“A fair amount of misery”: the movie Bill Murray hated making so much he can’t even talk about it
Compared to many other jobs, acting sounds pretty easy: you dress up, pretend to be someone else, get paid, and go home. And yet, thespians seem to love making things as difficult as possible for themselves, with Bill Murray just one of many examples.
If he’d only been cited as a problem on one set, then you could call it an isolated incident. However, the fact that it’s happened multiple times over a number of decades would suggest that he might be the problem, even if he remains unwilling to atone for the many sins he’s been accused of committing.
The whole ‘comedian as tortured genius’ thing has bordered on cliché for a long time, and as good as Murray has repeatedly proven himself as both a comedic and dramatic actor, his personality becoming the number one issue on so many productions is something that largely went unchecked until Aziz Ansari’s Being Mortal was shut down and mothballed.
He fought with Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live, got into it with both Lucy Liu and McG on Charlie’s Angels, treated Anjelica Huston like shit on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, deliberately antagonised Richard Dreyfuss on What About Bob?, and those are just some of his behind-the-scenes misdemeanours.
Most people would be fine with the prospect of being miserable for a few months if the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was millions of dollars, but not Murray. In fact, he found the entire experience of making Richard Donner’s festive favourite, Scrooged, so dejecting that he’d rather not have it brought up in his presence.
“That’s a tough one; I still have trouble talking about it,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “I thought it was an extraordinary script, but I saw a different movie from what the director saw. There was a fair amount of misery making it. We disagreed so much that neither of us was particularly happy with it.”
Again, Donner worked with many of Hollywood’s biggest stars and brashest personalities throughout his career, and none of them had a bad word to say about him. Pretty much the only person who’s ever spoken negatively of the Lethal Weapon helmer is Quentin Tarantino, and Murray, of course.
From the beginning, it was clear that they wouldn’t get along. Once he’d agreed to headline the picture for the sum of $6 million, the SNL veteran demanded several sweeping changes to the script, which he deviated from anyway, punched producer Michael O’Donoughue in the arm after he questioned his improvisation, and became increasingly difficult for Donner to wrangle.
The filmmaker conceded that “you don’t direct him, you pull him back,” and even that was an issue for Murray, who wasn’t fond of being pulled back. While Scrooged endures as a staple of the Christmastime viewing calendar, for the leading man, it’s one he’d rather forget.
