Robin Williams

Another drama, then it's back to the laughs

Robin Williams in "Jakob the Liar."

By Jack Garner
Democrat and Chronicle

(Sept. 24, 1999) -- Oscar-winning actor Robin Williams has heard the grumblings:

Whatever happened to that wacky madman comic we came to love as Mork or Mrs. Doubtfire?

After a succession of fairly serious films, including Good Will Hunting and What Dreams May Come, or comedies with solemn subtexts, like Patch Adams, the manic version of Robin Williams is missing in action.

So the 47-year-old Williams is going to hit the road to try to find him.

After launching his latest serious film -- the poignant Jakob the Liar -- Williams is taking six months off for an extensive stand-up comedy tour.

"Yeah, I'm ready," he says. "Some woman told me recently I should stop looking for the Nobel Prize. Thank you, madam."

"I'm going to do stand-up. That's the way to do it. It's about freedom. There are no boundaries. It's just me. It's that thing about being out there, and having total carte blanche.

"I'm committing to six months of doing an hour-and-a-half one-man show. That's the key thing.

"Getting out of the major cities, you find out what matters in America," he adds, "With the millennium, there's so much to talk about. And the boys are all lining up (for the presidential campaign).

"This will be all new material," he says.

"There are some film projects out there, but they'll hold. You know it's time to take a break when they start advertising films WITHOUT Robin Williams.

"I want to make sure the next film I do will be different, and the stand-up will help that decision. Then I can get away from that thing about `What happened to the funny Robin Williams?"'

"But, of course, if they still don't think what I'm doing is funny, then it'll be time to do some VERY serious things. The Mother Theresa Story."

Williams is talking in a hotel suite in Toronto, where Jakob the Liar premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. He's dressed casually in a form-fitting t-shirt and baggy cargo pants, and sits on the edge of the couch like a guy who's anxious to jump up. Sometimes, of course, he does.

Though comedy stand-up is in his future, he's anxious first to help secure an audience for Jakob the Liar, a heartfelt drama (with humor) about an unlucky hero in a Polish ghetto.

"Three years ago, (director) Peter Kassovitz sent the script to my wife," he says. Marsha Garces Williams eventually produced the film, as she did Mrs. Doubtfire and Patch Adams.

Initially, Robin Williams says he was concerned about the humor that's laced through the story.

"We were shooting at the same time as Life Is Beautiful, so the idea of having laughs in the film was new, and interesting, and a little daunting. Can we do this?

"There are those who may think it's disrespectful, but Holocaust survivors will tell you, 'No it isn't. This is how you survive.' "

Roberto Benigni's Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful beat Jakob to theaters by a year. Williams says it's a mixed blessing.

"Life Is Beautiful may have paved the way for our film, but the danger is that people will make comparisons of which is better. And that's not fair, because they're different stories on a similar theme, and each has the right to exist.

"I think that they're quite different from each other. Benigni made a comedy. We made a drama with elements of humor, and in a whole different style, with a literary basis.

"This is a different setting. It's the ghettos, as opposed to the death camps. Ghettos were used as holding areas, a hideous form of house arrest.

"It's a very specific place, with specific day-to-day existence. The Nazis even cut down the trees. Why? To deny the Jews any respite.

"That was part of the drill. That's what the Germans wanted to do. Not only to eventually annihilate you, but to demean, degrade and destroy any trace of you."

Jakob the Liar was filmed largely on location, in Polish settings with Holocaust roots. A sequence of ghetto residents being deported to the camps was shot in the exact square where such a thing really happened 55 years earlier, almost to the day.

"Shooting there was beyond method acting. It puts you into the place and the attitude. You can't go too far off with your acting when you're where it happened."

Williams says he gets angry when people suggest that the Holocaust has already generated too many stories and films.

"I met one Swiss journalist who said, 'Don't you think Holocaust movies are passe?'

"I told him, 'When you give back the billion dollars (stolen from the Jews) than you can talk.' "