The director of Mrs. Doubtfire wants to share the boxes of unused footage they filmed of Williams
Scriptwriters could sleep easy when working with Robin Williams, knowing his quick wit would conjure up hilarity at a moment’s notice. For this reason, even mistakes made by the man were just as hilarious as the intended joke. So much so that there are almost a thousand boxes full of just Williams’s outtakes from Mrs. Doubtfire.
1993’s Mrs. Doubtfire saw Williams as a struggling divorcee who takes up the guise of a tough but quirky nanny to see his kids more. The film turns 30 this year and director Chris Columbus is sharing some remarkable insights into making the film with Williams – including just how much footage they had capturing his brilliance.
On paper, Mrs. Doubtfire runs for a little over two hours. But there is so much more footage beyond that, teased Columbus. Cutting room floor? Perhaps a cutting room field would be more prudent.
“There are roughly 972 boxes of footage from Doubtfire — footage we used in the movie, outtakes, behind-the-scenes footage — in a warehouse somewhere,” Columbus revealed. What’s more, there’s a chance the public might see it in the future, as Columbus hopes, “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.”
The quantity of these unused Mrs. Doubtfire outtakes is due to the relentless pace Williams’ mind moved.
“Early on in the process, he 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,’” shared Columbus. “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.”
There were some logistical hiccups for this. For example, the film crew had to record using four cameras to keep up with Williams. But someone else had it especially hard. “The poor script supervisor,” he continued. “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.”
He added, “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.”
The end product was still a classic that deserves its place of honor in the American Film Institute and Bravo’s lists, but it sounds like Mrs. Doubtfire still has some great Robin Williams content to provide.
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