ased on his eclectic career playing eccentrics and nut jobs, Robin Williams can play a million characters—even if there doesn't seem to be a definitive one lurking beneath simply for himself. At the same time, this makes the superstar particularly well suited to animated characters, where his creativity is restrained only by the limits of an artist's ability to render his rantings.
After memorably playing the Genie in Disney's Aladdin more than a decade ago, Williams now returns to the two-dimensional medium for another attempt to make movie history; playing the screw-loose Fender, he creates an all-new aural vista against which director Chris Wedge (Ice Age) and his team of animators create a weird and wonderful world. Williams and Wedge recently sat down with Science Fiction Weekly to discuss their latest venture, Robots; even if Williams doesn't always stay directly on topic, his director is there to record the digression, decipher the dialogue and make something magical out of it.
Robin Williams, when you're recording, do they let you do as you please or do they direct you?
Williams: Yeah, they let me do exactly what [I want] and then pick. Kind of like looking through s--t for gold, but they basically say, "OK, you try this," and then we adjust, knowing that, number one, this will be for kids, and you don't want them going through puberty during the movie. And you play with it, and then once you start seeing the early renderings come in, you realize, "Oh, OK, I know what it looks like," and the fact that he's falling apart, you can start to play with that. And the parts that are old, which I am. That helps. That gives you the idea where you can go with it.
Do you perform the written lines first, then improvise?
Williams: No, in the same sessions where you were going off. You do that and then you just try something in the same scene. You'd give them, always, a base. You can't just go off and leave them, like, "Screw your writing, William Shakespeare. I can do To be or not, what?" You just go off on that, but you always give them the base. And the writing, you still have to keep the plot moving. But when they tweak it, they were basically trying to think of keeping—the thing you have to balance with this is kind of the madness and the heart of it, to keep the story going with Rodney and his father, the desire to keep the adventure going forward. And I always respected that, but I would go off and play.
Is performing voice-over the best outlet for your creativity?
Williams: Yeah, it is. It's the closest thing you can get to doing standup, other than HBO, where you're free. Yes, there are certain boundaries because it's a kids' movie, or a PG, but now, given the level of sophistication of children, even that's been pushed.
Did you face any limitations compared to your work on Aladdin, where you could transform into anything you wanted?
Williams: I mean, I can do a voice like at the end, when all of a sudden I try different things when he's in the full body armor. They're dressed like the Valkyrie on crack. There was that thing, and I tried one that was just kind of like a German Broom Hilda, which is kind of frightening in a Germanic way, which they can be frightening anyway. But when I tried the Scottish, it just seemed so out of joint, as it should be. But he can't morph. He can't change like the genie did, like to start doing 50 characters. But he can play, because he's also—he's a shyster, he's a scam artist. We had one thing that Chris had a great idea, that he's doing the shell game, except he's got clear glasses. "Find the pea, find the pea." "You idiot! Why did you bring the clear cup?"
Did part of accepting this role include the distinction that it not be sold as "Robin Williams as the sidekick?"
Williams: No, no, it's just part of accepting just being part of this project, just to be part of this world. To do a cartoon which I love. I mean, as much as I make fun of the Japanese, I love manga and animation. Japanese make cartoons not for kids, and if you see some of the really adult cartoons, they make cartoons even the Marquis de Sade would go, "Please, stop, what are you doing?" But yeah, not to be the sidekick but just to be part of it. And the good news is Chris and John Lasseter are like this. They're good friends, and they each got the same creative bug, which is wonderful. I wanted to do it, be part of the computer animation, and eventually, John, someday I'd like to be in a Pixar movie.
Chris Wedge, how is it directing Robin Williams? Is it a challenge?
Wedge: It was different for Robin, because he does kind of a stream-of-consciousness thing, and you can tell when he thinks it's working and when he doesn't. I think he's always incredibly conscientious about giving us what we needed for the scene. He would always read the pages first, and he would go off into his own little orbit, but I know he was always thinking, "OK, I think that's stuff they can use." Because some actors, they read the line, and you just say, "Um, let's try it this way, OK?" and then, "Oh, let's just run it two or three times and try it again," but with Robin, it's like he was done when he was done. This is kind of boring, but when we were done with each session, we would line up all of the takes so we could go through them, so we can go through and put the ones we want into the movie. We couldn't do that with Robin because he almost never said the same thing twice, and so what we would have is reams of transcripts from the sessions, so one of our assistants had to sit there with headphones and type, and he would go on—actually there are long rants where he would go off on something and then he would say, "I know someone will be listening to this someday," and one of our guys got to listen to that at two in the morning.
Were you concerned at all that he'd already provided the voice for a very memorable animated character in Aladdin?
Wedge: I think there was a little of that to me, but I almost thought he hasn't done anything in a long time, and he really responded to the material and he got into it. I said "Look, if he wants to do it and he's that excited about it, you know, I think it's going to be pretty hard to fail," but when you're making the movie, you just can't compare it to what's been done or what you think is going to be done. You have to be in your own thing, and I only saw Aladdin once. I honestly don't watch a lot of animation, to tell you the truth. I saw it once, I thought it was OK, but that was a long time ago, like 14, 15 years ago. Most of the kids that are coming to our movie probably haven't seen it.
What machines inspired your designs for the robots' look? The Harland Williams character looks like a Rock'em Sock'em Robot.
Wedge: Actually, we never did that one. They beat us to that in Toy Story; that's one place we might have gone, but Toy Story did that. He was actually inspired by a gigantic, I guess some kind of stamping machine, that we saw at a junkyard. I just wanted a robot that looked big and heavy and he was self-conscious of his size. We looked at all sorts of stuff; every detail came from some place. We really scoured junkyards nearby and took pictures and collected junk, brought it back to Blue Sky. We used to say, "Wow, if you look at this carburetor this way, it looks like somebody's head," or, "Look at all of those radiators stacked up in the corner over there. If you got down on the ground, they would look like apartment buildings." That's just kind of how we took machines around us and transformed them.
Was it a more daunting challenge than you originally envisioned?
Wedge: Yes, by a factor of 10. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. It's a lot of work. We got Ice Age made when we didn't know if we could make a feature film, but we got Ice Age made. We kept it as simple as we could. Once Ice Age was successful, the studio said, "Sure, go make Robots. Do whatever you want, but to a degree. Sure, yeah, great—do you know what you are doing?" So it was kind of a "be careful what you ask for" thing, or "they gave us enough rope to hang ourselves," whatever cliche you want to pick. It was a day we turned around and said, "Wait a minute. What we just signed up to do was invent everything in this world. There's no cars or trees or houses or lawn chairs that we know from this world. Everything, we had to invent, and so when somebody says, "OK, I see what this shot is, but what's behind them right there? There's a little kind of house in the painting we did, but what are going to put there?" "Well, don't we have a house?" "No, we have to design something new there." "How about that house?" "No, that was in the shot before it." We just had to keep filling this world with detail, and it was just exhausting after a while.
How did you conceive the world of the robots, and develop its internal logic in terms of how they would eat, or their basic "biological" functions?
Wedge: That was tough, because every time you answered a question like that, you wanted to be clever, so some of them came easily—you know, it took us a long time to figure out where babies came from. There was a scene in the movie that we finally moved off of; it was a silhouette of Mom and Dad on the couch and Dad was saying, "Are you tired?" and she would say "Why?" [He would say] "I don't know—we could do that thing." "What? Tonight? Come on." "I read all of the books, and I know how to do it." She says "OK," and then she stands up and puts the box up and says, "OK, let's make a baby." That was the joke, but we thought it might not work. But ideas swarmed around how you explained where they came from, how they grew up, what they would eat, would they sleep, and if we didn't come up with a clever enough thing, I just wouldn't do it. So you don't really see guys eating in our movie; I know the Iron Giant would pick up a tractor and take a bite out of it, but it didn't make that much sense to me, so we had the one scene where you think they are going to drink some hot grease, but they just pour it on themselves because it would feel nice and relaxing.
How do you cast each of the roles? The folks at Pixar assemble reels of real actors they like.
Wedge: Yeah, we did that. We listen to their voice. This is what I learned on Ice Age, is that you don't always get what you think you're going to get when you think "Actor A would be perfect for this character." You might get into the studio with them, and you're looking at them, and you're listening to their voice, like, "Man, their voice is kind of dull, isn't it? That's not going to work." I mean, they're a great actor, but their voice isn't what's doing it; it's their face and their body. So you just have to be careful, and we listened to voices from other movies, and we looked at the pictures of the characters, and every once in a while it just starts to, like, "Oh, yeah, I get that. That could work."
How did the look of the character change once you started hiring voice talent?
Wedge: They don't change at all. It was too late for us at that point. I think if you were drawing characters, you would be able to tweak and everything, but our guys were already, we were writing and designing and remodeling, and you can't control when an actor is going to sign on, either. You can't control any of that; you don't know who you are going to get. You try for this person, you try for that person, somebody might sign on but then they are shooting a movie and you're not going to get them for six months, or they might sign on and then they're off for some reason.
What features will be added to the DVD?
Wedge: Actually, we're putting back things that we took out of the movie. That's the first thing. I was going to do a director's cut one of these days; it won't be on the first one, but I actually want to put some things back that we took out. We thought at one point the movie was going to be too long, so we cut some stuff out that I want to put back now, but there are probably some scenes that I won't cut back in, and those will be on the DVD, entire scenes that we cut just because we thought it wasn't helping the story. But we're also doing, you're going to see some of the material that we filmed which is test material that we used to sell the concept to the studio, and some tests for the characters, a bunch of little sight gags and physical gags, just as we explored.
How long would the director's cut be?
Wedge: I don't know. It would be a little longer. I'd take some stuff out, and I'd put some other stuff back in. My director's cut is a little darker than what's out there right now [laughs].
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