Bill Murray is having a hard time talking about his latest film. It's not that the 58-year-old Hollywood veteran is reluctant to discuss City of Ember, but all anyone really wants to know is whether there's any truth to rumours about Ghostbusters 3.

"Every single interviewer has asked me about the Ghostbusters film," he says with resignation in his voice. "There are two fellas from The Office that are writing the script, but I have yet to see it. I'm more involved in trying to get the dessert we ordered at lunch than the Ghostbusters sequel."

While Murray claims he has no definite plans to reprise his role as the ghost-fighting Peter Venkman alongside
Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, he hasn't ruled it out completely.

"It's possible," he says. "It's a great idea that they have these two guys do it because I think it could be a fresh look at it, and it could be funny. It's not like I have any obligation to the franchise or anyone.

"If the script was good and I thought we could do it, it could be fun."

But enough about Ghostbusters. Murray's role in City Of Ember, a children's fantasy, is his first lead since 2005's Broken Flowers.
Apart from cameo appearances in The Darjeeling Limited and Get Smart, he's had a three-year break from acting.

The hiatus seems to have done him good. Now, after portraying a string of pensive men on the verge of a mid-life crisis, City Of Ember sees him play a larger-than-life selfish and corrupted mayor.

"It's so much easier to be a bad guy," he says. "It's a piece of cake. It's a joke. I keep saying, 'Why do they give Oscars to guys who play bad guys?' Because it's so simple. Play a good guy – that's hard."

The father-of-six, whose divorce from costume designer Jennifer Butler was finalised last June, delved into his own personal experiences to research the role. "When I told my sons I might be in the City Of Ember, they said, 'You're going to be the mayor?' I hadn't even read the script yet," he recalls. "So when I read it, I read it from their point of view and saw the mayor as a father figure that can disappoint.

"I'm a father and I've probably disappointed them on occasion. It's when you talk the talk and you don't live up to it."

Does the Oscar nominee have a dark side in real life?

"I take things intending to give them back and don't," he says. As the trademark deadpan look returns, Murray continues: "Sometimes you may encounter an object or thing that isn't really being used correctly or properly, and you see how you can make it help someone else's development. In some cases, it's your own.

"If there was something that was lying around like in your garage, and had lain there for nine years covered in dust, sometimes I feel the need not to steal it from you but to liberate that object from its bondage. I don't think of it so much as stealing as being a part of the flow of the universe."

Now City Of Ember is in the can, Murray is on a roll. His next project is Wes Anderson's adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr Fox, due to be released in 2009.

"I'll be playing the Badger," he says. "I worked really, really hard on a Wisconsin accent because I thought that would be an appropriate badger voice. I know they're fierce, and if I was a badger Wolverine, that would be the ticket."

However, the filmmaker wasn't impressed.

"I thought it was so funny and he said, 'I don't think so. I was thinking more of a Savile Row badger'. Who here has seen a badger walking down Savile Row?"