The iconic 1993 comedy “Mrs. Doubtfire” featured the late Robin Williams as a father who disguises himself as a Scottish nanny named Euphegenia Doubtfire in a heartfelt effort to stay close to his children during a difficult divorce with his wife.
Rumors circulated in 2021 suggesting that the film’s original director, Chris Columbus, was able to create more mature R and NC-17 versions of the film, thanks to Williams’ extensive improvisation on set.
Columbus somewhat confirmed the rumors, revealing that there was indeed some “definite R-rated material” in the film due to Williams going off-script numerous times during filming.
However, he expressed doubts that a complete R-rated edition would ever be released, but mentioned the possibility of creating a documentary about the film’s production.
For the film’s twentieth anniversary, Columbus recently shared in an interview with Business Insider that an astounding two million feet of film was shot during the making of “Mrs. Doubtfire”:
“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.”
Columbus elaborated that they had to shoot the entire movie with four cameras to keep up with Williams’ improvisation, resulting in an extensive archive of footage:
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 currently available for streaming on Disney+.
