Bill Murray Lost in Translation (2003)
Bill Murray was fifty-two when Lost in Translation was shot, twenty-five years out of Saturday Night Live, fifteen years past Scrooged and Ghostbusters II, and four years out of Wes Anderson's Rushmore (1998), the film widely understood to have begun the second act of his career. Sofia Coppola wrote Bob Harris for him.
Born in Wilmette, made by SNL
William James Murray was born in 1950 in Wilmette, Illinois, the fifth of nine children in an Irish Catholic family. He attended Regis University in Denver, dropped out after a marijuana arrest, and joined Chicago's Second City improv troupe in 1973, then moved to The National Lampoon Radio Hour and joined the Saturday Night Live cast in 1977 as Chevy Chase's replacement.
The film career that followed — Meatballs (1979), Caddyshack (1980), Stripes (1981), Tootsie (1982), Ghostbusters (1984), Scrooged (1988), Groundhog Day (1993) — established him as the most successful of the SNL generation, a comic actor whose deadpan could carry an entire picture. Groundhog Day, directed by Harold Ramis, is widely cited as the inflection point — a comedy that turned out to be about something, and that suggested Murray could do work the franchise pictures were not asking of him.
Wes Anderson and the second act
Rushmore (1998) cast Murray as Herman Blume, a melancholic industrial steel magnate, and the performance reframed him as a serious actor who happened to be funny. He has worked with Wes Anderson on every Anderson feature since: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), The Darjeeling Limited (2007), Moonrise Kingdom (2012), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and after.
"Bill is a great instrument. You set him in a room and you let him be present. The hardest thing about working with him is figuring out how to find him; the easy part is what happens once he is there." — Wes Anderson, The New Yorker (2018)
Coppola wrote Bob Harris for him
Coppola has said in many interviews that the part was Murray's from the first draft, and that she would not have made the picture if he had said no. There was no agent. The part was offered through a 1-800 number Murray checked irregularly, through Wes Anderson, through Mitch Glazer, through anyone Coppola could get to leave a message.
"I just had a feeling about him. There's a sadness underneath. He could do all that physical comedy and still you'd see this person who had been thinking about something for a long time. That was Bob." — Sofia Coppola, The Guardian (2017)
Murray flew to Tokyo and shot for about ten days. He has said in interviews that he was reluctant — Coppola was thirty-one, this was her second feature, and the script was unusually short — and that he took the part partly out of curiosity about whether something like the script could be shot at all.
"I read the script and there was nothing to it. It was sketches. I thought, either this woman is going to make a beautiful movie, or it's going to be a disaster, and I won't know which until we get there." — Bill Murray, Charlie Rose (2003)
What the performance does
Bob Harris does almost nothing for ninety minutes. He sits in elevators looking down at the businessmen around himb3; he fields Lydia's faxes and calls about carpet swatchesb14; he stares at the ceiling. The work is in the face — Murray underplays so consistently that the small moments where he commits read with disproportionate force. The "More Than This" karaokeb18 is the great example — Murray sings ragged and committed, and the scene works because Charlotte's face says so.
"Bill Murray gives the performance of his career, in the rare way that screen acting at its most exposed is given. He doesn't act sad. He is sad. The camera meets him where he is." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (2003)
The street whisper at the climaxb37 is improvised; Murray has said in interviews that he does not remember the exact words and would not say them if he did.
After Lost in Translation
Murray was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar — the only nomination of his career — and lost to Sean Penn for Mystic River. The post-Translation work has remained heavily Anderson- and indie-coded: Broken Flowers (2005) for Jim Jarmusch, St. Vincent (2014), the Wes Anderson cycle, voiceover and supporting parts. He has not, since Translation, headlined a comparable lead.