When Robin Williams got going, there was absolutely no stopping him. According to director Chris Columbus, the late, great Williams improvised so much while shooting Mrs. Doubtfire that nearly 2 million feet of film was amassed during production.
Columbus spoke about the stockpile of footage in a Business Insider article celebrating the 30th anniversary of Mrs. Doubtfire, revealing that there are almost 1,000 boxes of footage from the classic film starring Williams as Daniel Hillard, a recently divorced voice actor who, in order to stay close to his three children, goes undercover as British nanny Mrs. Doubtfire. “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,” said Columbus.
Columbus told Business Insider that he hopes to release a documentary about the making of Mrs. Doubtfire, sharing that a team is “talking about it and trying to get it done.” The goal is to highlight Williams’s singular comedic talent and 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,” he explained. “I mean, there’s 2 million feet of film in that warehouse, so there could be something we can do with all of that.”
A lot of that footage, it seems, is of Williams improvising. “If it were today, we would never end,” said Columbus. “But back then, we were shooting film, so once we were out of film in the camera, we would say to Robin, ‘We’re out of film.’ That happened on several occasions.” Although Williams was burning through film, he was so funny that the studio execs didn’t mind and “were loving what they were seeing.”
Williams starred in Mrs. Doubtfire opposite Sally Field, Pierce Brosnan, and Harvey Fierstein. “It got to the point that I had to shoot the entire movie with four cameras to keep up with him,” explained Columbus. “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. For Pierce Brosnan and Sally Field, it was quite difficult for them not to break character.”
To his credit, Williams was upfront about the way he liked to work and his love of improvisation. According to Columbus, Williams came up to him at the beginning of the process and said, “Hey, boss, the way I like to work, if you’re up for it, is: I’ll give you three or four scripted takes, and then let’s play.” Still, Columbus admitted that it couldn’t have been easy for those working on the film, particularly those tasked with working on the script. “The poor script supervisor,” he said. “She was handwriting it, and Robin would change every take. So Robin would go to a place where he couldn’t remember much of what he said. We would go to the script supervisor and ask her, and sometimes she didn’t even get it all.”