Interview by Dan Fierman
Illustration by Daniel Clowes
August 2010
When I arrived, he was standing alone in the corner of a New York hotel room, talking on a cell phone and wearing a ratty black polo, jeans, and yellow "tape measure" suspenders. I had been waiting for over an hour, which didn't seem like an unreasonable amount of time. Bill Murray famously does not give interviews—he's sat down for exactly four prolonged media encounters in the past ten years—and when he does, it's never clear what you're going to get. You just have to pray he's in a good mood.
The very thing that makes Bill Murray, well, Bill Murray is what makes sitting down with him such an unpredictable enterprise. Bill Murray crashes parties, ditches promotional appearances, clashes with his friends, his collaborators, and his enemies. If you—movie director, journalist, dentist—want to speak to him, you don't go through any gatekeeper. You leave a message on an 800 number. If Bill Murray wants to speak with you, he'll call you back. If his three and a half decades in the public sphere have taught us anything about the 59-year-old actor, it's that he simply does not give a good goddamn.
His career is known to most any fan of modern comedy: the years on SNL; the series of epochal comedies like Stripes, Groundhog Day, and Caddyshack. And his current artistic period, which could be described as Reclusive National Treasure. He lives in Rockland County, New York, emerging only to make movies for directors he's interested in: Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Sofia Coppola. This summer he'll release a period indie called Get Low, in which he plays an undertaker throwing an early funeral for Robert Duvall. Today, Murray was in an expansive mood. Then, after he spoke about Ghostbusters 3, Barack Obama, and Garfield, he decided the interview was over and was gone. As best as I can tell, he was not fucking with me. But who knows? Bill Murray doesn't need you to be in on his joke. His life is all one performance-art piece—and he does everything for an audience of one.
Bill Murray: How long do these things last? [picks up recorder] How much time is on these things?
GQ: A lot. They're digital.
Digital? I was thinking of recording myself sleeping. Would this work?
Well, assuming you don't make more than an hour and a half of noise each night, you'll be okay.
I dunno. That's why I need the recorder. Sometimes I snore, like when I get really tired. Smoke a cigar or something, you know. I have a brother with sleep apnea. That's terrifying. Jesus. But anyhow…you have questions.
I do. Here's my first one: Why the 800 number?
Well, it's what I finally went to. I have this phone number that they call and talk. And then I listen.
And you just weed 'em out?
I just sort of decide. I might listen and say, "Okay, why don't you put it on a piece of paper? Put it on a piece of paper, and if it's interesting, I'll call you back, and if it's not, I won't." It's exhausting otherwise. I don't want to have a relationship with someone if I'm not going to work with them. If you're talking about business, let's talk about business, but I don't want to hang out and bullshit.
But that's so much of how Hollywood does business.
Yeah, well, that always kind of creeped me out. And I don't like to work. I only like working when I'm working.
Well, I remember, you took a big break. It was in the late '80s, right?
It was in the middle of the '80s. Actually, I've taken a couple of breaks. I've retired a couple of times. It's great, because you can just say, "Oh, I'm sorry. I'm retired." [laughs] And people will actually believe that you've retired. There are nutters out there that will go, "Oh, okay!" and then leave you alone.
I'm always interested in how you pick your projects, because that's one damned random filmography. For Get Low, I dimly suspect that it came down to the line "One thing about Chicago, people know how to die."
[laughs] Well, that was appealing. No, [producer] Dean Zanuck and I had the nicest phone conversation, and I thought, Hmm… And then I saw the making-of DVD of his last movie. This really should be kept secret, but you can learn a lot by watching the making-of DVDs. Every actor should do it. You figure out what you're dealing with. And I thought, You know, this guy is all right. And it turned out beautifully. Where the hell did we take it? That's right. Poland. There's kind of a famous cinematography festival, in a place called Lodz, and God, they went nuts for it. These cinematographers were all, [deadpan Eastern European accent] "Oh yeah, dis good."
Like comedians, nodding at a joke.
Exactly! Oh yeah. [nods, stone-faced] "That's funny." They were just like that.
You have a lot of lines in this one that get tons of laughs I doubt were on the page. It's all in the rhythm, the delivery. How do you pitch something like that? How do you make something out of nothing?
I have developed a kind of different style over the years. I hate trying to re-create a tone or a pitch. Saying, "I want to make it sound like I made it sound the last time"? That's insane, because the last time doesn't exist. It's only this time. And everything is going to be different this time. There's only now. And I don't think a director, as often as not, knows what is going to play funny anyway. As often as not, the right one is the one that they're surprised by, so I don't think that they have the right tone in their head. And I think that good actors always—or if you're being good, anyway—you're making it better than the script. That's your fucking job. It's like, Okay, the script says this? Well, watch this. Let's just roar a little bit. Let's see how high we can go.
But you asked how you get the comic pitch. Well, obviously a lot of it is rhythm. And as often as not, it's the surprising rhythm. In life and in movies, you can usually guess what someone is going to say—you can actually hear it—before they say it. But if you undercut that just a little, it can make you fall off your chair. It's small and simple like that. You're always trying to get your distractions out of the way and be as calm as you can be [breathes in and out slowly], and emotion will just drive the machine. It will go through the machine without being interrupted, and it comes out in a rhythm that's naturally funny. And that funny rhythm is either humorous or touching. It can be either one. But it's always a surprise. I really don't know what's going to come out of my mouth.
Are you ever going to direct again? Quick Change is really one of the great lost movies about New York.
It's great. It's a great piece of writing. And how about the cast? You couldn't get that cast together for all the tea in China right now. I mean, Stanley Tucci, Tony Shalhoub…
Oh shit. The bluftoné. I forgot about the bluftoné.
Bluftoné! [laughs] Shalhoub gives one of the greatest comic performances I've ever seen! Though I do like Michael Caine and Maggie Smith in California Suite. Unfortunately, the last time I watched it was right after Kung Fu Hustle, which is the supreme achievement of the modern age in terms of comedy.
Kung Fu Hustle?
It's not even close. Quick Change after it looked like a home movie. It looked like a fucking high school film. I was like, "Oh man, I just saw this thing," and "God, that's just staggering, just staggering. That movie is just AHHHHHH!" And when I saw that, I was like: That. Just. Happened. There should have been a day of mourning for American comedy the day that movie came out.
You know, my younger brother will absolutely murder me if I don't ask you this question.…
All right. I should worry.
Is the third Ghostbusters movie happening? What's the story with that?
It's all a bunch of crock. It's a crock. There was a story—and I gotta be careful here, I don't want to hurt someone's feelings. When I hurt someone's feelings, I really want to hurt them. [laughs] Harold Ramis said, Oh, I've got these guys, they write on The Office, and they're really funny. They're going to write the next Ghostbusters. And they had just written this movie that he had directed.
Year One.
Year One. Well, I never went to see Year One, but people who did, including other Ghostbusters, said it was one of the worst things they had ever seen in their lives. So that dream just vaporized. That was gone. But it's the studio that really wants this thing. It's a franchise. It's a franchise, and they made a whole lot of money on Ghostbusters.
Oh, sure, I remember. The soundtrack. The lunchboxes. The action figures.
Right. And it's still one of the biggest movies of all time. And ever since that story broke, everywhere I go people are like, "So are you gonna make that movie?" I was down in Austin at South by Southwest, and you go at it hard down there—fun but, man, you need to sleep for days afterwards. Anyhow, I got into it one night with a bunch of younger people who were like, Oh, I love Peter Venkman! I grew up with Peter Venkman! We got to talking, and the more we talked about it, the more I thought, Oh Christ, I should just do this thing.
A generation awaits, for sure. You weren't even supposed to play that role, right?
Yeah. Originally it was Belushi. Like a lot of my movies. [beat] God, John died, what was it, twenty-five years ago?
It was '82, right?
Yeah, I think it was '82. I dunno. That part of life is getting fuzzy.
I read that you wanted to play a ghost in the movie. That's kind of brilliant.
Well, I hadn't wanted to do the movie. They kept asking, and I kept saying no. So once upon a time I said, just joking: "If you kill me off in the first reel, then fine, I'll do it." And then supposedly they came up with an idea where they kill me off and I was a ghost in the movie. Kinda clever, really.
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