The classic movie Bill Murray called a “masterpiece”
The legendary American comedy actor Bill Murray is known for his deadpan wit and unsmiling approach to comical adversity. Although he’s taken on a multitude of iconic roles of healthy variation, Murray never seems more sewn to his element than when he’s portraying the depressed, cynical man hounded by unfortunate circumstances and forced to change his way.
The actor’s roles in 1993’s Groundhog Day and 1988’s Scrooged most concisely fit this model, but the deadpan face has worked wonders in other settings, including Sofia Coppola’s vacuous 2003 rom-com masterpiece, Lost in Translation.
Like most well-established actors, Murray sifts through scripts from probing writers and filmmakers when deciding what movies to take on. He assesses the job at hand by the quality of the script. If there’s something to fix, he considers how he might like to improvise, and if there’s not, he needs to trust the director knows what they want.
In the late 1990s, Murray worked on the first of many celebrated collaborations with the esteemed auteur Wes Anderson. Almost 20 years Murray’s junior, Anderson had only just begun his rise to fame at the time following 1996’s Bottle Rocket and was unknown to Murray.
The actor recalled his first encounter with Anderson in a conversation with Patrick Heidmann of The Talks. “Well, meeting him… God, actually meeting him, I would have to think about that! But I’ll bet he remembers it! I don’t remember the actual meeting. I read the script for Rushmore, and I just sort of agreed to it. The agents and all the pushy people said, ‘Well, do you want to meet him?’ I said, ‘No!’ [Laughs] I said, ‘What day am I supposed to start work? Let’s go!’”
After working together on the Rushmore set, Murray and Anderson formed a close professional relationship based on trust: Anderson’s trust that Murray could bring his characteristic wit to zany characters and Murray’s trust that Anderson could write compelling scripts.
Discussing Rushmore in the context of great scriptwriting in a past interview with Charlie Rose, Murray said: “The ones [movies] that have been the best for me are usually scripts that are great. I’ve been in movies where I’ve had to improvise every day, all day, you know, when you pretty much toss it out. You take the framework, and you make up everything as you go.”
When the scripts are fleshed out and watertight, it leaves less legwork for the actor. “But there have been a couple of movies that were so well-written that you just walked in and pretty much said what originally was intended by the writer,” Murray continued.
Later, the actor picked out three movies from his career that he saw as having perfect scripts. “There was one by a guy named Danny Rubin [and Harold Ramis] called Groundhog Day, the original script of which was really a gem. An original idea and a masterpiece in some way!”
He added: “There’s another one called Mad Dog and Glory by Richard Price [and John McNaughton], who’s a well-known author and has a great way with words. And there was this one [Rushmore] that Anderson wrote with Owen Wilson. Those are three that came in, and I brought almost nothing to the movie.”
“Usually, I look at it and go… I look at it by how much I’ll have to fix. Because they’re [often] just sort of vague,” Murray added on the subject, suggesting that modern word processors are to blame for the rise of half-baked and lazy scriptwriting.
Watch Bill Murray’s full interview with Charlie Rose below.
