The performance Robin Williams refused to watch: “It’s like drowning”
We all have a film you refuse to watch, even if your closest friends have been begging you to, or a series you will not touch as you navigate a feed full of intense discourse about how it might just be the greatest show ever made.
Call it intuition or more informally a gut feeling, but when something inside you says, ‘No thanks, I’ll pass’, it’s hard not to listen to it, like my perpetual refusal to watch 2010’s Remember Me, starring Robert Pattinson, Emilie de Ravin, and Pierce Brosnan.
It was difficult, holding out against that movie when Twilight had shot Pattinson to unreal heights of fame, but a romance ruined by 9/11 with a young girl getting bullied relentlessly in school is going to be a skip, even if it includes a Robert Pattinson shedding the glitter for a depressed youngin with a diary.
My hormonal reactions aside, consider this predicament on a more intense scale, as for actors, the stakes are a little higher. Not only is it god-awful watching yourself on a big screen, where all of your smallest insecurities are blown up to huge proportions, but watching one of your own movies can easily cast you into your own biggest critic.
As such, filmgoers everywhere adored Robin Williams as the picture of unbridled joy, his deep, belly-reaching laugh, or the words, “Oh captain, my captain!” from the Dead Poets Society. But Williams didn’t feel the same way, especially about his 1982 vehicle The World According to Garp.
Speaking on the matter previously, he had shared, “I haven’t gone to see rushes, because I’m afraid they would jar me. I don’t think I’ll get a view of myself until the final cut. It’s like drowning, like running for your life. I have no perspective. It’s not like comedy or all-out farce, where I know my instincts. It’s all unknown territory. It’s like being in combat.”
The film was one of Williams’ very first features that saw him play the titular character of TS Garp, the illegitimate son of nurse Jenny Fields, whom she conceived with a dying pilot in World War II. “I finished one day of shooting and thought, ‘God, I died’,” Williams highlighted of the toll.
He continued: “Even though it was only a single scene, I had this bizarre feeling, and I wept for a couple of hours after it. When I finally see the film, I’ll look back and say, ‘I did that’. I’ll be proud. I feel proud now, but I just can’t say it yet because it’s not over.”
He rightly pointed out how making films is always as tense as Russian roulette, where every new venture feels like the end of one’s career, and the actors wait with bated breath for either success or being relegated to “selling the National Enquirer door to door”.
However, in this, Williams truly had nothing to worry about. He went on to have an illustrious career, one many of his eventual peers would envy, and, no, he never had to go door to door with the National Enquirer, despite his overwhelming anxiety. He began great, and he remained great for his entire career, cut short only by a tragedy uncontrollable.
