“You will feel it”: Wes Anderson explains what makes Bill Murray such a “powerful force”
For better or worse, Bill Murray has always been known as one of Hollywood’s unique personalities, which has won him plenty of admirers and quite a few enemies along the way.
Famously difficult to contact, Murray can only be contacted if he wants to be contacted, but his regular collaborator Wes Anderson is among the select few talents who can bank on his involvement in whatever part he’s being presented with.
Sofia Coppola spent months trying to track down the elusive star because she couldn’t imagine Lost in Translation being made by anyone else, but it’s not something Anderson has to involve himself with. After all, since his appearance in Rushmore, Murray has gone on to appear in nine of the filmmaker’s following 11 features, and in the case of Asteroid City, he still factored into the marketing despite being left on the cutting room floor.
On the other hand, Murray’s combative nature has put him at loggerheads with a number of co-stars and creative partners over the years, a list that stretches from Lucy Liu and Richard Dreyfuss to McG and Chevy Chase via Anjelica Huston’s inability to figure out whether he loved or loathed her when they were shooting Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
He’s unique, to put it one way, with Anderson in a better position than most to explain why. As he put it to the BBC, there’s a set of indescribable intangibles that make Murray who he is. “He’s a powerful force and you will feel it, whatever his mood is,” he said. “There is something sort of heroic about him too. He can sweep everyone up and that’s part of what makes him a star.”
The writer and director recalled attending a Sheryl Crow concert in New York City, where a crowd slowly began growing ever larger as more and more people discovered Murray was in their vicinity, leaving Anderson to acknowledge how he’d “never seen anything like it in my life”.
There’s a very specific form of magnetism that’s kept Murray so popular for what’s closing in on half a century, with Anderson putting it down to nothing more than the presence and aura he projects in every facet of his existence. Stars are stars for a reason, and as he offered, “the secret to his thing is whatever that is”.
By doing nothing more than being himself, Anderson was left mesmerised by the natural pull Murray projects, which has folks flocking to him in their droves whenever he’s spied out in public. That type of star quality is something that can’t be taught, but the filmmaker has nonetheless found a way to weaponize it by making the Saturday Night Live veteran the most famous member of his on-camera inner circle.
