Esquire Interviews Bill Murray

Bill Murray is one of my favorite actors. I watch What About Bob at least once a year. Just thinking about curling up on the couch with a big bowl of sinfully buttered popcorn is enough to put a goofy smile on my face.

Mr. Murray did an interview for Esquire last month, here are my favorite it-could-apply-to-writing bits from it.

Bill Murray on his teacher/mentor Del Close:

He taught people to commit. ... You've gotta go out there and improvise and you've gotta be completely unafraid to die. You've got to be able to take a chance to die. And you have to die lots. You have to die all the time. You're goin' out there with just a whisper of an idea. The fear will make you clench up. That's the fear of dying. When you start and the first few lines don't grab and people are going like, "What's this? I'm not laughing and I'm not interested," then you just put your arms out like this and open way up and that allows your stuff to go out. Otherwise it's just stuck inside you.

 The next time I have writers block I'm going to try that!

On making a movie:

SR: It's amazing what goes into making a movie.

BM: But nobody cares. It's like talking about the difficulties of fame. Nobody gives a shit. No one could care less. But it's an amazing triumph even to make a bad movie. Even a crap film is really an extraordinary achievement. You're taking a two-dimensional object and making it three-dimensional. The number of people. The number of days. The number of cuts.

I think that applies to writing as well. Even if you think, "This is a bad book, this is the worst book ever," while you're writing, you still need to finish the book. And, really, it's probably not as bad as you think, but it's easy to be negative in-the-moment.

If you'd like to read the rest of Bill Murray's interview, click here: Bill Murray: The ESQ+A