Columbus talks about the footage of “Mrs. Doubtfire.”

The beloved 1993 comedy “Mrs. “Doubtfire” featured Robin Williams as a father who dresses up as a Scottish governess named Eugene Doubtfire in an attempt to be closer to his children while he and his wife go through a divorce.

Back in 2021, a rumor circulated that the film’s original director, Chris Columbus, was able to make more difficult R and NC-17 cuts for the film, all thanks to the late Williams improvising a lot of what could have easily been done.

Columbus confirmed the rumors at the time, saying that while there was no NC-17 cut, there was some “definite R-rated material in there” with Williams going off the book for more than a dozen takes after they did some scripting.

However, he also noted at the time that it was unlikely that the full R-rated version of the film would ever be available, but added that he was open to making a documentary about the making of the film.

To mark the film’s 20th anniversary this month, Columbus gave a new interview to Interested in trade He revealed that two million feet of film were filmed during the filming:

“Early in the process, he said to me, ‘Hey boss, the way I like to work, if you’re up for it, is to give you three or four scripted takes, and then let’s play.’” By saying that, what he meant was that he wanted to improvise. And that’s exactly how we shot every scene. We would have exactly what was scripted, and then Robin would take off and it was something to watch.

Poor script supervisor. Remember, this is the early 90s, and you weren’t writing down what he was saying. She would write it longhand and Robin would change every take. So Robin will go to a place where he can’t remember much of what he said. We would go to the script supervisor and ask her, and sometimes she didn’t understand everything. Often times, he would literally give us a completely different perspective than we did in the written texts.

He adds that they got to a point where they shot the entire movie with four cameras to keep up with Williams as well as capture things like the other actors’ reactions to what they were seeing. The result is tons of archived material:

We shot almost 2 million feet of film on that one. There are approximately 972 boxes of footage from “Doubtfire” — footage we used in the movie, outtakes, and behind-the-scenes footage — in a warehouse somewhere, and we’d love to hire an editor to come in and look at all that footage.

We want to show Robin’s process. There is something special and magical about the way he did his work and I thought it would be fun to delve into it. I mean there’s two million feet of film in this warehouse, so there could be something we can do with all of that.

“Mrs. Doubtfire” is available to stream on Disney+.