The 36th Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) presented its highest honor, the Maltin Modern Master Award (established in 1995, and then re-named to recognize long-time renowned film critic Leonard Maltin in 2015), to actor Bill Murray during a live virtual presentation on April 2nd. The award was created to honor an individual who has enriched our culture through accomplishments in the motion picture industry, and in celebrating his work from On the Rocks and Rushmore to Groundhog Day and Ghostbusters, as well as so many titles in between, it was easy to see why the Academy Award-nominated actor is an American film legend.

During the 90-minute presentation and conversation, featuring clips from many of Murray’s films, the actor shared insight and inspiration about a number of the filmmakers that he’s worked with in his career. The highlights of the conversation that follow chronicle what lead him to acting, the adjustment in going from improv comedy to film, his experience on the set of all of the Ghostbusters films that he’s been a part of, including the upcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the false pretenses he agreed to be in Ghostbusters 2 under, working with directors Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola, how he felt about Andie MacDowell’s hair while making Groundhog Day, and why he hasn’t directed more.

Question: Did you envision yourself a movie actor, when you were just starting out in show business?

BILL MURRAY: I had a job before I thought of doing it for a living. One night on stage, I did something and I thought, “Hey, that’s pretty good. I could do this for a living.” That’s when I decided I could do it. And then, from there, I came to realize that the more fun I had doing my job, the better I was at it. I looked around at my friends and I thought, “Well, that’s as good as anyone can do,” to have a job that you have to have fun to be good at it. So, I stuck with it.

Have you had the experience of making a film where you and your co-stars all had a wonderful experience, but the movie sucked?

MURRAY: I don’t think that ever really happened. There were only a couple movies that weren’t wonderful and that I enjoy watching, but there were some that turned out mysterious and that didn’t quite work. There was only one that was an extraordinary time, and a great visit with great actors and great people and in a great landscape, where it was just a puzzle that we didn’t exactly solve. So, it happened once. I’ve been lucky.

Who did you enjoy watching when you were a kid?

MURRAY: To me, what’s more interesting is the people that I really didn’t get when I was younger. There are people that I didn’t quite understand when I was younger, that later I got to really like. The person that jumps into my mind is Jack Benny. He was a fella who I thought was a little bit dry for a 10-year-old or a 12-year-old, but later when I watched him, I saw that he was so deft. His timing was so precise. His face was such a beautiful photograph that I would turn on the TV and record him, just to go back and watch him. Jack Benny was perfect, absolutely perfect. And I didn’t really care for John Wayne much when I was a kid. I thought he was stiff. But later, I got to like him and watched him more. I thought he had extraordinary self-control and he didn’t push it. He let the story come to him. He let himself be the vehicle of the story, much better than I ever appreciated when I was a kid. Cary Grant is another one where people thought, “Well, he’s just a really good-looking guy,” but I can watch North by Northwest at any hour of the day. If it’s on TV, I can’t not watch it. Part of it’s Hitchcock and Eva Marie Saint is beautiful, but Cary Grant is just stunning in that role and he does so many things. He’s funny, he’s romantic, he’s heavy, he’s frightened. It’s a really nice performance, and he did it, all the time. Unfortunately, he had this beautiful body and handsome face, and people didn’t take it seriously.

In some of your early films, you and your colleagues established a persona for you that lead people to believe you were that guy because you made it look so easy.

MURRAY: Well, it’s not easy. Someone recently said, “I saw your last movie. I hope they didn’t pay you because you were just being yourself.” I just rattled back, “You know, it’s harder than you think to be yourself. Why don’t you try it sometime?” It’s not so easy to do. That part of it is the life challenge, really.

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Image via Columbia Pictures

RELATED: ‘Ghostbusters: Afterlife’ Gets New Release Date (Again)

What was it like to work with Ivan Reitman and Harold Ramis so early on in your career?

MURRAY: In the early days, Ivan Reitman promised that, if the movie wasn’t good, it would never be released. Ivan was just a knucklehead Canadian who was smuggled out of Czechoslovakia in the bottom of a boat, so all we could do was make fun of him and kid him, all the time. He certainly learned how to make movies. I made a handful with him and they really did all work. And Harold was someone that I knew from the Second City theater in Chicago. He was in the theater with my brother Brian. My brother Brian is the reason I ended up an actor. I had no other prospects. I’d run down there to hide out from the eyes of judgment, and seeing the show so many times, I thought I’d try my luck at it. It was far harder than I thought, but that’s how I got to it. But I knew Harold and he was very generous with me. He was very kind to me, when I was just a young punk. I was lucky with them, and that’s part of the luck that I’ve had. I was lucky to be hanging onto the coattails of those people, [John] Belushi and Danny Aykroyd, especially, and the people who went out there and did it first. I learned so much by watching them. You say you never imitate someone, but when I first started, I sure sounded like my brother Brian. They used to give me scenes of his to do in Second City, and I think I must have sounded so much like him that people thought, “Oh, Brian’s back in the show.”

Was there any kind of adjustment for you, going from improv comedy to film?

MURRAY: The most difficult thing is when you tell a joke or say something funny and no one laughs for nine months. You have this incomplete feeling in your gut that something’s wrong and you wonder why you’re not sleeping correctly. And then, when you go to the movie, you realize, “Oh, I said something funny, a long time ago, and no one laughed.” When you see it with an audience, you’re like, “Oh, thank God that’s over. What a relief that was.”

On Ghostbusters, were you expected and encouraged to improvise on set, or did you have to work all of that out before the shoot?

MURRAY: I don’t know how you’d do it before, unless you were writing it. Rehearsal is for losers. I think we all know that. We just like to get out there and do it. A script is two dimensions. A script can be as good as can be, but when you enter the physical world, and you have to stand, move, walk and talk, something arrives that’s unexpected and unaccounted for, and that’s where you make your bones, in what happens there. A movie that is lifeless is one where sometimes the script is all you get, and the actors give you the script and don’t take into it all that’s happening in the moment of the real shooting. There’s a lot going on in the moment, and the more you can notice it, be aware of it and transmit that, the more alive the scene becomes and the more alive the film becomes. That movie had great cinematography, with László Kovács. A lot of special effects movies look pretty weak nowadays, but that movie still has got a real look to it that’s pretty legit. It was ahead of its time. We had great special effects people. It was a hard job. The four of us – Ernie Hudson, Danny, Harold and I – knew we were gonna sink or swim together, so we were always looking out for each other. We were constantly making sure that everybody was pumping and all getting it.

As far as improvising goes, Harold was the mind and brain of the Ghostbusters, Danny was the heart of the Ghostbusters, Ernie was the soul of the Ghostbusters, and I was the mouth of the Ghostbusters. I got to talk a lot. When the special effects start to rear their ugly head, that’s when I had to work a little bit and earn my money and earn my keep to comment on it, as an audience member and the wiseacre of our group, in order to keep some false courage up about what we were going after, which we were truly terrified of. Even the sets were scary to us, really. It was frightening, with the electricity and all of those kinds of things. The stunts were really scary and dangerous. I’ve done most of my stunts, all my life, but one I said I wasn’t gonna do because it was a wire stunt. The stunt guy said, “I’ll handle this one,” and he flew so far up in the air and landed with his crotch right on the corner of this marble table. I’m not always right, but when I’m right like that, I feel it. It was a very painful moment, and you can see it in the movie. If that had been me hitting the table, you would have heard an unbelievable scream. I just think about how I cheated death in the film business and I cheated manhood that day.

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Image via Sony

Were you reluctant to do Ghostbusters 2?

MURRAY: Yes, I was very, very reluctant to do it. I was in absolutely no hurry. I probably thought that the only reason anyone would want another one was just to make money. And I was probably the most reluctant. Someone outfoxed me anyway. I don’t know if Ivan set it up, but they got us all back together in a room, and really, we hadn’t been together in a room since the movie came out and it was just really, really fun to be together. We were really funny together. Those are some really wonderful, really funny guys and girls. Sigourney [Weaver] and Annie Potts are some really spectacular women and funny as hell. They got us all together and they pitched a story idea that was really great. I thought, “Holy cow, we could make that work.”

It ended up not being the story they wrote. They got us in the sequel under false pretenses. Harold had this great idea, but by the time we got to shooting it, I showed up on set and went, “What the hell is this? What is this thing?” But we were already shooting it, so we had to figure out how to make it work. That was a great bunch of people. Just to be together was great. I probably like the first one better than the second one, just because the first cut is the deepest. We were in New York and we really made a mess in New York for a couple of months, but we had a lot of fun. People in New York will accept things, but those uniforms, when we rolled into places, people thought, “They’ve got these cool uniforms. They must be somebody.” People thought we were legitimate. When we drove that car through red lights and one-way streets, it just looked like we were in charge of the situation. It was a lot of fun, that first one. We didn’t get away with that much on the second one.

You’ve participated in every iteration of Ghostbusters.

MURRAY: Yes, that’s true. I did the one that the ladies did, and those are some of my favorite funny people. Those girls are so funny. You talk about improvising, and they did nothing but fire grenades, all day long. I sat in amazement, watching them. They circled the globe. You want a trip around the world, do a scene with those four girls sometime. That was interesting. It’s interesting to be a guy and listen to girls talk. You don’t get that opportunity, all the time, to listen to women at their most direct and frank, especially women who are that funny. I was just happy to be a fly on the wall, most of the day. And there’s gonna be another one. Ivan’s son, Jason, did one. I remember him calling me and saying, “I’ve got an idea for another Ghostbusters. I’ve had this idea for years.” I thought, “What the heck could that possibly be?” I remember him when he was a kid. I remember his Bar Mitzvah. I was like, “What the heck? What does this kid know?” But he had a really, really wonderful idea that he wrote with another wonderful guy that I got to work with, Gil Kenan, who made City of Ember. The two of them wrote a Ghostbusters movie that really brings it back to life. It really has the feel of the first one, more than the second one or the girls’ one. It has a different feel than two out of four.

I think he’s really got something. It was hard. It was really hard. That’s why I think it’s gonna be good. We were just in it for a little while, but it was physically painful. Wearing those packs is extremely uncomfortable. We had batteries the size of batteries. They now have batteries the size of earrings. It’s still a really heavy thing to wear, all the time. The special effects in this one are a lot of wind and dirt in your face, and there was a lot of going down and getting back up. I was like, “What is this? What am I doing? These are like Bulgarian deadlifts, or a Russian kettlebell, getting up and down with this thing on my back.” It was very uncomfortable. Usually, when something has a very high misery quotient, something comes of that and some quality is produced that, if you can capture it and project it, comes on the screen and affects you. I think it comes out sometime in the fall. They’ve delayed it for a year or a year and a half, but I’m glad they did. It will be worth seeing.

How did you come into Wes Anderson’s orbit?

MURRAY: I kept getting these notes from my agent, who kept sending me cassettes of his first film, Bottle Rocket. I probably have the largest collection of Bottle Rocket of any man on the planet, and I still haven’t seen the movie. I just never got around to watching it. Finally, they sent me the script of Rushmore and they said, “Would you like to meet this man?” And I said, “That’s not necessary.” They really wanted me to do it and they went, “What?!” I said, “He knows exactly what he wants to do.” When I read the script, I knew this was a guy who knew exactly what he was gonna do. They said, “Do you wanna meet him?” I said, “It’s not necessary. When do we shoot it?” It was like that. I’ve been very fortunate to work with Wes on all of his other movies, except for that one I haven’t seen. At first, it was an afterthought, but we’ve become great friends. He really makes movie-making an experience. I used to envy those old-timers who went to Hawaii and shot Hurricane, and they had to stay in Hawaii for five and a half months for a good storm. That was living. That was really being a movie actor, back then. But Wes’ movies are similar. We go to a place, we take over a small place, and that’s all you do, is the movie. There’s nothing else, but making that movie and being with the people that are making that movie. All of your daily life is just more gris for the mill. It’s more that you can bring to the job when you shoot. He really makes the making of movies and experience, and I love that. And every movie he makes just gets better and better and better.

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Image via Columbia Pictures

What do you remember about Groundhog Day?

MURRAY: Andie MacDowell drove me absolutely crazy on that movie. She drove me absolutely nuts. We were always waiting for Andie MacDowell’s hair. The fact is, Andie MacDowell has the greatest hair you have ever seen, in your life. When she finally would arrive, you had to just give up because that hair was really great, but she did drive me crazy. I’ve thought about it many times, that I owe her a real apology because she did drive me crazy. I’m not really method, but I must have really resented the fact that she still hadn’t fallen in love with me. We were 17 weeks into the movie and she still didn’t like me. That’s probably what I was holding onto. That was my method actor reserve. I must have read that in an article about acting. But I’d like to put on the record that her performance in the film is really, really, really good. I don’t mean really good, I mean what’s better that really good. It’s very good. It’s really great. That was a hard movie to make. It was just as hard for her, and she had that hair to deal with.

How have you enjoyed working with Sofia Coppola?

MURRAY: I love Sofia. It’s great because the longer I know her, the more I love her and the more I get to love about her. I see that she’s a real full-blown American woman. She’s a working mother and artist, and a sister and a wife. She’s all of those things, and I am none of those things. It’s fun. I completely get to give myself up to it. I can really admire all of those things because I am none of them. We met through work, and when she goes to work, she knows exactly what she wants. We call her the boss and we call her the velvet hammer. She’s a delicate lady, but she’s an absolute brute to anyone who tries to get her off of her intention. You can have a good idea and she’ll recognize a good idea, but no matter how charming, flattering or powerfully you present a bad idea, she’ll just say, “No, I don’t think so.” It’s really fun to watch. I don’t get it much myself because I don’t bother to try. I wait for when she’s really weak, at the end of the day. I love to watch her with other people, when they try to pitch something. It’s fascinating. It’s like watching a magician from backstage. It’s a delight.

Her family makes this wine too, so you get your hands on some of that wine, every once in a while. She’s got a wonderful husband, who’s a great musician, and her brother Roman feels like I got an extra brother. I just feel like he’s someone who’s so compassionate and so forgiving. I think I’ve had some of my worst behavior around Roman, and I didn’t hear anything about it, the next day. There was no blowback the next day. He’s also someone that loves making films. The whole family has got that virus, and they’re very helpful with each other and creative with each other. Roman works with Wes, too. He’s like the godbrother with both of those directors (Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola) for me.

Sofia’s most recent film (On the Rocks) is a really great exploration of what it’s like to be a modern woman. For Rashida Jones and Sofia to get together and talk about what it’s like to have a father that can take a lot of oxygen out of a room sometimes and a father that can fill the space was really challenging to work. I felt a great obligation to those two to try my best. It’s a delicate subject to talk about your family, or even to talk about a director that you worked closely with and you relate to. We made a Christmas movie. That’s a long shot, to make a Christmas movie. That can be pretty sappy. It can be incredibly disappointing and it can miss. It can fall and land flat. She squeezed gooseberries of emotion out of all kinds of scenes. There was emotional juice, all over the place. All of the actors threw in on it, without any real certainty of what we were gonna do or how it was gonna turn out, and it was delightful to watch. She and Roman made that happen. I just had faith. She far surpassed anything I thought anyone could do with that idea and script.

You’re such a creative person and yet you’ve only directed once, on Quick Change, and you’ve written very little. Why is that? Why haven’t you done that more often?

MURRAY: Well, I haven’t gotten around to business yet. I’ve gotta get to work. I really think that I should be writing. I really do wish to be a writer. I can write in fits and spurts, and I can write some dialogue and some scenes, but to write a full-length anything is a different thing. I haven’t knuckled down. I really enjoyed directing and I thought I was gonna do it all the time because I liked it. I like working with actors and I understand actors. I thought, “I could do that.” But my life changed, and to direct a movie, it takes a long time out of your life to make each and every film. When it was time for me to continue directing movies, I didn’t have that time to give. There are people that keep directing. Clint Eastwood made a movie last year and he’s 90. I don’t know how he does it, but he keeps after it. He just keeps writing stories. I’ve been really lucky to work with people like Sofia, Jim Jarmusch, Wes and Ruben Fleischer, who made Zombieland. It’s an embarrassment that I’m sure makes other actors go, “That lucky stiff. How does he get to work with those people? What did he ever do? Why? Isn’t he dead? Didn’t he die?” But maybe I’ll get around to it. Maybe the smoke will clear and I’ll get focused. Maybe I’ll learn something from working with these people that know what they’re doing.

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Image via A24

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