Working with Robin Williams: A Rutgers Prof Remembers

Patrick Stettner likens Robin Williams to “a genius jazz musician.” Stettner, who had the rare treat of directing a film with Williams, was reminiscing about his friend, who died Monday of a suicide.

Robin Williams as novelist Gabriel Noone in "The Night Listener."
Photo courtesy of Patrick Stettner

“He could take one single point and tie it to 10 different things,” says Stettner, an assistant professor at the Rutgers Center for Digital Filmmaking. “He could always find a connection and a tangent.”

Stettner met Williams in 2006 while casting his film The Night Listener based on a book by Armistead Maupin. “I was referred to him by a couple of filmmakers I knew,” says Stettner, a Brooklynite who commutes to Rutgers in New Brunswick. “Usually the process of attaching a star of his caliber to an indie project is not that easy,” says Stettner. After all, the budget for The Night Listener was less than $5 million. “But Williams really related to the material. He liked it right away.”

Williams played the novelist Gabriel Noone in The Night Listener, a thriller about an author who befriends a young AIDS patient over the phone. His fellow players included Toni Collette and Rory Culkin. The movie, released to 1,000 screens by Miramax in 2006, “earned everybody their money. Everyone ended up happy with it,” says Stettner, the co-writer with Maupin, as well as the director.

Stettner says he “really connected” with Williams during the project. “We got to know each other really well, because he had such a packed schedule that we ended up working seven days a week” in upstate New York and Manhattan, during the three-month shoot. “It was a mad rush to get the film done. But he was always so generous with his talent and time,” says Stettner. “I know he was proud of the work he did.”

On the set, Williams occasionally experienced difficulties keeping his comedic gifts under wraps. “He was incredibly professional, but sometimes the jokes would come out. When it was an issue I’d say, ‘Robin, when you do that it’s a little too much like comedy,’” Stettner says. “But he was grateful that we had that kind of rapport, where we could talk about it.”

There wasn’t much Williams couldn’t talk about, Stettner recalls. “He was this great humanist who just loved talking about anything.” During the shoot, “I’d find him at three or four o’clock in the morning, talking to gaffers and production assistants about anything, listening to their stories.”

If at the time Williams was experiencing the psychic pain that led to his suicide, Stettner was not aware of it.

“We all knew he had demons, but I’ve known comedians who use comedy because they’re really sad inside, and Robin wasn’t one of them. With him, the comedy came out of a beautiful creativity,” says Stettner. “He wasn’t cynical, he was a humanist. He was a man with a huge heart who just loved the human condition, and all its foibles.”

[justified_image_grid exclude="featured"]
Read more From the Editors articles.

By submitting comments you grant permission for all or part of those comments to appear in the print edition of New Jersey Monthly.

Required
Required not shown
Required not shown