The film so good it almost made Bill Murray quit acting

An actor both part of, and standing away from, the Hollywood movie industry, Bill Murray is an ironic, coolly detached cultural icon who has come to inspire a whole new generation of like-minded individuals. Without an agent or manager, Murray operates on his own plane of existence, only accepting offers for roles through a personal telephone number and voicemail that he infrequently checks.

With an eclectic array of past endeavours, including a musical, comedy film A Very Murray Christmas, random public appearances in wedding photos and multiple cameos across the history of cinema, Bill Murray has become one of cinema’s most beloved and unique performers. Dedicated to bringing his own brand of cynical humour to the forefront of alternative culture. Bill Murray somehow still remains the warm, friendly, sarcastic, endearing personality that he built his career on.

In fostering this personality, Murray has created a magnetising persona, with the likes of Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola and Harold Ramis each using the actor for their creative visions. No filmmaker has captured the image and persona of Bill Murray better than the American eccentric Jim Jarmusch, however, featuring the actor in such movies as Coffee and Cigarettes, Broken Flowers and The Dead Don’t Die.

It was the duo’s second collaboration in the 2005 movie Broken Flowers that had the biggest effect on Murray, with the actor playing Don Johnson, a man who receives an anonymous letter from a former lover informing him that he has a son who may be looking for him.

Loving his own work in the movie, Murray even considered quitting acting after production wrapped as he didn’t think he could do any better ever again. “Well, I did a film with Jim Jarmusch called Broken Flowers, but I really enjoyed that movie,” he told Rolling Stone in 2014 when asked what his favourite movie of his career has been.

“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,” Murray hilariously recalled about the movie’s production that won Jim Jarsmuch the Grand Jury Prize at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, as well as Palme d’Or nomination.

“When it was done, I thought ‘this movie is so good, I thought I should stop.’ I didn’t think I could do any better than Broken Flowers,” Murray exclaimed, overjoyed with how the movie turned out. Continuing, he added, “It’s a film that is completely realized, and beautiful, and I thought I had done all I could do to it as an actor. And then 6-7 months later someone asked me to work again, so I worked again, but for a few months I thought I couldn’t do any better than that”.

Bill Murray will soon be collaborating with Wes Anderson for the tenth time in the upcoming movie Asteroid City, where he will star with Maya Hawke, Sophia Lillis, Tom Hanks and Scarlett Johansson.