The 1980 director Bill Murray couldn’t stand working with: “He thought cocaine was the way”
Unless their name is Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, or Jim Jarmusch, any director who works with Bill Murray stands a decent chance of ending up on his shit-list in one way or another.
His decades-long friendship with Harold Ramis was destroyed beyond repair when they reunited for Groundhog Day, and while the movie is an endlessly rewatchable classic, and they eventually made amends before the latter’s death, it was a nightmarish experience from start to finish for both.
Richard Donner also found himself in the eye of the ‘Murricane’ when they were shooting Scrooged, and much like his time-loop classic, the ongoing friction between the pair did nothing to prevent the finished picture from becoming a staple of the annual viewing calendar and a stone-cold Christmastime favourite.
You definitely can’t say that about McG’s Charlie’s Angels, though, with the Saturday Night Live veteran leaving a trail of destruction in his wake that saw him called out by Lucy Liu, and when the filmmaker suggested that Murray almost broke his nose during a confrontation, he responded by saying he should have been killed instead.
Needless to say, you never know what you’re going to get until the eccentric actor and comedian arrives for his first day on set, and it’s become a recurring theme of his career, with Aziz Ansari’s Being Mortal getting mothballed as a result of the allegations made against Murray during production that saw it shut down and abandoned.
It’s also been a recurring theme since the beginning of his big-screen adventures, with the Academy Award nominee admitting that he didn’t get along great with Art Linson, who quickly realised he wasn’t cut out for the directorial business, helming only two pictures before he segued into producing, going on to back Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, Michael Mann’s Heat, and David Fincher’s Fight Club, among others.
1980 was Murray’s breakthrough year as a big-screen commodity, but two months before Ramis’ Caddyshack was released, the star came as close as he ever has to embracing the method when he played Hunter S Thompson in the semi-autobiographical comedy, Where the Buffalo Roam.
“It had a first-time director, first and last-time director,” Murray recalled, although not entirely accurately. “And he didn’t particularly know what he was doing, and he thought cocaine was the way to solve scenes. So that didn’t work out particularly well, but some of the stuff was amazing.”
He forged a close connection with the idiosyncratic Thompson, but not so much with Linson, leading to frequent disagreements during production. The author loathed the final results, with the leading man so outraged that some of his narration was removed that he demanded the studio shoot a new ending, not that it did anything to either improve Where the Buffalo Roam‘s chances of not going down in a ball of box office flames or to convince him that Linson was someone he ever wanted to work with again.
