The Safe House - Expositions

HOLLYWOOD (Zap2it.com) - In a particularly disturbing moment in Robin Williams' latest film "One Hour Photo," he is threatening a naked couple in bed while brandishing a large knife.

Director and writer Mark Romanek says he purposely didn't make it easy on the couple, and one half of the naked pair, "Alias" star Michael Vartan, tells Zap2it he dreaded the two days he had to go to the set and take his clothes off.

"It wasn't so much that the scene was so intense, it was when we'd break from the scene, Robin would say, 'The air conditioning must be on look at Vartan' (and point to the actor's private parts)."

Laughing about the teasing he did between takes, Williams knows how uncomfortable it is to be nude on screen. He did it in his Oscar-nominated role in "The Fisher King" running around Central Park with Jeff Bridges, and again in "Moscow on the Hudson" in a scene with Maria Conchita - "if you're going to be nude, that's a good person to be nude with," he adds.

"Nude scenes aren't great, they're really uncomfortable," Williams says in a one-on-one interview with Zap2it.com about his dramatically creepy role in Fox Searchlight's "One Hour Photo." "They're basically naked in front of you and you're threatening them with a knife. And I think more emotional, it's pretty hideous what you're making them do."

Red-faced with graying hair and a black shirt and jeans, Williams, who just turned 50 this past July 21, is still the court jester on the set, even when he's playing the heavy.

"It helps to let it be known that everybody's in the same boat. We're all there with you, don't worry," says Williams, who is getting a great deal of Oscar buzz for this role as a low-key guy at a one-hour photo lab who obsesses on a young family and puts their photos all over his walls.

He's had three nominations, for "Fisher King," "Dead Poet's Society" and "Good Morning, Vietnam" and won Best Supporting Actor for "Good Will Hunting" in 1997, but he's never played such a sinister, yet sympathetic role.

This is, after all, the guy who's known for being playful, from films such as "Toys," "Jack," "Popeye," the Genie of "Aladdin" and even the dark children's TV show host in "Death to Smoochy" earlier this year. But this uncharacteristic dark role is the one that could land him another Oscar, they say.

"It's nice when they say that, but it's only August and then you have the whole slew of Oscar movies at the end of the year, the Oscars are always a bizarre thing because it's part marketing, part film," Williams muses.

He'd like to have another one, sure, his statuette is on his desk next to his Screen Actors Guild Award, but he's realistic, and knows that this is a little film that's released too early in the year to get noticed around Academy time.

Williams, it seems, has mellowed, but he insists he's funnier, and may have proven that with his hit HBO Comedy Special of a recent stand-up tour. He recalls when this reporter interviewed him in 1980 for the University of Florida's "Alligator" school paper when he performed at the Homecoming's Gator Growl event and said the word "penis" too many times.

"I remember that infamous Gator Growl, all the alumni were furious and then the next year they hired Bob Hope," Williams laughs. "I remember doing the interview and I brought a stripper to the party afterwards. She passed out. It was pretty wonderful because I was sitting with my manager and here she was and all you guys were all dressed up in tuxedos to celebrate afterwards. They made a toast and everyone raised their glasses, she raised hers and just fell over."

Williams admits he was a bit plastered himself back then, "I did everything." But, he's funnier now, he says, than in the frenetic "Mork from Ork" days when he says he "would party like crazy after the show. One time I was so hung over the director kicked me because I was on the floor because I would nap and he had to kick me to give me notes. But, did it make me funnier? No."

Williams, who lives with his wife and children in San Francisco, says he has met people in his every day life like his character, but not as intense. In forming the character, he wanted Sy Parrish to be bland, pasty-faced, blonde.

"When he's not in the photo mat, he's very awkward, he has almost no life except for the photographs," Williams explains. "Family snapshots have that power where you see them as people in a brief moment captured by someone else who cared enough about them to take their picture and that's why he's fascinated by these photos. The other thing is when people take their pictures to a Photomat, I think they think because it's a machine that no one sees it. Anybody who's ever worked in a Photomat will tell you they have a wall of shame where they've duped the weird photos of the guy with the nipple clip."

Williams says he learned how to work the processing machines for the role. His make-up became as bland as the process he was learning.

"My face was almost like a Kabuki with Michael Jackson Number Two. They thinned the hair out," Williams says. "The idea that it get’s under the radar because it's so psychological and so disturbing because of the details of life."

The director and writer has done music videos for Madonna, David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Beck and many others, and Williams thought the understated stylish sense of this film was an incredible accomplishment for the neophyte director.

"This isn't like a normal thriller where there's somebody stalking and slashing. It's more about loneliness and human connection than anything else," Williams explains. "It's about a man who's so lonely that he lives a life vicariously through these people's photographs and thinks of himself as part of their family."

Fans have stalked Williams, and he worries about the ones where they talk about being together. He's careful.

"Do I want to meet someone like Sy? No," Williams smiles. "Nor would I want to have dinner with Jeffrey Dahmer. But I'd play another bad guy in a rat second."

His character in another film this year - Chris Nolan's "Insomnia" co-starring Al Pacino - was a bit of a sociopath. He enjoyed finally working with Pacino, who has a very different acting style, and would never break character, even if only to relieve the tension for the naked actors.

"And I'd play naked again, sure," Williams smirks, plucking at a hair poking out of his opened shirt which reveals his hairy chest. "Especially if allowed me to show all this fur, the movie will become like 'Gorillas in the Mist' or something like that."

Williams turns to his agent, who enters the room signaling the end of the interview and barks, "Hey, why wasn't I asked to audition for 'The Country Bears'?"

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