In early 1993, Steven Spielberg was in Kraków, Poland, making the hardest film of his life. And once a week, right on schedule, his phone would ring. On the other end was Robin Williams, ready to do about 15 minutes of comedy for one person. The calls always ended the same way. The moment Spielberg laughed the loudest, Robin hung up. No goodbye. Ever.
Spielberg shared the story publicly in 2018. By then, the man who made those calls was already gone.
A director carrying two films at once
To understand why those calls mattered, it helps to know what Spielberg’s days looked like. He shot Schindler’s List in black and white, often with handheld cameras, racing to finish during the Polish winter. Every day meant recreating the Holocaust in front of him, in the very country where so much of it happened.
At the same time, Jurassic Park was still being finished back in California. Spielberg later said he had to take satellite calls from Poland several times a week to go over Tyrannosaurus rex shots with the effects team. He hated those interruptions. Both films came out in 1993, Jurassic Park in June and Schindler’s List in November.
To hold on to his sanity, Spielberg watched episodes of Saturday Night Live on Betamax. And he had Robin.
Fifteen minutes, once a week
The two men had become friends making Hook in 1991. Robin understood exactly where Spielberg was and what the work was taking out of him.
“Robin knew what I was going through.”
So he called. Not to talk about the film, and not to ask how things were going. He called to perform. Spielberg described it as about 15 minutes of stand-up over the phone.
“I would laugh hysterically, because I had to release so much.”
Thirty years after the film, in a 2023 oral history for The Hollywood Reporter, Spielberg added a detail: the calls came every Friday. Some ran 10 minutes, some 20. The length never mattered. The ending did.
The rule: biggest laugh, then hang up
Robin Williams had a habit on the telephone, and he never broke it for Spielberg. He would keep going until he got the biggest laugh of the call, and then the line went dead.
“He’d always hang up on the loudest, best laugh you’d give him.”
Spielberg compared it to a comedian dropping the mic. There was no wind-down, no “talk to you next week,” no goodbye. Just the laugh, and then silence, until the next Friday.
It sounds like a joke, and it was. But it also meant Spielberg never had to hear the comedy fade. Every call left him at its highest point, right before he went back to the darkest material of his career.
What Robin said about those calls
Robin told the story himself, too. In a later appearance that has since resurfaced online, he explained it simply.
“So I would call him and just riff for him.”
Then he slipped into the voices he used to throw down the phone line, a stream of silly Yiddish-flavored wordplay about “kosher email” and eBay, and the audience roared. When the laughter settled, Robin turned serious for a moment. He called what Spielberg was filming a hideous thing, and said of his friend: “He kept going. He had to.”
The night Spielberg told the story
On April 26, 2018, the Tribeca Film Festival held a 25th-anniversary screening of Schindler’s List at the Beacon Theatre in New York. Spielberg sat on stage with Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Caroline Goodall and Embeth Davidtz. He said it was the first time he had watched the film with an audience since its release, and that no film since had given him the same sense of meaningful accomplishment.
When the talk turned to how he had survived the shoot emotionally, he brought up the weekly phone calls from Robin Williams.
Robin was not there to hear it. He had died in August 2014, almost four years earlier. The friend who never once said goodbye on the phone was remembered that night by the one man who had been on the other end of every call.
Do you remember the first time a Robin Williams performance made you laugh out loud? We’d love to hear it.