Bill Murray Made Common Mistake of Thinking 'Garfield' Was Coen Brothers Film
In a recent interview with GQ, Bill Murray took the time to answer some questions about his career, what he watches, Ghostbusters 3 (it's almost surely not happening--in part because Year One was so undeserving of a Year Two) and, most importantly, why he did Garfield. For the money? A little for the money. To build a bizarre continuity in which Bill Murray does the live-action version of every cartoon character voiced by Lorenzo Music? You'd think. No, it turns out it was mostly because he thought it was written by Joel Coen:
No! I didn't make [Garfield] for the dough! Well, not completely. I thought it would be kind of fun, because doing a voice is challenging, and I'd never done that. Plus, I looked at the script, and it said, "So-and-so and Joel Coen." And I thought: Christ, well, I love those Coens! They're funny. So I sorta read a few pages of it and thought, Yeah, I'd like to do that.... Finally, I went out to L.A. to record my lines. And usually when you're looping a movie, if it takes two days, that's a lot. I don't know if I should even tell this story, because it's kind of mean. [beat] What the hell? It's interesting. So I worked all day and kept going, "That's the line? Well, I can't say that." And you sit there and go, What can I say that will make this funny? And make it make sense? And I worked. I was exhausted, soaked with sweat, and the lines got worse and worse. And I said, "Okay, you better show me the whole rest of the movie, so we can see what we're dealing with." So I sat down and watched the whole thing, and I kept saying, "Who the hell cut this thing? Who did this? What the fuck was Coen thinking?" And then they explained it to me: It wasn't written by that Joel Coen.
The existence of Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties makes me a bit skeptical of this story, but let's not worry too much about that. More importantly, you need to read his amazing physical description of Jennifer Love Hewitt:
At least they had what's-her-name. The mind reader, pretty girl, really curvy girl, body's one in a million? What's her name? Help me. You know who I mean.
Someone needs to make that her IMDb bio.