Robin Williams' Final Interview

Copenhagen Review

Hamlet.  Good afternoon Mr Williams, thanks for agreeing to be interviewed by the Copenhagen Review. Do you know how I start every discussion?

Robin Williams.  I'm familiar with the magazine, yes.

H.  To be or not to be?

RW.  As Camus famously wrote at the start of The Myth of Sisyphus, something along the lines of, 'the only true philosophical question is that of suicide.'

H.  That was long after I originally posed the question.

RW.  Excuse me, I'm not usually one who feels the need to justify his presence by dropping names. It's just that I'm used to being interviewed by publications such as Empire magazine. Magazines which ask the interviewee questions like, 'how much does a pint of milk cost?' To which I, in my comic persona, respond, 'that all depends on whose titties I'm sucking on', or, alternatively, if I really want to bring the house down, I respond, 'that all depends on whose dick I'm sucking on', the interviewer then giving me the feed line, 'but that's not milk,' to which I react, 'I'm going to have to call daddy, that son of a bitch has been telling me it's milk for 57 years'. Crass stuff, but it's what the public want. This is quite a departure for me.

H.  Just be yourself.

RW.  That's the hardest role there is. I'm much more comfortable playing a role. The most comfortable I've ever been was playing a cartoon, I didn't even have to be part of my own skin.

H.  As an old friend of mine said, 'the world is a stage.'

RW.  To answer your question I suppose that in the end it's all not to be. This is the cornerstone of inevitability. However, all we shall ever know ourselves is to be. But even the stars are one day  not to be, some of them already so,  their light taking years to finally reach our eyes even after they die. The Yin of infinity is Yanged by inevitability. Another way of putting this would be jingle jangle. Nothing lasts forever, that's the only thing that does. That and time which you so wonderfully once epitomised as dust.

H.  I was originally going to say ash but changed it to dust at the last minute.

RW.  You were right to do so, sooner or later or we all come to fade away even those that burnt out.

H.  You mentioned earlier about time lasting forever, where do you place yourself in conjunction with infinity?

RW.  I consider myself, and everyone else for that matter, inseparable from it. I am part of a waltz with eternity which will still be playing its music long after I go. To a certain extent I believe no one goes, or if they do go, where do they go to? I cannot tell you exactly what it is that the dead do, but they do it very well.

H.  Speaking from experience I consider the dead to have a hold over the living which the living does not have over them.

RW.  Yes, this may be a cliche, but like most cliches it is based on a significant element of truth, it's hard to give up the ghost. Is it OK to smoke here?

H.  Yes, Denmark is very tolerant over cigarettes.

RW.  That's one thing this piece of shit country has going for it at least. 

H.  Not that I'm what they call patriotic, but we also have a very impressive bus service and the trains run remarkably close to schedule.

RW.  I don't use public transport. Celebrity turns you into a spectacle, people stare. Some people see me and just burst out laughing, it makes me feel like the Elephantman.

H.  To a degree we're all partly John Merrick I would say. Each one of us with their own form of Elephantiasis in one way or another. Hence the girl, I forget her name, in Todd Browning's Freaks becoming so horrified in the famous 'one of us' scene, she realises not much separates any of us from those around the table. What distinguishes us all from being John Merrick or the Elephantman is how much we surround ourselves with people who recognise our humanity and whose humanity we can recognise ourselves.

RW.  Could that be, in other words- sorry to be so vague- love?

H.  Perhaps.

RW.  It's an interesting scene that 'one of us' scene. Have you ever noticed how that phrase 'one of us, one of us' matches entirely, rhythm for rhythm, 'lone-li-ness, lone-li-ness'? There seems to be something insidious about the bunching together people do at the expense of their individuality. I try to take everyone for who they are but when you're on that stage looking at God knows how many people it's hard not to just think to yourself, mass. I become anxious about mass thinking.

H.  What worries you so much about it?

RW.  It dictates the way people look at things. It makes them convinced that there is only one way, their, plural, way. The world is getting divided into two conflicting points of view, the subcategorisation being that of left or right, liberal or republican in the States. To me there's always more than one way of skinning a cat. As a comedian I know from the early years on stage that you have to change the way you tell a joke depending on who you're telling it to. Have they stopped teaching the theory of relativity at schools?

H.  Do you consider society to be heading in the right direction?

RW.  In many ways I find this indisputable. I remember when I was little boy that you weren't allowed to sit down at the front of the bus if you were black in my country. Things have changed since then. Of course, spanners get thrown in the works. Maniacs become powerful and so on. This is part of the parcel with democracy. Things take much longer than we may have hoped. I'm a great believer in patience, you yourself are no advocate of rash decisions. Unfortunately we live in a convenience culture, everything is expected to be instant. I blame the microwave and jumbo jet for this, the progress of technology has left the progress of man behind and we have started to misconceive technological advancement as humanitarian advancement. 

H.  Yes, there is an act now think later mentality very prevalent in western society. In the past I have been criticised for too much thinking and too little action but I am certain more harm has been done under unthought acts than ever what has been considered. This is the basis of the word considerate.

RW.  Excuse the pun, we need to get our acts together.

H.  In the press release your agent sent me it mentions how your career has recently taken a turn toward darker material than that which we have come to expect. Could you comment a bit on this.

RW.  That's hollywood talk. This distinction between light and dark, it's quite restrictive, after all the universe is both, just look at the sky at night. Einstein once said that out of all things he is certain of two things, the infinity of the universe and of human stupidity and he wasn't even so sure about the first one. My definition of human stupidity would roughly be how much we limit ourselves. I remember when I first came across a decimal point, I realised that everything could be made smaller and smaller and smaller, and so on. Now we border each other off at any given opportunity, everybody's something or other or other, but the last thing they're described as is human. There's people in the Southern Staes of America who think that an Arab man's head is literally made out of a towel rather than skin and bone. We should concentrate on what we share in common more and what separates us less.

H.  You don't think that that's contradictory to what you said about mass thought.

RW.  People  become masses by collective separation more than they ever do on common ground. This is where the fractures in religion come, catholics versus protestants, sunnis versus shiites . They are concentrating on what sets them apart rather than together. The most powerful political tool there is at the moment is the creation of a bogeyman. The bogeyman doesn't have to be anything scary, it just has to be other.

H.  How do you think we can bring people together?

RW.  All I know is is my trade, but I do think humour helps. If you can get a room laughing, they are laughing together. This could go either way of course. The right, or, more accurately, wrong comedian could get the public laughing in the vilest possible way. We all know that there's good laughter and bad laughter.

H.  Do you think there's such a thing as too soon? 

RW.  I think it couldn't be soon enough. Ideally people are joking about something before it's even happened. 

H.  You must feel that you have a lot to do.

RW.  Unfortunately I feel out of the fray, I am unable to laugh at myself so how can I expect anyone else to laugh at me. There's that old chestnut, if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears, does it make a sound? Likewise, if a comedian makes a joke and no one laughs, is it a joke? I feel like a dead tree. I used to say that when a show was going badly for me to win the audience back over, it used to work, not anymore.

H.  I saw Chris Rock make the same joke, the audience were rolling in the aisles.

RW.  The industry works like that. It's why the x-factor's so popular, they turn these contestants into someone they can love for fifteen minutes and then ask not to spend the night. Being loved by the public is like being a box of Kleenex, it's only a matter of time until they reach the final tissue.

H.  How does one come to terms with this, do you not feel like one of those dead stars whose light is still shining even though they are dead stars, their starpower, as they call it in your industry, long gone.

RW.  You have to find beauty where you can get it, a man, a woman, a cat, a cradle, a song or game, a tree, a rock, a cloud. Now I am a star no more, back to earth, a mere mortal, maybe I can finally take some solace in the stars, as hopefully others once, in days gone by, did me.

H.  All in the gutter.

RW.  Yes. You have to hone your perspective. No one's born with the will to live, we have to find it where we can and when we can. There's an implication that we all just passively enjoy life 'til the day we fuckin' die, we're even supposed to passively enjoy the day we fuckin' die, it's a disgrace. As an entertainer I am no longer willing to indulge this myth. This, it seems, puts me entirely at odds with my country. So be it.  

H.  Good will to live hunting.

RW.  Yes, that's very amusing. Forgive me for not laughing but it's been a long day and I'm still lagged from the flight. 

H.  With that in mind I think all there is that's left to say is thank you Mr Williams.

RW.  Call me Robin.

H.  Robin. 

RW.  It's been a pleasure sweet prince.

H.  And to say how much I enjoyed your performance as Peter Pan.

RW.  I was going to say the same to you.