'I know how to be sour'

In his new film, Lost in Translation, Bill Murray is jet-lagged, cynical, a little grumpy. And the character he plays is even worse. Geoffrey Macnab catches up with him

* Geoffrey Macnab
* The Guardian,
* Thursday January 1 2004

Imagine that you are very far from home in a place where nobody understands you. Your body feels all pummelled up. The jet lag is so severe that sleeping is impossible. Everything is so unfamiliar that you half suspect you're on Mars. This, says Bill Murray, is precisely the sensation he experienced when he arrived in Tokyo to appear in Sofia Coppola's new movie, Lost in Translation. "It's almost like being held prisoner somewhere. You feel like you're being tortured because you can't sleep when you want to sleep. You go to work and you're tired all the time at work and then you go home and you can't sleep. That lasts for weeks."

In the film, Murray plays the equally jet-lagged Bob Harris, a successful but long-in-the-tooth movie star who has come to Japan to appear in a whiskey commercial and thereby earn an easy, if humiliating, $2m. He is staying at the Park Hyatt, a luxurious high-rise hotel whose many concessions to western guests (among them a New York Grill and a French restaurant) serve only to heighten the sense of cultural estrangement that he feels. During the day, the tuxedo-wearing Harris sits like a somnambulist under the studio lights shooting his booze commercial or striking Rat Pack poses for the photographers. (Murray confesses that the fatalistic look of self-loathing Harris adopts for the camera was mainly borrowed from Harrison Ford, whose grimacing face was plastered on billboards all over Tokyo, advertising Asahi beer.) During the sleepless nights, he drinks or sits on his bed in his tiny dressing gown and white slippers, channel-hopping through incomprehensible TV game shows and samurai movies.

Murray excels at playing crusty but good-hearted curmudgeons. "I know how to be sour. I know that taste," he says. It's little surprise to learn that Coppola wrote the role of Harris with him in mind, and then campaigned vigorously to persuade him to take it. As he prepares for the umpteenth take of the commercial, or slumps forlornly in the bar, nursing a whiskey, Murray's Bob has that same air of weary stoicism that made the actor so memorable as the weather forecaster in Groundhog Day, reliving the same day ad nauseam in a backwater American town.

In Groundhog Day, too, he was stuck in a hotel he couldn't escape, but Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, was considerably less glamorous than his gilded, high-rise cage in Lost in Translation. "Before we made Groundhog Day, the writer and I visited Punxsutawney," he remembers. "We got to the only hotel in the town. I woke up at 5am and took a shower. The water was freezing cold. I went downstairs and said that there was no hot water. And the woman behind the counter said, 'Oh, of course, there wouldn't be any hot water today. Today is the only day in the year that the hotel is even close to full.'"

Murray again has problems with showers in Lost in Translation. Early on, we see him wrestling with the shower head, but he can't get it any higher than his chest. In the end, he has to stoop to wash. An added burden is his celebrity. Hotel guests keep on recognising him and trying to engage him in conversation. He brushes them off, usually with politeness but sometimes with sardonic bad humour. It's a routine Murray knows well. "I always like to say to people who want to be rich and famous, try being rich first," he says. "See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside about being rich other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour-job."

Murray doesn't speak much to the press. The 53-year-old actor is a droll and articulate interviewee, but clearly feels as exasperated by his own fame as Harris does in the movie. "You know the theory of cell irritability?" he asks. "If you take an amoeba cell and poke it a thousand times, it will change and then re-form into its original shape. And then, the thousandth time you poke this amoeba, the cell will completely collapse and become nothing. That's kind of what it's like being famous. People say hi, how are you doing, and after the thousandth time, you just get angry; you really pop."

Lost in Translation is only partly a satire on the perils of celebrity. More importantly, it's a film about the pleasures (as well as the perils) of being adrift in a foreign culture. It's also a delicately told and strangely chaste love story that several critics have compared to David Lean's Brief Encounter. Just as he's about to "go pop", the disgruntled movie star meets a young woman who entrances him. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is a newly married Yale philosophy graduate also staying in the Hyatt. Her photographer husband is too busy working to pay much attention to her and she has as much time to kill as Harris does. The two talk, start up a friendship, go out on the town together.

There's a strange dynamic to their relationship. They're open with each other, but strangely hesitant about expressing their feelings. Harris has a wife back home in the US who is constantly sending him carpet samples and soliciting his opinion about how they should redecorate their house. Both he and Charlotte realise that their time together will be brief. "The film is about these moments in your life when you have a connection for a few days, an exchange," Coppola says, "but part of what I like is that being in a foreign atmosphere exaggerates what they're going through."

Coppola has been accused of trading on caricatures of the Japanese. In one contentious but very funny scene, a scantily clad prostitute turns up in Harris's room and says to the bemused movie actor: "Lick my tights! Lick my tights!" She has been sent to pleasure him and what she is really requesting is that he rip her tights. When Harris proves reluctant to do so, she gets him in a leglock. "The actress playing her was very powerful. She had strong quadriceps. And she was fierce. And she had really sharp shoes, really sharp heels. I should have got stunt pay," Murray says of the scene. He has no truck with the idea that it is cheap humour at the expense of the Japanese. The real butt of the joke, he argues, is the hapless American, forever misinterpreting the culture into which he has been plunged.

"Many people say, 'Do you think this is offensive to the Japanese?' Well, I know the Japanese are laughing more at the Americanisms than we are laughing at the Japanese-isms... they love watching the stupidity of the foreigner in Tokyo. They're not offended at all. They know that the bowing is funny and that their language is impenetrable to the rest of the world."

It's now awards season in Hollywood, and the trade papers are full of ads reading: "For Your Consideration Best Actor: Bill Murray." Predictably, he professes himself entirely uninterested in whether he is nominated for anything or not. He has spent the past few months away from the din in Italy, shooting The Life Aquatic for director Wes Anderson (with whom he also worked on Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums). "It's about a fellow a bit like Jacques Cousteau who has lost his funding. He's an undersea explorer who doesn't have enough money to go too deep," he says of the new film.

No, winning gongs doesn't mean much to him. "I'm over the Oscar thing. I feel that if you really want an Oscar, you're in trouble. It's like wanting to be married - you'll take anybody. If you want the Oscar really badly, it becomes a naked desire and ambition. It becomes very unattractive. I've seen it. The nice thing is that I'm over here in Europe making a movie and so I don't need to worry about it."

· Lost in Translation is released on January 9.