The thing I liked about this Bill Murray interview at GQ (and apparently he doesn't give a lot of them) was how differently he judges filmic art as opposed to critics and us armchair-critics. While we get to watch a movie or a TV show and parse it out for however long we want, a dude like Bill Murray is too busy for that. As an artist, he has so much work to do regarding a piece that there's not a lot of time just to be part of an audience. He's got to get down to the nitty-gritty of creating. So, I think that's where he's coming from when he audaciously says, "I never saw the original Office. I never saw this Office. I never even saw Clerks. Like I never saw, what's-his-name, Larry David's show." (And by Larry David's show he doesn't mean Curb; he means Seinfeld).
But this sort-of utilitarian POV comes some pretty unique choices of projects and favorites. Like how if he respects your stuff, he'll work with you. How when Harold Ramis asked him to do Ghostbusters 3 with writers of The Office, Murray originally rejected because of what people were saying about their work on Year One. Or how he did Garfield because he saw the name Joel Coen on the script:
"Finally, I went out to L.A. to record my lines. And usually when you're looping a movie, if it takes two days, that's a lot. I don't know if I should even tell this story, because it's kind of mean. [beat] What the hell? It's interesting. So I worked all day and kept going, "That's the line? Well, I can't say that." And you sit there and go, What can I say that will make this funny? And make it make sense? And I worked. I was exhausted, soaked with sweat, and the lines got worse and worse. And I said, "Okay, you better show me the whole rest of the movie, so we can see what we're dealing with." So I sat down and watched the whole thing, and I kept saying, "Who the hell cut this thing? Who did this? What the fuck was Coen thinking?" And then they explained it to me: It wasn't written by that Joel Coen."
Funniest thing he says about Garfield is regarding its one saving grace: "At least they had what's-her-name. The mind reader, pretty girl, really curvy girl, body's one in a million? What's her name? [ed. it was Jennifer Love Hewitt]. At least they had her in good-looking clothes. Best thing about the movie. But that's all ugly. That's inappropriate. That's just… [laughs] That's why, when they say, "Any regrets?" at the end of Zombieland, I say, "Well, maybe Garfield."
The only thing that's not awesome about this awesome interview is that it bigs up all of Bill Murray's classics, except for his greatest classic. Check below:
