Robin Williams’ Mrs. Doubtfire improvisations racked up 2 million feet of film

The director of Mrs Doubtfire has shared for the first time a truly staggering detail about Robin Williams’ improvisations on set.

Robin Williams improvised so much on the set of the 1993 comedy Mrs. Doubtfire that production ended up shooting two million feet of film by the time the movie wrapped.

“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,’” Chris Columbus, 65, told Business Insider.

“By saying that, what he meant was he wanted to improvise.”

“And that’s exactly how we shot every scene,” the director added, reports the New York Post.

“We would have exactly what was scripted, and then Robin would go off and it was something to behold.”

In the film, Williams, who died in 2014 at age 63, plays Daniel Hillard, a struggling actor going through a divorce from wife Miranda (Sally Field).

Robin Williams played the titular character, Mrs Doubtfire, in the iconic film.

After their split, the newly single mother hires as a babysitter Mrs. Euphegenia Doubtfire, who, unbeknown to her, is actually her ex-husband.

The film, which grossed more than $A670 million worldwide and later spawned a Broadway musical, also stars Pierce Brosnan as Miranda’s colleague Stu.

According to Columbus, Williams’ antics would often throw the entire production team off-kilter.

“The poor script supervisor,” Columbus reminisced. “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,” he continued. “Often, he would literally give us a completely different take than what we did doing the written takes.”

The film was a massive box office success.

Williams’ improvisation - while brilliant - wreaked havoc on set. Picture: Marc Robertson

The Home Alone director revealed that Williams sometimes improvised until the camera would run out of film.

“It got to the point that I had to shoot the entire movie with four cameras to keep up with him,” Columbus laughed. “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 …[the studio was] loving what they were seeing. Did they watch everything? I don’t think so. We shot almost two million feet of film on that picture.”

Columbus was later left with nearly 1,000 boxes of footage, which he wants to eventually turn into a documentary about William and his process.

“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,” he explained.

“We want to show Robin’s process,” Columbus added. “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.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Post and was reproduced with permission.

Originally published as Robin Williams’ Mrs. Doubtfire improvisations racked up 2 million feet of film