Robin Williams’ non-negotiable rule for making ‘Jumanji’
In the mid-1990s, Robin Williams starred in a string of films that defined the childhoods of my generation.
It almost reached a point where Williams’ face was becoming more familiar than that of my own family, as I watched him shapeshift in Mrs Doubtfire, play an overaged Peter Pan in Hook, or battle the peril of a board game on Jumanji.
The latter being the biggest blockbuster of the three, typifying the trend of grand adventure, action movies that existed within the decade. Buoyed by the introduction of CGI, which seemingly opened up the realms of possibility for moviemaking in that era, storylines became more expansive. The very premise that a film could follow a board game that descends into real-life chaos didn’t seem as far-reaching as it used to.
However, stylistically, it felt as though it was the antithesis of Williams as an actor. Sure, his comedy was wildly esoteric, but there was a humanity that underpinned it. The very reason Williams felt familiar during my childhood was through the warmth he exuded in every role he delivered. A warmth that one would rightly fear would get lost amidst the saturation of intense CGI.
Speaking of the project, Williams explained, “I mean, doing this movie with all these special effects, you have to imagine and visualize, I’ll show you a picture and say, this is what you’re looking at. ‘Oh, great, okay!’ And then you have to try and give it some sort of danger or a reality. And it usually involves hallucinating it or trying to visualize it.”
Adding, “It’s a really strange thing to do. But the thing that makes it, you can get through it is by focusing on the people.”
Just hearing how Williams spoke about the film in retrospect goes to prove there was some hesitation on his end in getting involved. The pitfalls of submitting himself to a digital world were overtly clear, and so it’s no surprise that he initially passed on the project.
The film’s director Joe Johnstone confirmed that, explaining, “The studio said they would make the film if we could get Robin to do it. He had passed on the original script. A bunch of us stayed up all night doing a cut-and-paste job and changed a lot around [the screenplay is credited to Jonathan Hensleigh, Greg Taylor and Jim Strain], and Robin liked it enough to say yes.”
But clearly, to Williams, saying yes only came with a promise that the people would be at the heart of the story and the filmmaking process. It was an agreement that proved no better than a day on set when Williams reportedly lost his temper over the fact that a simple fact had been forgotten.
When the filming hours became long and extensive, so as to appease the ambitious adventure element of production, Williams lost his temper at Johnstone and Co, who had seemingly forgotten the fact that children were present during the production. He, in fact, threatened to leave the shoot altogether if overtime hours became mandatory for child actors.
His genuine guardianship of those young actors carried over into the film, whereby his character feels an obvious sense of parental duty to his children, making Williams’ performance feel very real in a very unreal world.
