Friends, family weigh in on world of Robin Williams

A bout with flu once cost Marina Zenovich the chance to meet the subject of her HBO film, “Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind,” which makes its television debut Monday after premiering at Sundance earlier this year.

“I was supposed to interview him for my 2013 documentary about Richard Pryor, and I was very excited that he even agreed to do the interview,” Zenovich recalled in a phone interview. “And then the day I was to fly to San Francisco, I was very sick with the flu — so sick that I couldn’t go, and my producer had to do the interview. So I was bummed out about that.”

That opportunity wouldn’t come again, but Zenovich, who won Emmys for writing and directing the 2008 documentary “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” would eventually get to know Williams in a different way, as the director immersed herself in his work and spent time in deep conversation with some of the people the actor and comedian left behind when he died four years ago next month.

The resulting film is at least as funny, and sweet, as it is sad, focusing more on the life Williams lived, the joy he brought, and the things he overcame than on the circumstances of his death, and reminding us, clip by entertaining (and smartly curated) clip, of the talent that, from the beginning, confounded even his fellow comedians.

“In my head, my first sight of him was that he could fly, because of the energy,” recalls David Letterman. “We knew that whatever it was that Robin was doing, we weren’t going to get close to that.”

When someone, famous or not, dies by suicide, there’s a tendency for that person’s final moments to draw focus from the rest of their lives. Zenovich, though, wasn’t interested in making a film about Williams’ death.

“Of course it was always going to be touched upon, but it was not the focus,” she said of the two-hour documentary, which came about after she and Oscarwinning filmmaker Alex Gibney — “a friend and mentor” — merged competing projects about Williams, with Gibney staying on as a producer. “The suicide was the elephant in the room, and I literally didn’t even have to bring it up, because it colors everything, because everybody knows how it ends.

“With ‘Robin Williams: Come into My Mind,’ we wanted to make a film about him, his incredible talent, the creative process and his brain, and just kind of try to get inside his brain. Which was not easy. That’s like an idea, but then you have to ... make it happen,“she said.

And in fact the film can never quite answer the question, raised in a clip from an interview with Williams by Inside the Actors Studio host James Lipton: Was Williams “thinking faster than the rest of us”?

Williams was no saint, and the film deals squarely with his drug use — which ended, according to his “Mork & Mindy” co-star Pam Dawber, after he just missed witnessing the death of his friend John Belushi — as well as with a later bout with alcoholism, his womanizing, and the breakups of his first two marriages.

Of his three wives, only the first, Valerie Velardi, the mother of his oldest child, Zak, is interviewed. She paints an affectionate but clear-eyed picture of the early years of Williams’ fame, and offers up this tidbit: Her husband, she says, didn’t leave her for the nanny, as reports had long described the beginnings of his relationship with his second wife, Marsha Garces. Her marriage to him, she says, had been over, by mutual agreement, before Williams and Garces, who’d gone on to become the actor’s assistant, got together romantically.

“She didn’t really even want to tell me that,” Zenovich said.