuts, but I can’t find them. I know what I’m looking for, and I can’t find them. For the two of you to try to put together this sequence that just has to flow, it’s like the opening of Boogie Nights, except even harder.
David Clayton: We pre-visualized, and pre-planned all the musical numbers in the movie as our first port of call. “Rock DJ” was probably the trickiest of those because it was going to be a oner down Regent Street dialing in all sorts of cameras and positions and how are we going to shoot this? Just lots of planning went into it, as well as we did some rough mocap (motion capture) ourselves of the dance moves. Luckily, Ash, the choreographer, provided us with some how-to videos, so we learnt these moves, and we went to our motion capture stage here in Wellington and acted out these amazing dance moves down the street. Then I was able to gather all that up, compile it in Maya (3D application), and put cameras on it and we had a pretty great first pass that proved the concept was going to be amazing. Then we punted it over to Luke.
Luke Millar: Then that got passed to Erik Wilson, who’s a DP on the movie, and he went down to Regent Street with literally an iPhone, Ash, the choreographer, and five dancers. And they tried to block out and recreate the dance moves and there were certain things that were there on the street that weren’t in our previous model, just what I call street furniture, like lampposts and phone boxes and benches and whatnot. We had to make some small adjustments to be able to move through the space physically. After that, it was just a case of starting to break down when we needed a cut. The Take That boys change costumes a number of times throughout the number, and they change hairstyles as well, which is a little more subtle. By the end of it, Howard’s got his dreadlocks; at the start of it, he doesn’t. It’s like a little journey through their career, from not being famous to being famous. But we had one overriding ethos the whole time, which was we never wanted this giant thing to wipe through the camera because then it’s an immediate tell that there’s a cut at that point. All of the splits were engineered so that there was continuity in the rest of the frame. It would obviously happen because they suddenly just changed costumes, but you just couldn’t tell how. It happened right in front of your eyes, but you didn’t see it. I went through and did a split proposal where I color-coded opportunities where I thought we could split here; we could split here, we could split there. Then we followed that, but there were a couple of times when they wanted a split, and we couldn’t do it. The moment they run out of the CD store and the camera goes up on top of the mobility scooters all the way down to pretty much when the motorbike whips past is a single take–that whole number because there was no way we could split it. There were too many people on the street. We could never get everyone lined up.
The Contending: The thing that I loved about that scene, which I think is on a different level, is that this is the band Take That, in which Robbie was marginalized–truly the last guy on the ladder rung. “Rock DJ” is not a Take That song. That is a Robbie Williams song. I felt this sort of subversion of having his old bandmates, who I know he’s made up with to a large degree over time, but not at that moment. The cheekiness of having his old band dramatized performing his song. Was that something that was in your minds too?
Luke Millar: Not so much in my mind. It’s one of the strengths of the movie for sure how the writers were able to take the songs and work them into the narrative that was the movie, it was done really well. The songs were re-recorded to hit the emotional moment of the point at which they are featured. “Rock DJ” is one of his biggest hits; that and “Angels” probably would be the two, and it just fit the emotional moment of that scene; they’re getting that first record deal and then bursting out on the street and wanting to dance. For me personally, I knew timeline-wise it didn’t happen at that point, the song didn’t exist then, but I think the overall narrative and the fit for the song worked really well. And I actually never really thought about whether there’s another level of getting his ex-bandmates dancing to one of his bigger hits.
David Clayton: I think the audaciousness of the overall sequence just trumps all, doesn’t it? Another nice aspect of “Rock DJ” is it’s one of the only times in the movie where he breaks the fourth wall and he’s addressing the camera pretty much the whole time, for four minutes. You’re connecting to it, and you’re enjoying this exhilarating, amazing shot. I think it’s going to blow everybody away.
The Contending: I also loved that the film is not just sparkle for the viewers’ eyes. It’s not just pure entertainment, which it certainly is those things, but it’s surprisingly moving when you consider you’re using a CGI chimp. The scene that first really hit me in that way, and there were others, is the sort of borderline “suicide drive” set to “Come Undone,” when he gets into the car, and he’s taking all of these driving risks, and he’s singing the song that’s reflecting his inner feelings. That sequence is amazingly well-shot. It could have looked cartoony. It does look, I would say, in that fantasy realm, but it doesn’t become unmoored from the drama of his life. Tell me about putting that together and trying to maintain the emotional level and the craft at the same time, because you’re storytellers, too.
Luke Millar: A lot of the design, and this is true for not just that scene, but also the one where he fights all of the versions of himself, Michael really did want them to be heightened versions of reality, to understand that this is playing out in his head. In the first presentation, we did of “Come Undone,” which is the driving scene and then into the water, we got the note back from Michael that we’d made it look too real, which is probably the first and the last time in my career I’m ever going to get that note. So we went back to the drawing board and designed more of a sense of a heightened fantasy, realistically grounded, but a heightened fantasy mind, which is why the red flares get introduced during that sequence. For me, it was definitely trying to make it feel in a reality that people would understand–not being too fantastical–but being able to kiss in those elements so that you would quite quickly understand that he’s not actually drowning underwater, this is a battle that’s taking place in his mind.
David Clayton: Those two sequences were the CG sequences of the movie, the Knebworth battle, and the “Come Undone” sequence, where our focus in the animation team was to make sure that the cameras and the movements all felt in keeping with the rest of the movie. You can’t just bump straight into an all-CG environment and make it feel like you’re in a different world. There was a lot of creative camera work, but grounding it in reality and then just allowing the surreal look of things to give the effect that Luke described. Animating vehicles is challenging because we all see them daily and know what they look like. So there was a lot of careful work there to get all the details right in Robbie’s little car, but also the trucks and other vehicles. And then in the underwater sequence, just getting an entirely different kind of feel, sort of fantastical, the fans who swim up to him and confront him needed to feel a bit mermaid-ish. There was a reference that Michael loved which was an old Levi’s commercial with mermaids in it that was pretty trippy. So we looked at that and references to underwater sports and scenes where people are grappling and trying to get something underwater to get that balance of the fantastical, the surreal, the dreamlike, yet confronting, the reality of filming underwater, with not too much camera movement. The main thing, of course, is the story. It’s Robbie’s low point; he’s drowning, and he’s getting confronted by paparazzi, and fans who’ve literally committed suicide because he left the band. That’s pretty full-on.
Luke Millar: It’s a complete aside, but I have to say, when I first read the script, having lived through that era, I always thought he chose to leave the band. I didn’t realize he got kicked out. So when we first got into that scene, even for me, I was like, oh no way, this is going to be information for people that wasn’t out there when it happened.
The Contending: While I would never refer to anything in this movie as conventional, the boat dance sequence with Robbie and Nicole has a very classic Hollywood musical feel–a Fred and Ginger kind of thing. There’s a real sweetness in that stretch that’s beautiful and maybe cuts against some of the other grains in the film. How did you go about getting that sequence’s tone to fit in with the rest of the film?
Luke Millar: That is my favorite scene in the movie. Technically, it’s very difficult because of the close interaction between the two of them, but I think tonally, what’s lovely about it is it’s probably the first time in the film where you see Robbie at his most open, that connection he makes with Nicole on the boat, the conversation that they have that then leads into that song. There’s something really lovely and honest and genuine about it, and it feels like, at that point, there’s no pretense. It’s not the showman. It’s something a bit warmer, and that’s what I love about it. Obviously, there’s the world that we built around the boat–all the technical kind of stuff with it–but it’s the most beautiful and also one of the most tragic scenes at the same time. You’re seeing this couple meet for the first time and fall in love, but then, through these flash-forwards, you already know their relationship is doomed from that point onwards. It’s not going to survive. There is some very powerful storytelling within that musical number. I think you needed the beauty of the dance, the classical dance, the lifts, the delicate choreography, with the flash-forwards, which are a lot more raw and confronting in terms of the story they’re telling within those.
David Clayton: It’s very polarizing. Your brain is pulled in these two different directions. When I watched the movie at the Toronto Film Festival, that was the first time I’d seen it with an audience. It was the first time Robbie himself had seen it with an audience in its final form. Using “She’s the One” for the scene was one of the most emotional beats, as well as the shot where he shaves his head. When he shaves his head, this redemptive moment, that hit me big time because I guess the whole time we’ve been animating that and working on it and just the details of the hair being shaved and getting all the performance right, you’re looking at it from a technical standpoint, but then to see it in its final form as his redemption was really powerful.
The Contending: It’s funny that you mentioned that. I started losing my hair in my late twenties. And, of course, that creates a lot of angst for somebody at that age. And I remember when I got the shears out and I chopped it off, it was so liberating. I related to that scene in a completely different manner, but I think the point is the same. It’s an effort to try to get your act together and do it through physical action.
David Clayton: There’s a rebirth there, a cleansing of yourself. I’ve experienced it too. It does give you a fresh start. It was an amazing storytelling technique at that point. Plus, it reveals Robbie in one of his most iconic looks, with his shaved head, because he’s got that little scar there that we all recognize. And it just made our Robbie look more like Robbie in a way. It’s him coming into himself a bit.
The Contending: You referenced Knebworth. It starts as a conventional concert performance, and then it turns into something apocalyptic visually. Was there any concern that this might be too big of a leap for the audience? Or did you just feel like this is exactly right?
Luke Millar: I felt like we’d been building to this moment the whole time. From his first performance, when he auditioned for Take That with Nigel (Take That’s manager), we started to feather in these other versions of himself, constantly judging and evaluating what he was doing, and then adding some of his abusive nature. This starts to escalate throughout the movie. The climax of that moment is him finally leaping off the stage and attacking that part of himself. Like we were saying with “Come Undone,” I think it was very important to have a heightened sense of reality, which is why we end up time lapsing through the number. We also didn’t want it to appear like he had done one gig, one big festival, and that was it, then he was on the lake. It had to be multiple concerts throughout the year. As he goes through the sequence, he gets thinner and more and more gaunt. The physical abuse of himself is heightened so that when you finally cut to that harsh reality back onto the scene in the eyes, you really notice the difference between the character that we started the Knebworth Festival with and the one that’s standing. He’s gone through a journey. So that was one of the things that we were focused on making sure came through in the fight.
David Clayton: It’s an ambitious sequence. It shows a person’s mental trauma and decline as they go through an extreme psychotic kind of episode on screen. How do you represent that? It’s a battle. It’s a crazy, apocalyptic war with yourself. It was quite hard to work on because we’re always thinking he’s chipping away at himself here. He’s killing himself. And every time he killed a version of himself, it needed to look like it cost him something, and it hurt him. Then it culminates with him murdering his young self, which was a later addition in the sequence as it evolved, and we were going, whoa, is this one step too far? Man, that’s hard to watch. It was already hard to watch when he was killing a teen version of himself but then substituting in the younger version; this is traumatic. But that’s what it needed to be.
The Contending: The final sequence of the film, the performance of “My Way,” a song that he loved as a kid that he connected to his father, and brings them back together, in a sense. The scene ends with one of the greatest final lines–I won’t speak it here for those who haven’t seen it yet. The constant sort of dichotomy of warming up to Robbie, getting pushed away by him, and then accepting that this is just who he is, I thought it was brilliant. That sequence is closer to the boat scene where it’s a little more traditional in presentation, but then to have that last line, when you were watching it back, did you think to yourself, is that the right thing for him to say after we’ve hopefully won the audience over?
Luke Millar: I 100 percent thought that. That line changed a few times, and then it settled on what you see in the movie. I was always of the mindset that I’m not sure if that would stick, but for me, it does embody the film’s sentiment, which is this is who this guy is. If you ever see him live as well, watch a Robbie Williams concert; one of the things he’s really good at, as well as performing his songs, is the dialogue between the songs. That line is exactly the dialogue that happens between the songs in a real Robbie Williams concert. He’s got all these great stories, often either degrading himself or often being very brash and arrogant, and certain audience members take it positively, as you did, and other people don’t react to it quite the same way. That in itself is very Robbie Williams. He’s got no filter. He’ll be the same person to everyone, and you can take him or leave him as you see fit.
The Contending: And your thoughts, David? How do you lead up to this warm sequence with him and his father and those acerbic last words?
David Clayton: That line was in there from day one when we pre-vis’d it and mapped out the shots there. It was always that sort of push-in, all the way into the eyes, for the final look. And even though we’re only framed for his eyes, you can see him smiling, you can feel him smiling, as he delivers this last cheeky line. And I’m with Luke; it just couldn’t be any other way. It embodies the cheeky exuberance that’s got him where he is today, so how could you finish any other way except that?
The Contending: When you are making a film, and you’re going through it day by day, and you’re trying to make it work, I always say to friends of mine who don’t understand how hard it is to make a movie. To make a bad movie is hard because everybody works just as hard on a bad movie as they do on a good movie–sometimes things don’t turn out. You had to know you were walking a high wire with Better Man. What was it like for both of you to watch it for the first time with people who had no relationship with the film other than as a viewer?
Luke Millar: The way we worked on it definitely helped give us the confidence that this was going to be good. And it was different from how we usually work on films. Normally, we would pick a couple of key shots from a sequence and work them up. Once people have approved or bought into the look and the feeling of those shots, we tend to roll it out to the rest of the sequence. But Michael was very keen that we didn’t do that because when you watch the scene, it’s not like this one shot is the important moment. It’s how the whole thing plays out. How does Robbie come across in this moment? He directed Jonno to get him a performance that he was happy with, and he just wanted to make sure that he still came across when we put the ape in there. In working through these scenes, we would complete the whole sequence before we sent it to them. Our first animation pass would be every single shot, regardless of how many shots were in the scene. Then we would always follow that up very quickly with a render so that we could get the costume and the hairstyle in there and present back the full scene. This is how we worked throughout the entire movie. We filled in big chunks of the edit as we worked through the film. We could already place little snapshots of the movie as we were working on it and then have this confidence that it was going to work. Even in presenting or showing it to other people at Weta, or Michael, or potential investors, before we’d finished the movie, we’d already gained the confidence that we knew it was going to work. I’ve seen this movie a lot, obviously. I’ve seen every single shot so many times and watched the whole movie many times over. Even during its rough cuts, when things were not fully polished, and there were scenes that were unfinished, I’ve always had the same emotional reaction to the film. I was always thinking that if I feel like this and I’ve seen it 40 times, then other people have to feel the same way. I couldn’t understand how anyone else would feel differently.
David Clayton: I honestly never doubted it either. From the get-go, I always believed in the movie. I don’t think I was like oh, this is going to be popular and a hit, so I’m going to do a good job on it. I just loved it, honestly, so I wanted to do a great job on this movie and do my best work. That was the reward for me, the journey. I think everybody who worked on the movie felt like that. We had great synergy. Everyone was raving about how this is the best movie they’ve worked on. It didn’t really occur to me what the rest of the world thought. I was just like, what do we think? If we’re happy and we’re having a great time, then that’s the reward and that’s what was driving us.
Luke Millar: At this point, we still don’t know what the rest of the world thinks. There’s been screenings, there’s been critics, there’s been reviews, but we still don’t know how it’s going to be received by the general public.
David Clayton: We don’t know what the world’s going to think, and you guys can go F yourselves. (Laughs).
