Bill Murray Reflects on Choice to Play ‘Garfield’
By GQ magazine’s math, Bill Murray has agreed to “exactly four prolonged media encounters in the past ten years — and when he does, it’s never clear what you’re going to get.”
Fortunately for us all, the funnyman with more cred than almost anyone to ever earn a laugh agreed to one more long sit-down, for GQ’s annual comedy issue.
“Sitting across from Bill Murray was basically the most terrifying, wonderful thing I have ever done in my career. The man is an American treasure and I still can’t believe I met him,” GQ senior editor Dan Fierman told PopEater of the experience. “Candid as hell, too.”
The results are dynamite — the 59-year-old star riffs on why on earth he made ‘Garfield,’ the many TV shows he’s never seen, and if he’ll be involved with a third ‘Ghostbusters.’
First off, why ‘Garfield’? “I didn’t make that for the dough! Well, not completely. I thought it would be kind of fun, because doing a voice is challenging, and I’d never done that. Plus, I looked at the script, and it said, “So-and-so and Joel Coen.” And I thought: ‘Christ, well, I love those Coens! They’re funny.’ So I sorta read a few pages of it and thought, ‘Yeah, I’d like to do that.’ Then this studio guy calls me up out of nowhere, and I had a nice conversation with him. No bulls***, no schmooze, none of that stuff. We just talked for a long time about the movie. Finally, I went out to LA to record my lines.
And what was it like, recording the dialogue for a movie that eventually notched a sorry 15% on RottenTomatoes? “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 f*** was Coen thinking?’ And then they explained it to me: It wasn’t written by that Joel Coen.”
The saving grace of ‘Garfield’? “The mind reader, pretty girl, really curvy girl, body’s one in a million? What’s her name? Help me. You know who I mean. [Interviewer: “Jennifer Love Hewitt?”] “Right! At least they had her in good-looking clothes. Best thing about the movie.”
Anything happening with a third ‘Ghostbusters’? “It’s all a bunch of crock. It’s a crock. There was a story — and I gotta be careful here, I don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. When I hurt someone’s feelings, I really want to hurt them. [laughs] Harold Ramis said, Oh, I’ve got these guys, they write on ‘The Office,’ and they’re really funny. They’re going to write the next ‘Ghostbusters.’ And they had just written this movie that he had directed…”
…which was ‘Year One’: “Well, I never went to see ‘Year One,’ but people who did, including other Ghostbusters, said it was one of the worst things they had ever seen in their lives. So that dream just vaporized. That was gone. But it’s the studio that really wants this thing. It’s a franchise. It’s a franchise, and they made a whole lot of money on ‘Ghostbusters.'”
He hasn’t seen ‘Community’: “I’m hoping it’s funny. It looks kind of funny. Chevy in life can really be funny. I don’t see him that often anymore, but in life he’s a hell of a lot more fun than I am — he’s always going; he really, really, really wants to make people laugh. But I haven’t watched it.”
What else hasn’t he seen? “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. [Interviewer: ‘” ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’?”] No! The other one. With the other guy. ‘Seinfeld’! I never saw ‘Seinfeld.’ Really! I never saw ‘Seinfeld’ until the final episode, and that’s the only one I saw. And it was terrible. I’m watching, thinking, ‘This isn’t funny at all. It’s terrible!’ ”
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