By The beloved 1993 comedy “Mrs. Doubtfire” featured Robin Williams as a father dressing up as a Scottish nanny named Euphegenia Doubtfire in an effort to be closer to his kids while he and his wife are going through a divorce.
Back in 2021, a rumor sprung up that the film’s original director Chris Columbus was able to make harder R and NC-17 cuts of the film all thanks to the late Williams improvising so much it could easily have been done.
Columbus semi-confirmed the rumors at the time, saying whilst there was no NC-17 cut, there was some “definite R-rated material there” with Williams going off book for over a dozen takes after they had done a few scripted ones.
However he also indicated at the time it’s unlikely a full R-rated edition of the film would ever be available, but added he was open to doing a documentary about the making of the film.
Marking the film’s twentieth anniversary this month, Columbus has done a new interview with Business Insider and revealed that two million feet of film was shot during the making of the movie:
“Early on in the process, he went to me, ‘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’. By saying that, what he meant was he wanted to improvise. And that’s exactly how we shot every scene. We would have exactly what was scripted, and then Robin would go off and it was something to behold.
The poor script supervisor. Remember, this is the early 1990s, she wasn’t typing what he was saying. 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. Often, he would literally give us a completely different take than what we did doing the written takes.”
He adds it reached a point they shot the entire movie with four cameras to keep up with Williams along with capturing things like the other actors’ reactions to what they were seeing. The result is tons of archived material:
We shot almost 2 million feet of film on that picture. 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.
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.”
“Mrs. Doubtfire” is available to stream on Disney+.
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