Williams speaks for himself in doco

Filmmaker puts viewers inside star’s thought process

When filmmaker Marina Zenovich sought to make a documentary about Robin Williams, she found that she could do it largely in the late comedian’s own voice.

Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, uses a wealth of archival footage to put viewers inside his thought process — mirroring a routine Williams used as an up-andcoming comic in the 1970s.

The film, which includes interviews with David Letterman and Billy Crystal, screened at the Sundance Festival. Friends and relatives, including Williams’ son, Zak, also share memories.

“I get sad when I think about Billy and Robin because when I interviewed him (Crystal) you could really feel a sense of loss,” the filmmaker said. “I love the line in the movie when he says, ‘Everyone wanted something from him. I had no agenda. I just liked him.”

The documentary doesn’t dwell on the exact circumstances around Williams’s 2014 death at m 63.

According to his wife, Susan Schneider Williams (who is not in the film), Williams had Lewy body disease and died from suicide “at the end of an intense, confusing, and relatively swift persecution at the hand of this disease’s symptoms and pathology”.

Instead, several people in the documentary note that the “sparkle had gone out of his eye” during the time Williams worked on his 2013 sitcom, The Crazy Ones.

Crystal remembers seeing Williams for the last time when he revealed he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. “When he told me, I never heard Robin be afraid except for that moment,” Crystal says.

The documentary aimed to celebrate the artist, Zenovich said, and her team “handcrafted” the project with love. It was often difficult to choose among hundreds of clips and routines.

“What’s so great is hearing people say the film is so inspiring. It’s so joyful. And I don’t know, it touches on something deep. I mean, it’s about so many things. It’s about fame, the effects of fame. It’s about talent and kind of someone with an amazing talent, watching his trajectory.”

The film shows that

John Belushi’s death had a huge impact on Williams, who was one of three people with the hard-partying Belushi the night he died after overdosing on cocaine and heroin.

According to the documentary, Williams learned that Belushi died the following day on the set of Mork and Mindy. His sudden death led to Williams, who had been heavily drinking and doing drugs, sobering up.

“Here’s this guy who was a beast, who could doing anything and he’s gone,” Williams said.

Zenovich said she wants people to have a greater understanding of Williams and what he tried to do “and how generous he was and what a great mind he had”.

Williams received four Academy Award nominations and won for 1997’s Good Will Hunting.