WHY GRACEY JUMPED THROUGH HOOPS FOR THE SHOWMAN
▶ Director Michael Gracey tells James Mottram the circus tale behind the filming of his P T Barnum movie musical
Barnum was a deeply flawed character in real life and that’s what makes him an interesting person MICHAEL GRACEY Director
The phrase “Whatever it takes…” could easily apply to The Greatest Showman, the new musical film starring Hugh Jackman as the 19th-century circus impresario P T Barnum. Michael Gracey, a former commercial director making his directorial film debut, remembers telling “a number of questionable stories” just to get it made.
For starters, he wanted to use songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, so resorted to creative tactics. While musicians such as Bruno Mars and Pharrell Williams were initially sought to write the songs, Gracey had his heart set on this up-and-coming duo. “At the time, Benj and Justin, all they had to their name was an off-Broadway musical,” says Gracey. “That didn’t really cut it in Hollywood, putting a film of this scale in the hands of a first-time director and two songwriters who had no real acclaim. So I just started telling everyone they’d won a Tony… and because it’s Hollywood, no one checks.” Eventually, Pasek and Paul did win a Tony – for Dear Evan Hansen – as well as an Oscar for La La Land. But it is the sort of cheeky fib that Barnum himself might appreciate. “I think anyone in show business has a bit of Barnum in them,” says Gracey. He concludes his movie with a quote spoken by his subject: “The noblest art is that of making others happy.”
While this suggests that Barnum loved his public, there was another side to him. A genius in mathematics, marketing and self-promotion, he is famously associated with the phrase “There’s a sucker born every minute” (although there’s no evidence that he ever said it). Certainly, he could be accused of exploitation; many of his acts, such as the Bearded Lady and the dwarf known as Tom Thumb, were considered “freaks”, or “oddities” as Barnum more gently termed them.
“Barnum was a deeply flawed character in real life and that’s what makes him an interesting person,” says Gracey. “I don’t believe at all… that he got these oddities together for some altruistic means. He did it to make money. He did it as a businessman, but I also genuinely think that… he told these wondrous stories that made the world fall in love with them and effectively made them stars. What he didn’t realise he was doing, he was making these people feel loved for the first time in their lives.”
When it came to launching The
Greatest Showman, it was anything but easy. Aside from Gracey’s inexperience – and Pasek and Paul’s for that matter – original film musicals are considered a huge risk. The track record is hardly good either, from Francis Ford Coppola’s costly flop One From the Heart (1982) to James L Brooks’s I’ll Do Anything
(1994), which received such poor audience test scores that all the musical numbers were removed.
While La La Land may be the exception that proves the rule, the bulk of film musicals are adapted from pre-existing stage shows, such as the Oscar-winning Chicago, or so-called “jukebox” musicals, using established songs. “I understand it’s a risky prospect,” says Gracey. “But Hugh and I were both adamant; we pointed to the films we loved. Original musicals… whether it was Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, Cabaret. We were like: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to do that? To do a film like that for our generation.’” It is why The Greatest Showman took so long; the idea was first floated to Jackman by producer Larry Mark shortly after he hosted the Oscars in 2009. Around the same time, Gracey met Jackman, while filming a Lipton Ice Tea commercial for the Japanese market. “It was between myself and a French director, and they gave me the job because I was Australian and they assumed I knew Hugh Jackman. And I never corrected them either, by the way. I just kept quiet.”
Gracey recalls their first meeting. “On the first day of rehearsal, all of the agencies are there and the client is there, and Hugh sees me and he goes “Michael!” with this big grin on his face. We hug – and as we’re hugging, he says: ‘They think I know you, just go along with it.’ We pretended to be best friends that whole shoot. At the end of that shoot was when we said we should do a film together.”
While Jackman is best known to filmgoers for playing the mutant superhero Wolverine in the X-Men films, he has a strong history with musicals on stage. His breakthrough was playing Curly in a production of
Oklahoma! in London’s West End (which gained him an Olivier Award nomination). Later, he won a Tony on Broadway for his turn as songwriter Peter Allen in The Boy from Oz. More recently, he won a Golden Globe for the movie version of Les Misérables.
Despite all this, convincing studios to back Jackman and Gracey on The
Greatest Showman was still a huge ask. “There was no guarantee that the film would ever get made,” says Gracey. “So all of these songs that Justin and Benj were writing, we would – in our darkest hours – talk about the fact that no one might ever hear them. But they kept writing. It got to a point that it was undeniable that, at least on the music front, we had something special.”
Gracey had some inspiration to draw from. Having worked in visual effects in the past, he was around Luhrmann at the time his fellow Australian was pitching Moulin Rouge! to 20th Century Fox. It is one of the great modern jukebox musicals and the film that relaunched studios’ interest in songand-dance films. “I was very fortunate to be around that and see first-hand how he presented Moulin Rouge! to Fox,” he says.
Gracey calls Luhrmann “the king of pitching”, and it isn’t hard to see why. “It’s remarkable the way he can tell a story through picture. Just standing
in a room. I was putting my pitch together thinking: ‘I can only hope that this risky project gets greenlit in the way Moulin Rouge! did.’
“It took us a few more years than it took Baz, but he had Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet behind him. I [was] a first-time filmmaker, which makes everything completely terrifying for everyone involved,” he says.
At least the shoot itself was a joy. With a cast that includes Michelle Williams, Zac Efron and rising star Zendaya, Gracey says the feeling on set was electric. “In some films, it’s hard to get the stars to show up, even when they’re scheduled to show up. On The Greatest Showman, we had stars… [such as] Zac and Zendaya, and Hugh coming down to set just to see other people’s numbers, even if they weren’t in front of camera. That’s how exciting it was being on set.”
With complex dance numbers and infectious Pasek and Paul songs such as From Now On, This Is Me and The Greatest Show, the film translates much of that energy onto the screen. Jackman has already been nominated for a Golden Globe, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if he gained the second Oscar nod of his career (after Les Misérables). Now all they need is for audiences to show up in droves, as they did for Barnum’s circus shows. Whatever it takes...