By Erin Free & Gill Pringle
“I’m a nut, but not just a nut,” Bill Murray once said. A brilliant comedian, and one of the funniest actors in Hollywood history, Bill Murray is also one of the world’s most unlikely superstars. Possessed of a bone-dry sense of humour, and a seeming disregard for any of the trappings that go along with movie stardom, Murray legitimately seems to care not one iota about his image, his career, or his social standing. A true rarity, he allegedly has no agent, no business manager, and no lawyer, and is famous for travelling without an entourage. The ultimate “sad clown” (“I have felt lonely many times in my life,” he once said), Murray finds the humour amongst the pain, and the silliness inside the sorrow. “I know how to be sour,” he once commented. “I know that taste.” He’s an absolutely singular screen talent with the rare ability to both emotionally move an audience, and make them bust a muscle with laughter.
His eccentricities, meanwhile, are famous. As well as being a golfing legend thanks to his unforgettable performance as the manic Carl Spackler in the hilariously on-course Caddyshack, Bill Murray is also a diehard baseball fan, and has a true burning love for The Chicago Cubs. During the Cubs’ playoff run in 2003, Murray was on location in Italy shooting The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, but he had it specifically written into his contract that he would be provided with a satellite feed of all the games. “If I hadn’t been a comedian or an actor or whatever it is that I am now, I would have been a baseball player,” Murray once said.
And ever the prankster, Bill Murray is famous for sneaking up behind random people on the streets of New York. He stealthily covers their eyes with his hands, and when they turn around in surprise to look at him, the actor whispers, “Nobody will ever believe you”, and then walks quietly away. This sort of idiosyncratic behaviour even crosses over to Murray’s work life, with the actor apparently only available to prospective directors through a special telephone line.
When FilmInk asked director, Paul Feig, how difficult it was to track down the actor to ask him about appearing in the ill-fated 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, he let out a big laugh. “All those stories are true,” Feig said. “You are given a number, and it just goes beep, and you’re talking. I was talking for twenty seconds and it cut off. I was like, ‘Did he hang up on me, or does this just have a kill switch in it?’ I had run into him at the Saturday Night Live 40th anniversary show. I’d never met him before but I’m friends with his brother and a lot of other family members of his. So I finally got to go up to him. First, I went up to Dan Aykroyd, who I’d never met before. Dan was so lovely and he was really excited about the project. We talked a long time, and then I saw Bill, so I went over to him. Bill was so supportive too, and he was really into it. But then at the very end, I was like, ‘Well, I hope that you’ll join us for something.’ And he was like, ‘Oh yeah, okay’ and then, boom, he was gone. I was like, ‘Oh no, I just blew it with Bill.’”
Feig was sweating for good reason. He and co-writer, Katie Dippold, had created a character especially for Murray in 2016’s Ghostbusters: grumpy paranormal sceptic, Martin Weiss. “He’s an adversary to the Ghostbusters,” Feig explained. “Our line producer’s husband is really close friends with Bill, and I kept hearing that he might do it. It was actually looking like he might do it, but you don’t know until the day before. And we had to shoot it! So I was like, ‘If he doesn’t show up, what do we do?’ I wanted to get somebody with a name in that role, so I was actually wondering if I could hire a name actor and then go, ‘If Bill Murray shows up, you’re fired?’ Then I thought that maybe I’d just play the role if he doesn’t show up! Thank God I didn’t! But then the day before, I heard that he was getting on a plane. I remember that morning coming in so tense, and then the ADs said, ‘He’s in the make-up trailer.’ So I just walked in and there he was.” Does Paul Feig actually have Bill Murray’s proper phone number now? “No, I still have that same number,” he laughed. “But he’s a wonderful guy.”
Director, Jon Favreau, who cast Murray as the sweet but manipulative Baloo the bear in his motion-capture-heavy version of The Jungle Book, also experience the mystique of Murray. “You don’t just call his agent and book the guy,” Favreau laughs to FilmInk of the mercurial actor. “I know Ted Melfi, who did St. Vincent with Bill, so he gave me some advice, and then I tried to contact him through his lawyer. There’s also, of course, a phone number that you can call, but I eventually got through to someone who was doing temporary assistant work for him. It was like a real detective adventure, but what’s good about that is that there’s a vetting process. Anybody who works with Bill really wants him. It’s not like you just arbitrarily cast him. You have to work hard to get him.”
Roger Michell, who directed Bill Murray in 2012’s Hyde Park On Hudson told FilmInk a very similar story. “If you want Bill Murray to do your film, it’s tough,” he explained. “It’s hard to even get a hold of him, let alone pin him down. He doesn’t have an agent. I waited a year for him to say yes to the film. In fact, I was heavily in pre-production before he eventually agreed to do it. But he’s very sweet and mischievous”
One director, however, seems to have a Bat-Phone-like direct line to surly actor, and that’s Wes Anderson, who has directed Murray in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, Rushmore, Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, amongst others. “I just know where he is, it’s easier for me,” Wes Anderson told FilmInk in 2004. Anderson also played a big part in introducing Murray to Sofia Coppola for their 2003 cult darling, Lost In Translation. “Sofia didn’t know him before, but she knows him now. She had me and others all working on Bill at once. We went out to dinner, and it was a real process. I loved her script. It was so simple. It’s hard getting Bill to read something, but I told him it was a good one, and that he might want to do it.”
Lost In Translation was a major commercial and artistic success, and it gave both Coppola and Murray an enormous career jolt, earning Coppola a Best Screenplay Oscar and a Best Director nomination and Murray a nod for Best Actor. Coppola obviously hung onto Bill Murray’s phone number because the pair have now reunited for the charming comedy drama On The Rocks. “This is Bill Murray and Rashida Jones,” Coppola told Indiewire during the shoot for the film. “They play father and daughter, and she’s married to Marlon Wayans, a successful businessman who is traveling a lot and has a beautiful assistant. Rashida’s character has suspicions. The dad, who’s kind of a sophisticated playboy, gets her paranoid because he’s seeing men through his point of view. It’s the clash between the two generations, and her being a young woman and he’s a gentleman of another generation. It’s the two of them as a father and daughter sort of on a little adventure to spy on her husband. It’s a lot of them talking about life and men and women over martinis in New York.”
In short, it’s vintage Bill Murray…
On The Rocks is in cinemas from October 2. Click here for our review, and here for our story on Sofia Coppola.
