“You don’t have to throw tantrums”: the director who called Bill Murray “irrationally mean”
Bill Murray has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way during his five decades of Hollywood stardom. Depressingly, that includes one of his closest friends and collaborators.
Over the years, Murray has often seemed to be at war with himself, never quite settling on whether he wants to be a beloved comedy icon or a willfully awkward, foul-tempered arsehole who people only tolerate because he’s so damn good at what he does. This has led to him being a lucky charm for a director like Wes Anderson, who works with him consistently and seemingly has no issues with ‘Bad Bill’, yet also a scourge for co-stars like Richard Dreyfuss and Lucy Liu, who have been on the receiving end of his aptitude for verbal abuse and frightening outbursts.
Without doubt, though, Murray’s saddest feud was with an actor/director who many believe was just as responsible for his laconic, unpredictable screen persona as the man himself was. Indeed, Murray’s breakthrough role as a weirdo camp counsellor in 1979’s Meatballs was written by this slyly brainy comedic force, and they then starred together in several enormous hits. I am, of course, referring to the legendary Harold Ramis, a man whose contribution to modern Hollywood comedy as a writer, actor, and director simply can’t be underestimated.
Indeed, for the first 14 or 15 years of their Hollywood journeys, Ramis and Murray were almost inseparable. Even when Ramis wasn’t lending his recognisable bespectacled face to Murray’s movies, such as Stripes, he was directing him to seminal performances in absurdly memorable comic capers like Caddyshack, or writing many of his best lines in the Ghostbusters movies.
In fact, to an entire generation, Ramis and Murray will always be Egon Spengler and Peter Venkman from that beloved comedy-horror behemoth, two wryly funny scientists who proved to kids everywhere that they truly weren’t afraid of no ghosts. Picturing them as those characters only made it harder for folks to accept it when the two icons, who counted each other as close friends throughout this period, went through the messiest of breakups in 1992.
At that time, Murray reportedly signed up to make Groundhog Day, a time loop tale of a TV weatherman being forced to relive the same day over and over again, on the strength of a rewrite Ramis did of original scribe Danny Rubin’s script. Strangely, though, he then began picking it over with a fine-toothed comb during pre-production, seemingly wanting to push the project in a more philosophical direction than the impeccably crafted, family comedy Ramis had written.
This fundamental difference in vision ensured the project was fraught with tension from the beginning. As Rubin told The New Yorker, it got to the point where Ramis refused to take Murray’s 2am phone calls anymore, while Murray would mouth “I’m not here” when Ramis called him. “They were like two brothers who weren’t getting along,” Rubin regretfully admitted.
Unfortunately, the situation became even more untenable during the shoot, where it seemed like Murray was never happy and would do things purely to fuck with people. For instance, he hired a deaf personal assistant, but nobody in the production was prepared for that, and didn’t speak sign language. Ramis also claimed he would routinely contradict his instructions, and his behaviour with fellow cast members was erratic at best, upsetting at worst. “At times, Bill was just really irrationally mean and unavailable; he was constantly late on set,” Ramis recalled. “What I’d want to say to him is just what we tell our children: ‘You don’t have to throw tantrums to get what you want. Just say what you want.’”
Horrifyingly, the situation became so hostile on one particularly stressful day that the normally calm and collected Ramis blew a gasket and grabbed Murray by the collar, before hurling him against a wall. After this, the two former buddies didn’t speak for two full decades, with Murray finally breaking the detente when Ramis was on his deathbed in 2014. He simply turned up one random morning with doughnuts and a police escort – a 100% patented Murray gag – and they reminisced about the old times for a few hours.
Sensibly, Groundhog Day wasn’t mentioned.
