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IT FEELS oddly incongruous to be discussing conservation issues with Robin Williams. Not because he isn't thoughtful or the subject isn't pertinent, but because if ever there was someone who seemed wilfully spendthrift about energy levels, it's Williams, who has just flown into London to do press for his new animated feature Happy Feet, having played a comedy benefit in Las Vegas the previous night. Here he is, fizzing animatedly about George Bush.
"There's no such thing as global warming," he spits. "That's why they had Michael Crichton speak to Congress. When you want scientific fact, get a really good science-fiction writer.
"I guess I am a Californian liberal - I have a hybrid car and a large SUV. I ride bikes. People say that I'm a tree-hugger - I do a lot more than hug trees, if you find the right knotty pine.
"I like basically having my drinking water without faecal matter. Or unacceptable levels of strychnine. It used to be that you could drink out of a hose, but now if you do, it's 'Kids, quickly, to the hospital.'"
Williams rattles out ad-lib gags with an almost Tourettes-like compulsion. In less than an hour he is Arnold Schwarzenegger, scaring California with his pronunciation of "immigration", a Brokeback Mountain cowboy in love with his film director, and Jack Nicholson considering the allure of the pig in Babe.
At 55, he looks fitter and trimmer than he has in years. His eyes are a brilliant blue and he talks fast, in what seems a crazed, kinetic attempt to short-circuit reality and zip through topics. For an hour, it's entertaining; for a day, it must be exhausting and an interference with life. But it seems as if he can't help himself. Conversations with Williams may begin in an earnest, low-key fashion, but the moment he says something that makes you laugh he comes alive and the chase is on to make you laugh again.
The barrage of free-associated images, impressions and sound effects runs right across the news headlines, including his own recent story, when he announced that he had checked himself into rehab for alcohol problems after more than two decades of sobriety. "I went to rehab the same day that Mel Gibson was arrested on the Pacific Coast Highway," says Williams. "I think that allowed me a certain anonymity. I love how God has a sense of humour and lets Mel get stopped by the only Jewish highway patrolman in all of California."
Williams says he hid his alcohol problem for three years before seeking help. "There was a bottle of vodka that was in the refrigerator and I would drink it down, thinking no one noticed until it got down to the very bottom - 'I don't know what happened, there must be a Russian tooth fairy.'" He also tried to hide his consumption by topping up the bottle with water, realising too late that, unlike alcohol, water freezes.
He says his drinking happened only during private time, not while he was working, and that there was no conspicuous trigger for his lapse. "It's not caused by anything, it's just there. It lies in wait for the time when you think, 'It's fine now, I'm okay.' Then, the next thing you know, it's not okay. Then you realise, 'Where am I? I didn't realise I was in Cleveland.'" He spent two months "club medicated" in the Hazelden Springbrook Center, being treated for alcohol abuse. "Just alcohol. That's enough, really," he says.
Williams first gave up drinking and drugs in the early 1980s, going cold turkey after the fatal overdose of his friend and fellow comedian John Belushi in 1982. "The first time I did it alone. But this time it was good to know there were others out there. We won't talk about the names specifically. My kids saw the before and after, and my son Cody said it best: 'It's good to see you back again.'"
Williams concedes that talking about his recent rehab experience isn't his favourite pastime, but on the other hand he is keen to establish that he is back doing films, stand-up and freeform banter. "It has been nice to have these movies out. It's also nice to be out of rehab and go, 'Hey, I'm back.' But it's weird to get out of rehab and go to Vegas. Great idea - like going to detox in Colombia. But it has been great. I think it's just the right moment to take a relaxing time off, be with family and hang out in California and ride my bikes. It'll be great."
Before taking a break, he has been trotting the globe and talking about Happy Feet. "Getting out of rehab and promoting a new film is like getting out of heart surgery and doing a marathon: 'Aargh - my heart!'"
Happy Feet is the latest animated effort for Williams, who voiced Batty Koda in 1992's FernGully: The Last Rainforest and was Fender in the 2005 offering Robots. But his best-known work as a voice actor is in Aladdin, as the shape-shifting genie.
The comedic side of Williams's brain takes over when asked how he was able to find the right way to play two penguins, a Latino called Ramón and a guru penguin called Lovelace. He says he was supposed to have a third role, as a Scottish Presbyterian penguin, but this was dropped ("It frightened too many of the children") - much to the relief of those who recall the Brigadoon accent of his Scottish nanny Mrs Doubtfire.
Williams talks about how much he liked getting to work with comedians Carlos Alazraqui, Johnny Sanchez III, Lombardo Boyar and Jeff Garcia, who provide voices for Ramón's Adelaide penguin posse, the Adelie Amigos. The five comedians recorded their voices together, ad-libbing numerous lines. "It was pretty crazy to have that kind of freedom. And because it's computerised, it's great to know that someone didn't draw for two years and go, 'Oh, please, just say the words.' So it was great to have that freedom with George Miller, the director, basically closing his eyes and going, 'Slower.' It was like bad phone sex."
Williams's schtick is so prone to parody that it's easy to forget how groundbreaking he was when he first beamed down as Mork in a bit part on Happy Days, creating such a sensation that he was soon offered a spin-off show of his own, Mork & Mindy. "I still have people calling me Mork, no matter what I've done," he admits. "I've met Nobel Prize physicists who say, 'You are Mork!' And I say, 'Yes, I am, thank you.'"
Even in those days Williams had his way with scriptwriters. They would simply include "Robin does his thing" in his breakout sections. It took him longer to appreciate the discipline of working from a script. During The World According to Garp, he started improvising around his lines "and the director, George Roy Hill, made a face like a weasel in a wind tunnel, so I went, 'Not good?' And he went, 'Just say the words.' And it really helped to, you know, focus, put all of yourself into that. Occasionally you can improvise, use that as a base and go off from it. But if a script is well written, you really don't have to. Like with Good Will Hunting - there was very little riffing there. Because it was such a precise piece, you didn't need to."
George Miller, who directed Happy Feet, is a former doctor and seriously wonders if Williams is some sort of medical quirk. "I'm used to how brains work, and I can tell you that there's something going on with Robin that is very rare," he says. "To be able to process something so quickly and yet it comes out fully formed, the rhythm of the words. When I write a line, I sometimes struggle for days over getting the rhythm of the words right. Somehow it all comes out of Robin perfectly formed."
Not all of his work is flawless. But since he became a star, at 26, Williams has never had the luxury of failing in private. His first mistake was a big one. "Popeye - 20 million right off the bat." It wasn't until Good Morning, Vietnam, in 1987, that Williams achieved anything like his true potential. Using a vague storyline about a maverick radio DJ in Vietnam, Williams ignored scripted dialogue and spent more than 20 minutes improvising interviews with everyone from the artillery vet with a record request ("Play anything, but play it loud!") to a fashion designer who despises camouflage uniforms ("When you're in battle you should wear something that says 'clash'!"). By this time he was in the throes of divorce and therapy.
"Remember to say no - it's the most difficult word," the late Bette Davis advised him once, but Williams couldn't say no to work, drugs, women or drink. His first wife, Valerie Velardi, described him as a "stimulus junkie". By the early 1980s he was hooked on drugs and alcohol. Years later he famously described cocaine as "God's way of saying you're making too much money". Then Belushi overdosed. Rumours circulated that Williams had been snorting coke with this friend just a short time before his death. A few weeks later, Velardi announced she was pregnant. Williams gave up drugs and drink cold turkey. Taking cocaine, he said, was "like being a haemophiliac in a razor factory".
He seems unable to stop himself making whatever is said end up in giggles, and perversely it can cramp his comedy. The ad-libs and verbal gymnastics are frenetic, and when he's allowed his head, even in films like Happy Feet, routines overstay their welcome. Some sequences in Mrs Doubtfire were funny when they began but were ruined by the lack of an editing blade. Peter Sellers suffered from the same flaw, often working a sketch to death.
Williams's comedy is still viewed as manic kamikaze humour, and because it seems to burst out of him so easily his public have certain expectations. "People think they know you," he told me. "They expect you to be like you are on TV or in the movies, bouncing off the walls. A woman came up to me at the airport. 'Be zany!' she said. 'Do something goofy!' At that point you want to say, 'Back off!' They want you to be something you're not."
But it has to be said that he is loath to disappoint them, because Williams is a kind man. The first time I interviewed him, for radio, I was late and the lift was broken. "It's his last interview," the press officer told me, heartlessly. "He'll be gone if you don't get there right now." So I sprinted up five floors and by the time I reached his suite I was a broken woman. My hands shook as I threaded the batteries into the recorder, and during the first question the microphone wagged like an excited dog's tail.
Williams gently unpeeled my fingers and took over the microphone himself, dipping it towards me when he reached the end of his answer or if he thought I wanted to interrupt. He also stayed on late so that I had the half-hour interview I needed, even though this jeopardised his scheduled flight home that afternoon.
Many movie actors seem to fall under the spell of themselves, but Williams's curiosity and compassion always face outwards. He engages in conversation, watches and listens intently and seems interested in anyone who crosses his path.
His film career probably peaked with his Oscar for best supporting actor in Good Will Hunting ten years ago, and of late he has made some rather odd film choices. The recent Night Caller was a bleakly blank feature where his talk-show host gets embroiled in the fantasy life of a fan. And in the summer he starred in RV, the sort of movie that used to have National Lampoon in the title and a cast led by Chevy Chase. Chase seems to have dropped off the radar recently, unmourned. In his place, Williams takes his movie family on the road for a string of hilarious high-jinks involving racoons and Portaloos.
It's disturbing when he totters on the verge of having Chevy Chase's career. It didn't do much for Chase. Still, he maintains his Teflon-coated rule. Maybe Man of the Year, a Barry Levinson satire, will be more promising, a comedy where Williams - again playing a talk-show host, not a million miles removed from The Daily Show's Jon Stewart - becomes president of the United States.
In the forthcoming Night at the Museum, he takes on another political character of sorts, as a Tussaud's statue of Teddy Roosevelt that comes alive after hours. "Roosevelt put into place a lot of great things. He established the national park system and environmental protection, and also consumer protection. He was a very brave man, and a brilliant man - a brilliant Republican, which is a phrase you don't hear much these days.
"When George W Bush said, 'Is our children learning?', I realised, hmm - okay. When Blair and the British politicians debate on TV you see they have the ability to deal with hecklers. They can think on their feet. They have to be able to react. It comes out of the tradition of debating at school. What do people remember from American debates? Who sweated the most."
For a mind so attuned to absurdity, it must be odd to plug a movie about talking penguins when you feel so much of the real world is in chaos. But Williams is more than up to the task of connecting the threat to the Happy Feet penguins with wider concerns. "Little things do make a difference," he effervesces. "Like cutting back on fluorocarbons reduces the hole in the ozone layer, which makes the planet from outer space look like a ramshackle mess. These are huge things. Does a little penguin movie help? Maybe.
"First the penguins, then us. So there are some big ideas to talk about here. Will it affect policy? I don't know. We live in a country where our president thinks the Kyoto Accord is a nice car." And we laugh, because with Williams even saving the planet comes with a punchline.
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