Bill Murray Opens Up To Reddit; His Brother Was His Biggest Influence; SNL’s Cast With Kristen Wiig Was Best Since Original; Strangest Experience

Bill Murray did a Reddit session on Friday. Bill opened about his biggest influence, his brother Brian Doyle Murray, about the new SNL cast and his strangest experience.

Bill Murray movies are classics in broad and nuanced comedy. Bill was scouted from National Lampoon Radio Hour to come into living rooms across the country, replacing Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live. Murry earned an Emmy for that and then went to make the blockbuster comedies Meatballs in 1979, Caddyshack in 1980, Ghostbusters in 1984, What About Bob? In 1991, and Groundhog Day in 1993.

Bill Murray got a second wind after he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for 2003's Lost in Translation. He went on to do a series of films with director Wes Anderson including Rushmore in 1998, The Royal Tenenbaums in 2001), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou in 2004, Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2009 and Moonrise Kingdom in  2012).

On Friday, Bill Murray participated in an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit. Talking about the new SNL cast, Murray said "They're good. I don't know them as well as I knew the previous one."

Bill Murray said he believes the Saturday Night Live cast that was led by Kristen Wiig was the best cast since the original. "They were my favorite group. Some really talented people that were all comedians of some kind or another. You think about Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, all these wonderful funny guys. But the last group with Kristen Wiig and those characters, they were a bunch of actors and their stuff was just different.

But it wasn't just the Not Ready for Primetime players. Murray says "It's all about the writing, the writing is such a challenge and you are trying to write backwards to fit 90 minutes between dress rehearsal and the airing. And sometimes the writers don't get the whole thing figured out, it's not like a play where you can rehearse it several times. So good actors - and those were really good actors, and there are some great actors in this current group as well I might add - they seem to be able to solve writing problems, improvisational actors, can solve them on their feet. They can solve it during the performance, and make a scene work. It's not like we were improvising when we made the shows, but you could feel ways to make things better. And when you get into the third dimension, as opposed to the printed page, you can see ways to solve things and write things live that other sorts of professionals don't necessarily have. And that's why I like that previous group. So this group, there are definitely some actors in this group, I see them working in the same way and making scenes go. They really roll very nicely, they have great momentum, and it seems like they are calm in the moment."

Murray said he had the most fun in movies making Broken Flowers in 2005. He said "When it was done, I thought 'this movie is so good, I thought I should stop." And also "Well, I did a film with Jim Jarmusch called Broken Flowers, but I really enjoyed that movie. I enjoyed the script that he wrote. He asked me if I could do a movie, and I said "I gotta stay home, but if you make a movie that i could shoot within one hour of my house, I'll do it." So he found those locations. And I did the movie.

Sadly, when Murray signed on to do Garfield he thought was doing a Coen Brothers movie because he screenplay was credited to "Joel Cohen."

Who was Murray's biggest influence? His brother, Brian Doyle Murray, recently seen on "The Middle" and the cartoons "Spongebob" and "Flapjack."  Bill says "He made much of what I am possible. To this day, if I have a question about something ethical or about being an actor or entertainer or a person or something like that, he's a person who helped form me. Shooting scenes with him is delightful. The idea that the two of us get to entertain is a kick."

The strangest experience Bill Murray has ever had? He says "The oddest... well, I was eating at a sushi bar. I would go to sushi bars with a book I had called "Making out in Japanese." it was a small paperback book, with questions like "can we get into the back seat?" "do your parents know about me?" "do you have a curfew?" And I would say to the sushi chef "Do you have a curfew? Do your parents know about us? And can we get into the back seat?" And I would always have a lot of fun with that, but that one particular day, he said "would you like some fresh eel?" and I said "yes I would." so he came back with a fresh eel, a live eel, and then he walked back behind a screen and came back in 10 seconds with a no-longer-alive eel. It was the freshest thing I had ever eaten in my life. It was such a funny moment to see something that was alive that no longer was alive, that was my food, in 30 seconds.

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