Forever sealing his place in urban lore as the most interesting man on the Internet, Bill Murray took to Reddit Friday night for a surprise AMA (“ask me anythingâ€) to promote The Monuments Men. Thankfully, the Redditors asked all the right questions, and Murray’s responses were by turns candid and cagey (and often quite long). We’ve compiled some of the best bits below, though we recommend you read the whole thing yourself:
On golf:
“My favorite place to play golf is in Ireland. That’s where my ancestors come from, and it’s the most beautiful country to play golf in, and when you come as a guest to play golf you are treated like a king. And the last place I played golf? Well the last place I can think of is I was working on a job in Hawaii with Emma Stone, and one day I got to play golf at a place called Weilea on a place called Oahu. I played with Scott Simpson, and I played with 3 other great, great Hawaiian guys who were SO much fun and so positive, and one was the club champion. And when you play with great players, you play better, it just elevates your game. A high tide raises all boats, you’ve heard that one? I played so well, I won $50. Winning $50 playing golf? That’s money. So I won $50, and they couldn’t believe I could putt, and that I didn’t choke. We played into the sunset on the pacific ocean, with leaning palm trees, laughing the entire time. But then this very positive group of people said on the next day, “we want to take you on a outrigger canoe to go surfing waves in the pacific.â€
It was delirious. It was something everyone should get a chance to do. That was a round of golf, where it went EVEN further. And they now are my friends. And I went from the surf, to the plane, and that was the end of my job. I was all salty, I had a lei around my neck, I was charmed.â€
On The Fantastic Mister Fox:
“Well that was great fun. It was great fun, because it just dragged on and on and on. And it was this fun bunch of people. First we went to our friend’s farm, and we all stayed at her place for a handful of days while we recorded during the day and then at night we would have these magnificent meals and we would all tell stories. We had a LOT of great food, a lot of great wine and great stories. It went on until people started literally falling from their chairs and being taken away. And then we had to go to another place and do it again, we went to George’s place, but then something happen and the whole party broke up, and George said “you don’t have to go, do ya†and I didn’t, so we just kicked around Northern Italy for a while. It was a real fiesta. And then Wes was working in England, so I had to fly to England for like 3 days to re-record, but the re-recording only took about 70 minutes, so that was fun. And then I had to go to Paris, once again, another disaster having to go to Paris to re-record for 20 minutes. It was a terrible, terrible experience. That was a really good job and he did a great job on the film. And Wes’ brother Eric did a great job as the character, he was just amazing. To me he was the high point of the whole thing. And the artisans working in England that built all those sets and did all that work, the mechanicals, to see them work - that was like a treasure. That was like getting to go backstage to see the finest artists at work.â€
On his favorite Bill Murray film:
“Well, I did a film with Jim Jarmusch called Broken Flowers, but I really enjoyed that movie. I enjoyed the script that he wrote. He asked me if I could do a movie, and I said ‘I gotta stay home, but if you make a movie that i could shoot within one hour of my house, I’ll do it.’ So he found those locations. And I did the movie. And when it was done, I thought ‘this movie is so good, I thought I should stop.’ I didn’t think I could do any better than Broken Flowers, it’s a film that is completely realized, and beautiful, and I thought I had done all I could do to it as an actor. And then 6-7 months later someone asked me to work again, so I worked again, but for a few months I thought I couldn’t do any better than that.â€
On sandwiches:
“You know, there’s a place not far from Warner Brothers, I think it was called the Godfather? And they made all kinds of sandwiches with smashed avocado and sprouts and stuff like that. And they really tasted good. And when you were having a bad day, I remember a particularly rough movie, you’d get sandwiches from this place. And they were very filling and very tasty, and then you’d forget about the morning.â€
But not the weird kind:
“I like pickles, I put pickles in lots of sandwiches. I’m big on pickles, but I’ve never had them with peanut butter. I really like peanut butter though. I’m kind of surprised because I like them both so much that I haven’t combined them.â€
On Garfield and the Coen brothers:
“I had a hilarious experience with Garfield. I only read a few pages of it, and I kind of wanted to do a cartoon movie, because I had looked at the screenplay and it said ‘Joel Cohen’ on it. And I wasn’t thinking clearly, but it was spelled Cohen, not Coen. I love the Coen brothers movies. I think that Joel Coen is a wonderful comedic mind.â€
On his urban legends, particularly the one about the french fries:
“Well I have no idea what you’re talking about.â€
On what he whispered at the end of Lost In Translation:
“You know? I forget.â€