Bill Murray Is Ready to Laugh Again

[Lodestar]

Interview with Bill Murray
Vanity Fair (Dec. 2015)

(excerpt)

Murray pulls his car over to the side of the road. The rain beats down on the windshield. I have no idea where he has brought me or why we are sitting, parked in the storm. Murray looks to his left and I follow his gaze. We are parked across the street from the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the scene of the nightmarish Charleston slaughter only a few months earlier. Murray stares at the now familiar white church, the flowers on the pavement in the rain, the painted cross on which someone has written “forgiveness.”

We sit for a long while. Murray finally starts the car and pulls off into traffic. He looks straight ahead. “I find myself driving here. Often.”

There is a weight and thoughtfulness to Murray. An equally powerful shadow companion, I guess, to the free and spontaneous fun engine. I remind Murray that I wrote the part of Richie Lanz, the burnt-out rock manager in the movie Rock the Kasbah, eight years earlier, partly because of a conversation he’d had with film critic Elvis Mitchell. Mitchell was concerned that Murray had done a string of somber roles and that it was affecting his life, actually hurting his life.

Murray turns down the SteelDrivers on the radio. “Well, it was very generous of him to say, ‘Look, your life is very melancholy right now and you’re doing melancholy movies. So what do you think’s gonna happen? It’s just gonna get worse.’ Which is what was happening. For years I’d been thinking, ‘Gosh, I’d really like to be funny again.’ You know? ‘I’d really like to go and be funny again.’ Because it’s like writing. If you can write, you need to write. And if you can be funny, you need to be funny.”

//

Question: ..can’t your inner self, your true self, be shaken, diminished, compromised, or even stolen from you?


Murray shakes his head. “It can’t be diminished, because it’s supreme. It really is supreme. It can’t be diminished. The only thing is if you don’t listen to it enough, you don’t hear it enough. That voice can’t be diminished. It can only be under-utilized—and mine is under-utilized. Everyone’s is under-utilized. I mean, God, I’m just so shallow, most of my day. You know? Most of my week, most of my month and year and life. But there is this desire, this wish to do better. Not in a competitive sense, but to just arrive, to show up. It’s when you kind of quiet down, slow things down—everything sort of turns back inside and sort of re-settles. Then, maybe, you can hear something.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/11/bill-murray-mitch-glazer-cover-story


Me too Bill!

[underpants]

1. Cool

[BeyondGeography]

2. That's a great artist speaking

Nothing less than a soulmate of Beethoven.

[dhill926]

3. great article....