Bill Murray is expected for lunch in a quiet backwater at the Cannes film festival. A limousine with tinted
windows edges its way around a line of parked cars along the narrow street. A posse of film types
assembles to greet the star and the car doors are opened with a
flourish. Out steps an unknown couple, surprised at the fuss. As they do so, a scooter splutters into view, sounding like a clapped-out lawnmower, with Murray's familiar figure perched on the saddle.
"I always like to have my life in my own hands," he says.
Of the Hollywood stars who have made a business out of laughter on screen, Murray is one of the most enduring. Other comics who
followed him into the movies from America's anarchic Saturday Night Live (SNL) have gone on to greater riches -- Jim Carrey and Mike Myers among them -- but, at 55, Murray is recognized by his
contemporaries as the king. Will Ferrell, the latest SNL recruit to films, can recall each twist of Murray's act.
"He would come on as a guest and I'd watch him from the sidelines, thinking, `How can he be so cool?"'
Murray's confidence, though, is surprisingly fragile. He'd had a terrific audience reaction to the previous night's premiere of his latest film, Broken Flowers -- indeed, it was on the strength of this that he'd agreed to meet me.
"I'm happy," he says.
At the premiere, he says, he'd been uncertain and edgy.
Once the applause started, it went on for five minutes. Broken Flowers went on to win the Grand Prix, regarded as the festival's runner-up prize.
Murray plays a successful,
middle-aged man called Don Johnston -- and yes, there are several in-jokes about Don Johnson of Miami Vice in the script. He is dumped by his latest girlfriend.
Johnston begins to crisscross America in search of clues from four old flames: Laura (Sharon Stone), Dora (Frances Conroy), Carmen (Jessica Lange) and Penny (Tilda Swinton).
"Just the very thought of someone my age going to visit old girlfriends had instant appeal," says Murray.
What gave it an added frisson was that Jim Jarmusch, an independent director, was not under the sway of any film studio. He told his actors they could play their first scene with Murray any way they wanted. "Tilda Swinton's first words to me were, `What the fuck do you want, Donny?'" Murray recalls. "They kept that line in -- it really woke me up."
At last year's Oscars, when he was beaten to a best actor award for his performance in Lost In Translation, he alone among the other four nominees didn't applaud Sean Penn's victory.
Murray has made more than 40 movies and there's still no big prize in sight. Comedy, however well done, is at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to awards. He knows it. So do Steve Martin, Jim Carrey and Mike Myers. "Even Charlie Chaplin knew it," Murray says.
Four years ago, he was in hot water on the set of the high-profile Charlie's Angels, in which he played the Angels' chief, John Bosley, with a glamorous line-up of Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu. He made a chance remark to Liu about the quality of the script.
"She got furious with me because she thought it was a personal assault," he says.
Murray did not feature in the sequel. He was getting a reputation as not the easiest man to work with.
By the late 1990s he was in need of a box-office success and quality, and he found them both with three independent, or at least
independent-minded, film-makers: Wes Anderson, Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola. With them, he reinvented himself.
For Anderson, he was a
somewhat sinister industrialist in Rushmore, Gwyneth Paltrow's
uptight husband in The Royal Tenenbaums, and, most recently, nonchalantly funny as a washed-up marine explorer in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,
appearing much of the time in a wetsuit and capitalizing on the
pathos and sense of expected failure that have always been enjoyable elements in his performances.
Murray's second wife, Jennifer Butler, is at home in Los Angeles. She rarely travels with him because they have three young sons.
"I know what it's like to be that stranger's voice calling in," he admits.
There is also that little-discussed subject -- loneliness.
"The oddest feeling of all was after the death of my mother, Lucille, 10 years ago. My father had already died, but I always had some attachment to our big family while she was alive. She was from the previous generation, which kept us all going. She was always interested in all of us and would pass on all the news from various uncles and aunts. But when she died, I felt bereft. It seems strange to say now that I felt so lonely, yet I did ... I feel like shedding a tear here and now just talking about it."
You wouldn't have known. Murray's face does not change much. An occasional frown, perhaps, or a tightness around the eyes, an overall impression that he would rather not be here talking about himself.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist