Robin Williams - Funny face

Robin Williams isn't taking a holiday in New Zealand - it's research. He talks about his next career movie and RUSSELL BAILLIE tries to keep up.

It's the morning after Robin Williams and family have attended the Auckland premiere of his latest movie, Bicentennial Man.

At the party afterwards he gave another preview - of his planned return to stand-up comedy next year.

But now it's sit-down comedy time.

Williams sits on a couch in a plush Auckland hotel lounge. At the door is a dark-suited hotel security guy complete with earpiece. There's another one in the foyer, and in the corner sits what is probably his personal minder, who resembles a roadie for the Grateful Dead (probably was, Williams lives in San Francisco).

No, he smiles, between making Secret Service jokes, the whole posse won't be coming with him when he heads off on his fly-fishing and mountain-biking Kiwi holiday during the next week.

The problem with interviewing Williams, of course, is making sense of it in print. In our 20 or so minutes he slaloms through half a dozen accents - he can already do a passable New Zild - and just as many tangents.

All you can do is isolate the bits that make sense. Here are some of them ...

In Bicentennial man your middle name once again seems to be "pathos" ...

I didn't plan it to be pathos. It's emotional because he deals with life and death and everything and because over 200 years he sees a lot of human behaviour so that's why I wanted to do it. I am fascinated by artificial intelligence and human behaviour so the two meet perfectly on this. Plus it's based on an Isaac Asimov story and no one has ever done him.

But science fiction-wise, it's hardly Blade Runner, is it?