00:00I'm Michael Gracie, I'm the director of Better Man.
00:03Shutting down Regent Street and dancing down Regent Street with 500 people
00:07was one of the best moments of my life.
00:10It was an incredible thing to shoot.
00:12We really got to take this up a notch.
00:14Because it takes you from coming out on the street and nobody knows who they are
00:17to, by the end of the musical number, people are chasing them down the street
00:20because take that is now the biggest thing in Europe.
00:23We do this costume change where the boys jump through these racks of clothes.
00:27As they ride the clothing racks, they hit a gumball machine outside Hamley's.
00:32The idea of dancing on top of gumballs is actually something I originally pitched
00:37in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that didn't happen.
00:40I pitched it a second time in The Greatest Showman that didn't happen.
00:43And this is the third time me trying to do a musical number of dancing on top of gumballs
00:48and we finally achieved it.
00:50We would go down to Regent Street just with an iPhone in the middle of the night
00:54and dance down the street with people yelling at us. Is that for TikTok?
00:57Another element was the mobility scooters.
01:00And the mobility scooters broke down so often during rehearsal that I was terrified
01:05we were never going to make it through the night.
01:07We had two mobility scooter engineers on standby.
01:11Entirely worthwhile, but an incredible amount of work.
01:14And in this breakdown sequence in the music store, obviously this is highly choreographed.
01:19It took I think like 38 takes because it's all one camera move.
01:24It was a lot of takes.
01:26This sequence obviously was 500 dances.
01:29There's no CG except for the monkey.
01:31All of the people in the street are real.
01:33The joy that people had doing it, even though it was 3 in the morning,
01:36people were having the time of their life.
01:38Even in between takes, the ripple, the laughter, the energy,
01:42you got a sense that this was something special.
01:45And I think everyone who was a part of that number really felt it.
01:49♪♪
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