The director Bill Murray will always refuse to work with: “He really wants to make a movie with me”
If Bill Murray doesn’t want to work with someone, then he’s not going to work with them, and he’s probably going to make it almost impossible for them to contact him, which is something when he’s already famously hard to get a hold of.
There’s absolutely no rhyme or reason to how the Academy Award nominee and Saturday Night Live legend picks and chooses the filmmakers he’ll collaborate with, unless that person is Wes Anderson, in which case he doesn’t need to hear anything before committing himself to the director’s next film.
He famously agreed to voice the title character in Garfield because he thought it had been written by one of the Coen brothers, and even for smaller pictures like Ted Melfi’s St Vincent, the writer and director spent months trying to reach him, and when he did, Murray instructed his lawyer to send a one-page letter to a post office in Martha’s Vineyard in response, nowhere near where Melfi ived.
Since his SNL days, Murray has grown accustomed to being surrounded by Hollywood’s most prominent comedic forces. Whether he’s sharing the screen with them, being directed by them, or reciting the dialogue from their screenplays, he’s partnered up with heavyweights of multiple generations, with Judd Apatow being a major exception.
Once the filmmaker and producer’s signature brand of comedy took over the genre in the early 2000s with titles like Anchorman, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, it felt as if he was destined to work with Murray eventually, especially when Apatow cast plenty of performers who’d made films with him before.
Unfortunately for him, Murray has precisely zero interest in ever being welcomed into the repertory, and it’s all because he’s seen precisely one picture that Apatow was involved with and completely hated it. One of his first credits was as the screenwriter and producer of 1996’s critical and commercial flop, Celtic Pride, and regardless of everything he achieved after that, the Ghostbuster had seen enough.
“I know someone who knows him, and he apparently really wants to make a movie with me,” Murray told GQ. “And the only Apatow movie I ever saw was Celtic Pride. That was the only movie I ever saw. Did you ever see it? Well, there’s a reason you didn’t, and when you see it, you’ll know what it is. It’s just brutal. Totally brutal.”
He said that in 2010, and a decade and a half later, he still hasn’t changed his mind, apparently. Celtic Pride is a terrible movie, but it doesn’t exactly paint a full picture of Apatow’s work. Murray would disagree, and another sin he wasn’t willing to forgive was that the basketball caper also starred his longtime friend and fellow ghost exterminator, Dan Aykroyd.
“Danny’s in it! Danny doesn’t even know how many players are on a team in basketball,” Murray remarked. “And he’s in this movie? Oh my Jesus mercy.” If Apatow had a time machine, his first port of call would likely be to travel back and erase Celtic Pride from history so he stood a half-decent chance of achieving his dream of casting the actor he’s dying to work with.
