Mrs. Doubtfire: Robin Williams’ improvs represent 600 km of film

Chris Columbus claims to have plenty of material to make a documentary out of!

There is not only Leonardo DiCaprio who made endless improvisations (according to Martin Scorsese on the set of Killers of the Flower Moon). Robin Williams was a professional long before him in terms of extended improvisations. It is also thanks to this talent that he was courted by Disney to dub the genius ofAladdina character animated from his lines (which he largely invented) and not the other way around.

A recent interview with the director of Mrs. Doubtfire, Chris Columbus, detailed all the excessive improvisation shown by the actor during filming. For the 30th anniversary of the film, he entrusted Business Insider that the team had recorded “almost 600 km of film”. Which is equivalent to the distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“He came to me quite early saying:‘Hey boss, if you’re up for it, I like to do three or four scripted takes and then perform.’ In fact, it meant that he wanted to improvise, which is how we recorded all the scenes. We had a full script, but it was Robin’s way.”

However, this sometimes posed a problem in the organization of the making of the film.

“Robin changed all the takes. He improvised and sometimes it totally lost him. We looked at the person responsible for the script with a questioning look, but she herself didn’t know where we were either,” tell Chris Columbus.

The actor’s improvisations caused the team’s perdition, who no longer knew which way to dance. The spontaneity of the actor, however, made it possible to set the very particular tone of this family comedy.

“This could not happen today, he continues. At the time we were shooting on film, once we ran out we had to tell Robin to stop playing. It happened several times. I had to shoot with four cameras to follow him. He was too unpredictable, you had to be on the lookout.”

Chris Columbus confided that he would like a documentary on Mrs. Doubtfire can come to fruition from all these archives.

“There are around 972 boxes of footage Doubtfire. Sequences used for the film, shots, behind the scenes…We would like to hire an editor to see all these sequences. We would like to work on this. There was something magical about the way he played, I think it would be fun to delve into.”

Making-of: how Robin Williams became Mrs. Doubtfire

Will such a project be possible soon? Before he died, Robin Williams had stipulated that he didn’t want his image, nor his voice, cannot be reused until 25 years after his disappearance. A way to avoid being resurrected digitally.

If his heirs made an exception for the Disney short film celebrating the studio’s 100th anniversary, in which we hear the Genie from an old recording of the actor, will the same be true for a documentary dedicated to behind the scenes of the filming of Mrs. Doubtfire ?

Nine years after his death, Robin Williams returns as Genie at Disney