The PBS web series Blank on Blank released a new installment featuring the late actor’s voice, recorded when he was 40. The show’s producer talked to BuzzFeed News about the discovery of the footage and what it reveals about Williams.
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The late Robin Williams was never concerned that he'd experience a lack of comedic material. "No, there's a world out there. Open a window, and it's there," the late actor says in a newly released, never-before-heard audio interview that is being paired with an animated sketch on PBS's Blank on Blank .
The web series, which creates animated sequences to accompany recorded and archival interviews with iconic figures, allows fans to once again experience the work of Williams, who died on Aug. 11 at the age of 63. The most recent installment of Blank on Blank, released on Dec. 2, includes footage from two different interviews with Williams, both collected by writer Lawrence Grobel in 1991 for a piece he published the following year in Playboy.
"Comedy is there to basically show us [that] we fart, we laugh, to make us realize we still are part animal," he says in one of the interviews. "So you don't take yourself seriously and destroy the species."
"[Williams] makes this mention of comedy [being] there to help people take off masks and realize who they are fundamentally," David Gerlach, the producer of Blank of Blank, told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview. "The idea of masks, I thought, kind of flowed throughout because there's a mask you put on when you're a comedian on stage."
Though the tapes are more than 23 years old — they were on microcassettes, Gerlach said — they make for a very powerful five-minute video. "We wanted to put together a piece that kind of showcased both his thoughtful, sensitive, endearing side, but also his amazing speed and comedic timing," Gerlach said.
But the episode of Blank on Blank with Williams wasn't originally meant to be a memoriam for the late actor. In fact, Gerlach had reached out for the tapes before Williams died.
"Before Williams died, [Grobel and I] had been talking about his Robin Williams interviews," Gerlach said. "I reached out [to Grobel] and said, 'Hey, do you have the tapes from interviews that likely no one's ever heard before, because we'd like to bring some of them to life.'" Though Williams died just as Grobel was pulling together the clips, they kept moving forward on the project.
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