The “crazy-ass” movie Robin Williams would never forget: “Everyone was stoned”
Surely there comes a time in anyone’s job where you sit back and simply think, ‘What on earth am I doing?’ Unless you’re a doctor or a firefighter, or someone saving lives daily, there always comes a moment when you look around and realise how utterly ridiculous life can get.
For Robin Williams, the moment came at a point where the silliness hits a fever pitch. This must have happened a lot. When you’re working in the world of comedy, and your business quite literally is laughs and gags, that sense of thinking surely everything has gone too far now must be one all comedians are pretty familiar with.
When Williams was messing around with prophetic and doing silly voices for Mrs Doubtfire, he likely thought that was peak stupidity. Or when he, an adult man, was flying around pretending to be Peter Pan in Hook, he probably felt pretty ridiculous there.
There was likely also a moment where it went beyond silliness into outright chaos. In movies that involve more action, like Jumanji, or more slapstick comedy, like Flubber, the act of even just playing alongside CGI figures that wouldn’t be there in real life, leaving him speaking to nothing at all, must have made him feel like he was slightly losing his mind in a job that demanded a loosened grip on reality. His very job was to simply go with the flow, no matter how laughable it all got.
He was well trained for that, though, given that one of his first-ever roles set the tone and the peak for the carnage that could follow. If you get the worst out of the way first, then nothing can seem as bad, and even back in 1980, Williams knew, or at least hoped, that Popeye had to be the worst.
It wasn’t that the experience was bad, it was just that it was complete carnage. “Crazy-ass movie,” he said, and that’s an understatement. It was really already bound to be, as the very idea of Williams playing the weird cartoon character alongside Shelley Duvall already feels like a fever dream.
But it got even crazier when, somehow, they ran out of money. “Literally, near the end of the movie … the studio had pooled all of the money, so all the special effects people left. It was Ed Wood the last weeks of the movie,” Williams said.
In Ed Wood’s actual last weeks, the icon drank himself to death and blew all his money on booze and drugs, so that really gives you a sense of the culture on the set of Popeye. “You couldn’t escape it,” Barry Diller, the former Paramount Pictures CEO, said of the presence of cocaine on set, claiming it was the “most coked-up” film production he ever saw, as he recalled, “Film cans were actually being used to ship cocaine back and forth to this set. Everyone was stoned.”
Really, though, when you’re making a film this weird with characters this odd, maybe it has to be done. Then, add on top of that the pressure of the cast basically just having to make it work as the production fell further into chaos, a helping hand was probably needed.
“Shelley Duvall was in a pond, basically, with an octopus with no internal mechanism, having to drape it over her body like a feather boa. I’m in the water, and I’m kind of like sitting there,” Williams said. It all barraged towards an equally ridiculous finale as the actor said, “Eventually, Robert Evans, who is there, is kind of wandering around going, ‘How do we end the movie? How do we end the movie?’ And I joked, ‘We could walk on the water like Jesus.’ And he’s like, ‘That’s the way! That’s how we’ll end the movie!’”
Cocaine, a dream and a high tolerance for ridiculousness – that’s how Robin Williams got through his breakout role.
