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Close to the Heart
RD: Tell us a little bit about your new movie, RV. It's about a white-collar ad executive, right?Williams: He's very technologically savvy. The whole family is using all kinds of devices. And the dad says, "Okay, we'll spend quality time. We'll take an old-style family vacation. I'll rent an RV." He brings it home and they say, "What's that?" It all goes south on him from there.
RD: You grew up outside Detroit, and your father, Robert, worked in the auto industry. What family vacations did you take?
Williams: There weren't that many, because Dad was working so much. I remember going to New York once -- I'd never been in the city -- and the noises at night and looking out the window. You would hear everything [he makes the sounds of a foreign dialect], and those garbage trucks.
RD: Why do you now live in San Francisco as opposed to Hollywood or New York?
Williams: My father retired to San Francisco, and I got a chance to know him and be around him. It's always been someplace where everything changed for the better. It's always been a home for me.
RD: Anything else?
Williams: Up to that point I'd been at an all-boys private school. All of sudden I was in a coeducational school. There were girls everywhere. They weren't brought in for dances and then taken away. And the first time I saw fog, I didn't know what it was. I thought it was poison gas. "What's that, Dad?"
RD: Tell us more about your father.
Williams: He worked for Lincoln-Mercury when they made great cars. His job was to troubleshoot, to travel around to different dealerships, and eventually he saw the company's quality go downhill. They offered him loads of cash to stay, and he said no thanks. For me he's always been this very ethical guy.
RD: How does that show up in your life now?
Williams: I have like a no-fly zone with doing commercial endorsements and product placements. That's a residual from Dad. I just want to do movies, and I want to sell them. I don't want to link up with some product.
RD: Lots of actors won't endorse products here, but will do commercials in Japan. What do you think of that?
Williams: No. 1, financially, I don't have to do it. No. 2, the people who do it, God bless them, but you think, Why does he need to do that? He's got hundreds of millions of dollars. Unless it's like Paul Newman with salad dressing, where the money goes to charity. If I could do something like that with a product, I would.
RD: I heard that you own a vineyard and produce wine in Napa Valley.
Williams: I've owned the ranch for about 26 years, but I've only been growing grapes for the last 15.
RD: But you no longer drink, so how do you know if the wine is any good?
Williams: The people running the ranch and my wife are all really knowledgeable.
RD: Why did you stop drinking?
Williams: Because my first son was about to be born and I thought, I can't continue this way.
RD: Do you think you had a problem?
Williams: The drinking was tied into cocaine. You needed to drink, especially hard liquor, to take the edge off the coke. So that would usually be this kind of hook for me.
RD: How crazy did you get?
Williams: Not too crazy, but it was enough to go, Uh-uh. Especially with work. Hangovers don't make you a nice person.
RD: Was it easy for you to quit?
Williams: It was kind of a decompression -- from straight alcohol to mixed drinks to wine to spritzers -- and then you're out.
RD: You've been married to your wife, Marsha, since 1989. Has she been a stabilizing force?
Williams: Oh, more than stabilizing. Nurturing, everything, the whole nine yards. She and my family.
RD: Tell us about your friendship with Christopher Reeve.
Williams: At Juilliard he lived nearby, and he literally fed me for a while. I'd go to his house and, as I say, borrow food. "Tuna, thank you." We were totally opposite -- me coming from the West Coast and a junior college, and him from the hard-core Ivy League. He used to be the studly studly of all studlies, and I was the little fool ferret boy. It was astonishing to see that women just responded to him like [makes whooshing noises].
RD: After his accident, I was amazed at how strong he was.
Williams: Yeah. I don't know how many times he had near-death experiences. When your spinal cord freezes up, you're vulnerable to everything. But he was tough as nails. And he kept a great, kind of dark sense of humor about it, but also was able to accomplish amazing things. Now, with the war, we have more and more people coming in with spinal injuries. What he got going -- especially with stem cells -- there's amazing potential there.
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