The panned Robin Williams role John Travolta was desperate to play
Robin Williams was an actor who embodied the perfect balance of playfulness and nuance. His genuine excitement and curiosity appeal to children in films like Hook, and his delicate emotional side adds sensitivity to his more grown-up films like Good Will Hunting and Dead Poets Society. However, few people know about his 1996 film Jack, in which he quite literally plays a child trapped in the body of an adult.
Williams seems like the perfect casting choice for a project like this, bringing his unique humour and larger-than-life persona to the bizarre story, like the 1988 film Big but in reverse. However, there was initially another actor who desperately wanted the role, someone who perhaps wouldn’t have been the most natural fit.
The film was directed by none other than Francis Ford Coppola and written by an emerging director at the time called Gary Nadeau, who was fresh off the success of his first short film, Red. The project won a student Academy Award, and when preparing for meetings in Los Angeles, Nadeau realised he needed a script to pitch and quickly came up with the idea of Jack with his friend. Miraculously, the script was completed and sold within two months, and Nadeau was initially set to direct. However, once Williams was attached to the project, they claimed that he wouldn’t work with a student director, and Nadeau eventually stepped down.
However, when Nadeau was still set to direct, he had met with another actor about the part and had written the role for someone else entirely, with Nadeau saying, “The script was originally written with Kevin Kline in mind, while John Travolta – in his post-Pulp Fiction comeback mode – wanted the role. I was invited to see this press screening of Pulp Fiction at the New York Film Festival… I had lunch with Travolta the next day. I sat with him for hours, and he was dying to play Jack.”
After his performance in Pulp Fiction, Travolta seems like the most unsuspecting of people to pursue a role that seems so fluffy and innocent, but perhaps the actor wanted a palette cleanser after working with Tarantino. Ultimately, Williams was the top choice for the part, and once he signed onto the project, he convinced Coppola to direct, which was all the more amazing to Nadeau, given that it was his first Hollywood script.
Coppola seems as surprising as Travolta on a project like this, which could not be more opposite to The Godfather or Apocalypse Now. However, the director explained that he had a personal connection to the story, saying: “I think it was Hemingway who said that to be a great artist you have to have an unhappy childhood. I had polio as a child, and was kept from any contact with [other] kids. There was a lot of longing. And I think that was why I empathised with this film.”
Well, that will do it. Nothing screams catharsis like the process of working on a kid’s movie, and I hope he got the therapeutic effect that he wanted.
