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Bill Murray foxes critics with a serious talent
Bill Murray doesn't make many movies but, when he does, he wants to work with his mates, he tells Yorkshire Post film critic Tony Earnshaw.
Bill Murray has starred in some big hits in his time.
Think Ghostbusters and its sequel, through to The Royal Tenenbaums and Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola's bittersweet romance about a middle-aged actor finding redemption and love in Japan.
It surprised many people when Murray, at 53, was nominated for his first Academy Award. He didn't win; the gong went to Sean Penn for Mystic River.
But what it did was confront people with the knowledge that here was a comic actor of rare talent who could also cut it as a dramatic star.
Unlike contemporaries such as Steve Martin, Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy, Murray has never gone after dramatic roles in order to prove himself as some kind of heavyweight.
And while his cohorts in comedy have often come a cropper, Murray rarely has. He puts it down to being evasive and elusive in equal measure.
He doesn't respond to many film offers and enjoys the reputation he has for being a slippery customer.
"It's always better to say 'no' than to say 'yes'," he laughs, "but not with the Kid."
Murray, at 59, is referring to 40-year-old Wes Anderson, the red-hot director of quirky comedies who burst onto the scene in 1998 with Bottle Rocket.
The film gave a break to Owen and Luke Wilson and was big enough for a whole range of Hollywood's movers and shakers to want to collaborate with him.
Murray has just worked with Anderson for the fifth time on Fantastic Mr Fox, joining a star-studded ensemble cast that includes Meryl Streep, Willem Dafoe, Jason Schwartzman and George Clooney as the feral hero at the heart of the tail (sorry, tale).
Murray plays Badger.
For Murray, doing the film was a no-brainer. It reunited him with Anderson and Schwartzman (his co-star in Rushmore) and presented a fresh challenge for an actor who still doesn't actually get up in the mornings to make too many movies.
"I remember for Rushmore there were a lot of people trying to get me to see his first film, Bottle Rocket. They all said 'You have to see this movie; you have to meet this guy.' And I got sent so many tapes – I must have the largest collection of Bottle Rocket tapes in existence.
"Then they sent me the script and I just said 'I'll do it.' And they were like 'But don't you want to meet him?' And I said 'No, I don't need to meet him. I just met him – it's all right here in the script.' I just knew that whoever wrote that script knew exactly what he wanted to do."
Since Rushmore the Murray/Anderson partnership has produced The Royal Tenenbaums (with Gene Hackman and Gwyneth Paltrow joining a fast-growing repertory company), The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited. Murray hasn't been the focus of all of them – in The Darjeeling Limited he provided a brief, rapid cameo – but in each he has provided Anderson with his muse. Now he's doing it again in Anderson's first animation.
"Our first relationship was professional," recalls Murray. "And that's the thing about the movie business. I don't necessarily become friends with everyone I work with, but Wes and I got all the work done on Rushmore and that was a great success.
"In the course of it we became great friends and that's rare – nice and very unusual."
Murray claims never to have steered his career. After early success on Saturday Night Live he broke into movies with Caddyshack and Stripes. Both movies traded off his TV persona.
Then came the rollercoaster ride of Tootsie, Ghostbusters, Scrooged, Ghostbusters II and Groundhog Day. All of them hits, all of them elevated to box office gold thanks to Mr Murray.
Yet people forget Murray's turn as the ambulance driver in Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, a project no-one wanted him to do
but which he fought against all advice to make.
It was not a success but, even then in 1984, it hinted at the kind of player Murray really was. Looking back, he can see the emergence of a unique career that hit some kind of peak with Lost in Translation in 2003.
"To me, it was always going to happen," he says with a refreshingly lack of false modesty.
"I never had a plan for my career; I just did the projects I liked and they kept tumbling out. The fact that I did more dramatic stuff, to me, was inevitable, I guess. I never thought about it that much. Now I feel like I'd love to do a funny movie again."
The spectre of Ghostbusters III raises its head. It's 20 years since the last film. Sigourney Weaver has just turned 60, Dan Aykroyd is 57, Harold Ramis is 64.
Murray himself, playing Peter Venkman, turns 60 in 2010. Maybe they've all left it too late for a third outing, now thought to be imminent. Murray smiles.
"Once upon a time, I said 'Yeah, I'll do it if you kill me off in the first reel.' Then recently in the mail I got this note from Aykroyd and it was a note to the writers. They hired these guys who write The Office in the US to write it. I got sent the notes and they said 'Venkman will die early on'. So now they are going to have me as a ghost throughout the movie.
"That's not bad. It could be funny."
Bill Murray can sniff out a funny line at 100 yards. If he says it's funny, it probably will be.
Fantastic Mr Fox (PG) is on nationwide release.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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