Bill Murray

.

Wes Anderson’s love letter to French cinema and homage to print journalism comes in the form of his upcoming film, The French Dispatch, in which he has recruited the Anderson ensemble of usual suspects including Bill Murray, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Owen Wilson, and Bob Balaban, and has added some new faces to his well-worn troupe, including Alex Lawther, Timothée Chalamet, Lea Seydoux and Elisabeth Moss. At the New York Film Festival, the esteemed writer-director-producer joined some of his cast via Zoom from Cinchón, Spain, on the outskirts of Madrid, where he is shooting Asteroid City to discuss this much-anticipated new film.

Film fans of a certain age will likely always associate Bill Murray foremost with the anarchic comedies of his early career – the words “It just doesn’t matter!,” from his iconic “demotivational” speech in Meatballs, forever ringing in their ears. But like a fine wine, the 70-year-old actor seems to be just getting better with age.

Bill Murray plays a father in the comedy On the Rocks directed by Sofia Coppola.   In 1998 he told the journalists of the Hollywood Foreign Press how he gave up on his premed studies to join his older brother Brian at Second City’s improvisation comedy troupe in Chicago.

A dastardly plot to exile all canines, an island made of trash, a near-futuristic “Japanese archipelago” as backdrop for a story which resonates eerily with the world we live in today. Wes Anderson’s latest stop motion Japan-tinged homage transports us to a world steeped in the work of Hayao Miyazaki and Akira Kurosawa’s early “city movies”, with a hint of The Little Prince for good measure.

Ghosts of all kinds were very much in the minds of Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray when they came to see us back in June 1984. “Beyond American cinema, even Bergman loves the use of ghosts and devils visiting the Earth and that kind of thing”, Dan Aykroyd told us.