When Marina Zenovich was an aspiring actor living in New York, taking on small roles to pay the bills, she was cast as an extra in The Fisher King, appearing in the scene where Parry, the madcap eccentric played by Robin Williams, imagines a spontaneous flashmob breaking out among enchanted commuters in Grand Central Station.
It’s “one of the most glorious cinematic moments”, Zenovich says, but she’d forgotten taking part in it until her new documentary, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, screened at the Karlovy Vary film festival this month. When asked if she ever had a chance to meet her subject, whose life she’d been poring over for four years, she recalled having waltzed in his close proximity.
Fashioned from archival footage, old audio tapes, interviews with Williams’ contemporaries and clips of the comic’s stand-up, Come Inside My Mind is the first documentary to comprehensively examine Williams’ life and art since his suicide in 2014. It includes virtually no narration, save for Williams’ own, which can have an eerie, almost ghostlike effect (if only ghosts were as charming and exuberant as Robin Williams). “Every person is driven by some deep, deep, deep, deep secret,” he says in voiceover about halfway through the film.
It’s a question Williams scarcely addressed, preferring to bare his soul by way of performance. “Steve Martin says in the film, when Robin was on stage, whether it was theater or standup, he was in charge,” says Zenovich. “But in his life he was trying to hold himself together.” Still, the comic’s embattled sense of sense worth threatened to impose itself on an otherwise supremely confident stage persona. As he says in voiceover, recalling advice from a shrink: “Be careful what you talk about, because you may be on stage in front of so many people and start talking about something you’re not able to deal with.”
Martin, who starred opposite Williams in Mike Nichols’ 1988 stage production of Waiting for Godot, is one of several comedy heavyweights who appear in the film, which functions as both a showcase for Williams’ gifts and something of a shiva for the friends and family he left behind. Billy Crystal remembers the zany voicemails Robin left him; David Letterman waxes poetic about southern California in the 70s, when the governor, Jerry Brown, dated Linda Ronstadt; Pam Dawber shares stories from a lifelong friendship with Williams that began with Mork & Mindy; and the actor’s own son, Zak, is wistful when calling to mind the years his father was absent.
The film takes its name from one of Williams’ early standup routines, a motormouthed bit where he pantomimes removing the crown of his head and invites the audience to witness what’s inside. The magic of Williams’ comedy, often frenzied and off-the-cuff, was harder to capture in a documentary than that of Richard Pryor’s, Zenovich’s last subject. “With Richard Pryor, it was easier to settle because he told longer stories,” says the director. “I didn’t know what it would be like with Robin because his comedy is all over the place. What was hard was finding the mix of sadness and joy that the film now has. It looks easy, but it was a struggle.”
With documentaries about Williams, Pryor and Roman Polanski under her belt, Zenovich has somewhat unwittingly developed a reputation for appraising the lives of “difficult” men. “My husband pointed out to me that I do that, but it was never my intention” she says. “I just make films about things that interest me.”
What drew her to Williams, apart from his singularly rapid-fire wit, was his creative generosity, attested to by most everyone in the documentary, sometimes with a kind of rueful speculation about what it must’ve felt like inside Robin’s brain. Lewis Black, shown in the film on a USO tour of Afghanistan with Williams, calls him a light that “never knew how to turn himself off”. Another comedian, Eric Idle, says Williams “had a restless mind” and “didn’t feel worthy”. The film could delve deeper than it does into his demons, although its focus on Williams’ manic psyche, sometimes turbocharged by cocaine or a double-fist of tequila and espresso, suggests the lows were as extreme as the creative highs. By the time he died in 2014, a neuropathology known as Lewy body disease had depleted his dopamine levels, as his widow Susan Williams shared in an essay titled “The terrorist inside my husband’s brain”.
Between all this are nods to his greatest hits – Good Morning, Vietnam, Dead Poets Society, Moscow on the Hudson and Good Will Hunting – and touching outtakes from Mrs Doubtfire, one of Williams’ most luminous comic flourishes. Generally, though, more attention is paid to his creativity than his biography. For a subject like Williams, the strategy makes sense: he gave so much of himself to audiences that, off stage, there was often no gas left in the tank. Today, we find ourselves clamoring to get to know celebrities as they are in “real life”, behind the makeup and careful public orchestrations. Williams, however, was that rare star whose humanity and spirit radiated from his every comic gesture.
- Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind premieres on HBO 16 July with a UK date yet to be announced
