‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ director on scrapped sequel, Robin Williams’ endless improvisations
'It got to the point that I had to shoot the entire movie with four cameras to keep up with him,' filmmaker Chris Columbus says as film marks 30th anniversary
“It’s an interesting thing. Back then, there was an attitude that sequels were looked down upon by the artists. So Robin was against doing a sequel immediately after,” Columbus said.
But as the years went by, talk of a sequel gained steam and a Columbus presented Williams with a script.
“He and I didn’t talk about a sequel until the year he passed away. We had a script that was written and it was the last time I saw Robin,” Columbus said. “I went to his house and we sat down and talked about it and the script was really strong. Robin’s only comment was, ‘Boss, do I have to be in the suit as much this time?’ It was physically demanding. For Robin, I think it was like running a marathon every day he was in the Doubtfire costume. He was older, obviously.
“So we talked about it and I think he was hoping in the rewrite we would cut back on the Doubtfire character. But then Robin passed away so there will never be a sequel to Mrs. Doubtfire.”
“It got to the point that I had to shoot the entire movie with four cameras to keep up with him. None of us knew what he was going to say when he got going and so I wanted a camera on the other actors to get their reactions,” said Columbus.
“There are roughly 972 boxes of footage from Doubtfire — footage we used in the movie, outtakes, behind-the-scenes footage — in a warehouse somewhere and we would like to hire an editor to go in and look at all of that footage,” Columbus continued.
“We want to show Robin’s process. There is something special and magical about how he went about his work and I think it would be fun to delve into it. I mean, there’s 2 million feet of film in that warehouse so there could be something we can do with all of that,” he said.
In the beloved family film, Williams played Daniel Hillard, an actor living in San Francisco who disguises himself as a housekeeper named Euphegenia Doubtfire so he can spend time with his three kids after he and his wife (played by Sally Field) get a divorce.
The film was the second biggest movie at the box office back in 1993, trailing only Jurassic Park.
In a 2015 interview with Yahoo! Columbus said that because of the actor’s off-the-cuff jokes, there were four different cuts of Mrs. Doubtfire. “Literally, a PG-rated version of the film, PG-13, R, and NC-17,” he said.
“There was a deal between Robin and myself, which was, he’ll do one or two, three scripted takes. And then he would say, ‘Then let me play.’ And we would basically go on anywhere between 15 to 22 takes, I think 22 being the most I remember,” Columbus added in a chat with Entertainment Weekly in 2021.
As a result, the Mork & Mindy star inserted new lines with each new take. “He would sometimes go into territory that wouldn’t be appropriate for a PG-13 movie, but certainly appropriate and hilariously funny for an R-rated film,” Columbus said. His reference to there being an NC-17 version of the film was “a joke.”
But, Columbus recalled, “I do remember it was outrageously funny material.”
