”It`s a breath mint,” says Robin Williams, spurred by
it`s-impossible-to- say-exactly-what.
”No, it`s a paper,” he continues, and now it`s getting clearer. The rhythms of the contrast come from an old TV commercial for Certs. But where is he going?
”It`s the New York Tums,” Williams says. And thus, more or less, the interview begins.
The joke doesn`t scan, precisely. Tums, after all, unlike Certs, is neither a candy mint nor a breath mint. It`s an antacid.
But by the time this realization hits the reporter, it`s way too late. And who cares, anyway?
Williams is long gone into another routine. Having spotted a computer printout of the questions he`s to be asked, he has imagined a conversation between a New York Times staffer and the massive information system that holds the paper`s files.
”I need access to files,” he says, a perfectly sober Timesman. Then his voice changes to a blandly sinister monotone; he`s Hal, the renegade spaceship computer from the film ”2001.”
”No, Dave, I can`t give you that.”
”I need the files.”
”I`m sorry. You`ll have to call the Post, Dave.”
It is possible to get Williams to stop-he`s a genial guy-but the impulse is not to. It would be easy to let a prearranged conversation with him in a New York hotel room become a performance for an audience of one, a privilege that anyone who has witnessed his ebullient act in a club, a concert hall or on television might welcome.
The truth is he`d be happy to oblige. At 36, he`s a veteran film actor whose new movie is ”Dead Poets Society.”
But he`s nonetheless primarily known for his physically energetic and vocally supple stand-up routines that, like the one he`s just been asked to call to a halt, absurdly link the disparate elements of our shared
contemporary culture and ricochet from shtik to shtik at dizzying speed.
Since 1978, when he amassed a huge following as the benevolent, maniacally childlike space alien, Mork, on the television series ”Mork and Mindy,” Williams has become perhaps the most ubiquitous comedian of his generation, possibly its most celebrated (in 1986, he became the first solo comic to perform at the Metropolitan Opera House; he`s currently on the cover of Esquire) and, arguably, its best-loved.
Williams made his film debut in 1980 in the title role of Robert Altman`s peculiar realization of the ”Popeye” comic strip.
Since then, among other roles, Williams has starred as the increasingly disgruntled idealist and writer in ”The World According to Garp”; as a Russian musician who defects in ”Moscow on the Hudson”; and most
successfully, by the reckoning of most critics, because the role suited his antic stage personality, as the insubordinate military disc jockey Adrian Cronauer in ”Good Morning, Vietnam.”
Last fall Williams appeared-with Bill Irwin, Steve Martin and F. Murray Abraham-in Mike Nichols`s production of ”Waiting for Godot” at Lincoln Center.
A compact man, looking fit in a T-shirt and slacks, Williams is in New York for the filming of his ninth movie, an untitled feature in which he plays a car-lease salesman and for which he`s sporting a trim mustache.
He responds to a question about acting, the second prong of his career, with a quizzical expression and then almost casually admits it is often in creative conflict with the first.
”Performing and acting?” he says. ”One is hang-gliding, the other oil drilling. With live comedy, the total freedom you have, to go from the Ottoman Empire to Madonna, is incredible. With acting, you have certain constraints.
”What do I like more? Sure, I like performing full out.”
Directed by the Australian Peter Weir, whose American films include
”Witness” and ”The Year of Living Dangerously,” and notable, among other things, according to the production notes, for being the first feature film ever to be shot in Delaware, ”Dead Poets Society” is set in 1959 at an elite boys` boarding school known as Welton Academy.
Williams plays John Keating, a Rhodes scholar who has returned to his alma mater to teach English.
A romantic lover of poetry who counsels his students to pursue their dreams, and a bit of a weirdo besides, Keating is something of an iconoclast in this strict conformist environment; in one class, much to the astonishment of his well-disciplined students, he has them tear out the pompous introductory chapter of a textbook.
The title of the film refers to a club that Keating founded as a student, whose ritual meetings involved midnight poetry readings in an off-campus cave, a practice his young charges are moved to resurrect.
The movie ends tragically, though with an element of redemption. ”I like the point of the movie,” Williams says, ”of trying to find the passionate thing in your life, finding some sort of passion.”
Still, in ”Dead Poets Society,” Williams`s own passion emerges only in snippets. Anyone familiar with the body of his work might consider his performance constrained.
In the middle of an eerie lesson in which he impresses on his 16-year-old students the inevitable fact of their mortality, he rewards a wrong answer as an abrupt quiz-show host: ”No. Thank you for playing,” a gag he used in
”Good Morning, Vietnam.”
And there`s a nifty bit in which he does John Wayne reciting Shakespeare. But Keating`s idiosyncrasy is more Keating`s than Williams`.
When he leads the boys out for soccer practice and has them recite heroic lines of poetry before each kick-”To indeed be a god!” Boot-it`s the situation that gets the laughs, not the actor. Throughout the movie, the character of Keating is mostly written, rarely improvised.
Asked about the frustration factor inherent in accommodating himself to such a role, Williams is both candid and good-natured.
He answers in a number of ways, returning to the question several times, now straitlaced, now riffing. It seems a genuinely interesting problem to him, one that he`s happy to be working out.
”Is it difficult? For me? Yeah. You feel sometimes like a rodeo pony.”
Then he lapses into the accent and cadence of what it must be assumed are those of a rodeo pony.
”Am I gonna get out now? Brrrrrrr. I`m in chute No. 4. Let me do the poetry, boss. Let me out. Let me kick out. Let me do some poetry. Come on!
”We tried it more like a Cronauer character,” Williams says of his performance as Keating.
”But it didn`t work. I did a thing where he`s talking about analyzing books you haven`t read. `You can read the dust jacket.` And then I talked about how you can tie that in with the Hindu philosopher, Raheesh Nun. And it ended up with a kid saying, `Well, how do I get hold of Raheesh Nun?` `You don`t. You make him up, like I did.`
”Another one, a great one that was in the bit where we tore out the pages, about the Uber Poets. I did a whole run on”-he takes on a thick German accent-”Zair vill be professors running all ofer looking for ze Uber Poem!
”It was a gas to do at the time. You try to push it, push the envelope-hey, Chuck Yeager acting!-but the really outrageous stuff broke the envelope.
”The main point is teaching. The movie is basically about them,”
meaning the students. ”It`s about what they do when they get this,” meaning the spirit of Keating`s inspiration.
”Why would this character be slightly restrained? It`s 1959; he`s at a private boys` school. He`s from that background himself and just come back from being a Rhodes Scholar.
”Those are the constraints you have to filter the same energy that goes into live comedy through. They`re like light filters. Sometimes it takes out the bright colors, but you can sometimes get the energy.
”This is the fight I have within myself, being No. 1 a comic. The comic`s going, `Grab your crotch. That`ll be funny. That`ll work.` ” And Williams is suddenly flipping voices again, the actor and the comic, his own good angel and bad angel.
” `But he`s a teacher.`
” `Come on, don`t be afraid.`
” `Just say the words. Let the author speak.`
” `Forget the author. Grab yourself.`
” `The author wants. . . . `
” `Shut up. Go for the laughs. The author`s not going to be around when you cash your check.` ”
Williams, who was born in Chicago and went to elementary school in nearby Lake Forest, eventually attended a private day school in Birmingham, Mich., before his father, an automobile executive, retired and moved the family to Tiburon, Cal., in Marin County north of San Francisco.
He spent his senior year at Redwood High School, graduating in 1969. Memories of a couple of his own teachers contributed to his portrayal of Keating.
