Mrs. Doubtfire Used 2 Million Feet of Film Because Robin Williams Improvised So Much Dialogue
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The post Mrs. Doubtfire Used 2 Million Feet of Film Because Robin Williams Improvised So Much Dialogue appeared first on Consequence.
Robin Williams improvised so much dialogue while shooting Mrs. Doubtfire that the movie used up 2 million feet of film, according to its director Chris Columbus.
“Early on in the process, [Williams] went to me, ‘Hey boss, the way I like to work, if you’re up for it, is I’ll give you three or four scripted takes, and then let’s play,’” Columbus said in a new interview with Business Insider commemorating the film’s 30th anniversary. “By saying that, what he meant was he wanted to improvise. And that’s exactly how we shot every scene. We would have exactly what was scripted, and then Robin would go off and it was something to behold.”
Williams ad-libbed so much on the set of the 1993 comedy — in which he plays a newly-divorced actor digsuising himself as an elderly female housekeeper — that there were “several occasions” where he used up all the film that was loaded into the camera. “The poor script supervisor,” Columbus added. “Remember, this is the early 1990s, she wasn’t typing what he was saying. She was handwriting it and Robin would change every take. So Robin would go to a place where he couldn’t remember much of what he said. We would go to the script supervisor and ask her and sometimes she didn’t even get it all. Often, he would literally give us a completely different take than what we did doing the written takes.”
Now, those 378 miles of film are occupying nearly 1,000 boxes in storage somewhere. Columbus still wants to put them to use, however, and is toying with the idea of making a documentary: “There are roughly 972 boxes of footage from Doubtfire — footage we used in the movie, outtakes, behind-the-scenes footage — in a warehouse somewhere and we would like to hire an editor to go in and look at all of that footage,” he continued. “We want to show Robin’s process. There is something special and magical about how he went about his work and I think it would be fun to delve into it. I mean, there’s 2 million feet of film in that warehouse so there could be something we can do with all of that.”
In fact, the last conversation Columbus ever had with Williams before his death in 2014 was about the script to a possible Doubtfire sequel. Now, Columbus is adamant on not making a sequel out of respect to Williams, and claims he’ll do everything in his power to make sure big studios don’t make a Doubtfire 2, either: “I will certainly be very vocal about it if they decide to do it.”
Mrs. Doubtfire was adapted into a Broadway musical that debuted in 2019. The year before, Williams was the subject of an HBO documentary titled Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind.
Mrs. Doubtfire Used 2 Million Feet of Film Because Robin Williams Improvised So Much Dialogue
Abby Jones
Popular Posts
