Bill Murray brought his particular brand of jocularity to Cannes while discussing his various relationships with filmmakers and, in particular, directors.
“Sometimes when you work with a director you know you not only may never see him again, sometimes you hope you never seen him again,” Murray told a packed press conference straight after a screening of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, which opens this year’s Cannes Film Festival In Competition.
“And that goes for the director as well. They can’t wait for you to leave. They drive you to the airport to make sure you leave. That happens,”
Murray deadpanned. “With Wes, I’ve never gotten a ride to the airport.”
At what was one of the starriest opening pressers in recent memory with Tilda Swinton, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Bob Balaban and Roman Coppola joining Murray, Anderson and the film’s two debutant stars Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, the emerging theme was certainly one of Anderson love.
Willis, described by Murray as a “massive movie star,”said he was pleased to have been told what to do.
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“I found it really refreshing to be directed and to be asked to perform and to play a part in a really specificway,” Willis said.
All agreed that Anderson’s shoots, which sees his players all chip in together and have no trailers for his cast to hide out in, are fun.
“It’s clearly a family that has been created over the years,” Swinton said, after Murray had affectionately described her as a “monstrous” actress. “I felt like I had been invited to a wedding and one that I was really happy to be invited to,” the Oscar winning actress said.
Norton agreed with Anderson’s theory that his films were made in a similar way to working in theater, despite the director’s confession he doesn’t have much experience in that world.
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Said Norton: “As an actor I used to dream about how fun it would be to be a part of a troupe like that. Wes has put one together.”
But it was the ever-ready wit of Murray who outshone the day’s star power.
“These are what you call ‘art films’,” Murray said. “I don’t know if you know what those are, but they’re films where you work very, very long hours for no money. All we get is this trip to Cannes. That’s it. But fortunately we’ve saved from other jobs we’ve worked on, so we can (afford to) work with Wes over and over again.”
