Bill Murray on the directors who validated his career: “I don’t have to go looking for work”
Having been a star since the late 1970s when he first broke through as part of a stacked Saturday Night Live ensemble, Bill Murray doesn’t come across as the type of person who’d be desperate for validation.
That’s especially true considering the lengths he’s gone to in order to avoid the usual bells and whistles that come attached to fame and success, most notably being easily contactable and always carrying himself with the utmost professionalism on set.
Murray is a famously difficult man to reach, avoiding any semblance of being reachable by disavowing phones, emails, and fax machines, and he’s also got a habit of igniting feuds. Whether it’s Chevy Chase, Richard Dreyfuss, Lucy Liu, or McG, being a prickly customer who can’t be tracked down or located by conventional means is hardly the work of someone insecure in their position.
Like many actors he’s got his favourites, though, and a couple of them helped instil him with that sense of validation he may or may not have even been yearning for in the first place. There’s a lot of performers and filmmakers out there who’d love to work with Murray, and history has shown it’s a feat much easier said than done.
That being said, if it’s Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, or Jim Jarmusch making those inquiries, then the Ghostbusters favourite’s involvement is a mere formality. He’s made a 15 features with those three auteurs alone, and in an interview with iNews, Murray explained that being in a constant state of demand by that trio is one of his most cherished accomplishments.
“They’ve sort of validated my career in a way, the fact that these great directors keep calling me up every once in a while,” he admitted. “Because these three people call me up, I worry even less than ever before that someone’s going to call me up. I don’t have to go looking for work, anyway. I mean if you did nine movies with Wes Anderson, people will call that a career.”
Across his nine films with Anderson – ten if you include his role in Asteroid City that didn’t make it into the theatrical cut – three movies with Jarmusch, as well as two pictures and a festive Netflix special for Coppola, Murray has run the gamut from drama to comedy and back again.
Anderson has become famous for continually gathering new members to his repertory through the years, but ask anyone who his single most noteworthy collaborator ever is, and there’s a distinct possibility Murray is going to be the answer. He was three decades deep into his career before he ever worked with any of the three, but in his estimation they’ve all clambered onto a pedestal that doesn’t have room for anybody else.
