The only director who banned Robin Williams from improvising: “Hold it, jerk”
Just because someone is very good, one of the best, even, at something, it doesn’t mean they need to do it all the time. Few have ever been better at improvisational comedy than Robin Williams, but he knew when to turn it on and when to turn it off.
Chris Columbus has repeatedly said there’s enough unused footage from Mrs Doubtfire to recut the entire movie into a foul-mouthed and R-rated comedy, and the team behind Aladdin said much the same thing, with Williams riffing his way through so much material that they were drowning in it.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, stream of consciousness comedy wasn’t exactly suited to a dark and desperate dramatic thriller like Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia, so the Academy Award-winning actor knew that he wouldn’t even dare to deviate from the script, which didn’t stop him from trying to crack up the cast and crew between takes.
Many of Williams’ best performances, including Good Morning, Vietnam, Good Will Hunting, The Fisher King, and Dead Poets Society, saw him place one foot in each word. He’d stick to the script to a certain extent, but there were still off-the-cuff asides that he’d spontaneously add in, which were done in service of the character he was playing, and ultimately for the benefit of the picture.
However, when he played his first leading role in a movie after the Popeye debacle in 1982’s The World According to Garp, he found himself up against the no-nonsense George Roy Hill. The Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting director wasn’t sold on the prospect of allowing his leading man to take his dialogue into his own hands, so he stopped him from doing it.
“I’d seen him as Popeye and didn’t understand a word he said,” the filmmaker explained. “I’d seen him once as Mork and didn’t understand him either.” Clearly, he wasn’t keen on the broader side of Williams’ performative skill set, which was just as well, seeing as that wasn’t the reason he hired him for the role.
“I felt he had a sense of decency that was important,” Hill elaborated. “Garp is an abrasive man, but his underlying decency is a key part of the character, and I felt Robin was the sort of actor who could provide that.” He still tried to improvise, though, and when he did, the leading man was reminded who was in charge.
When Williams first tried going off-script, the director called a wrap and shut down the entire set for the day, leaving the actor in no doubt as to who was running the show: “I thought, ‘OK, you’ve made your point, I won’t do that again.” This being Williams, he couldn’t help himself and did it again, and the results were very similar.
In the scene where Garp’s wife, Mary Beth Hurt’s Helen, reveals that she’s pregnant, he celebrates by drawing a baby’s face on her stomach. “I wanted to say, ‘Oh, looky, our baby has a beard,'” he remembered, only to be immediately shut down by Hill, who stopped him in his tracks with a short and highly abrupt, “Hold it, jerk.” With his authority established, Williams kept himself on a tight leash.
