In April of this year, it was rumored Dan Aykroyd had called Bill Murray and said, “stop acting like a jerk” when it came to “Ghostbusters 3.”
Murray asked to be killed off at the beginning of the movie, and appear as a ghost only, but he’s been badmouthing the project pretty much anytime anyone’s asked him about it.
Either way, if Aykroyd did make that call, Murray’s not really heeded the plea to stop shitting all over the upcoming project.
Speaking to GQ in this month’s issue, Murray was all over it again, even though he tried to “not hurt anyone’s feelings.”
“It’s all a bunch of crock. It’s a crock. There was a story—and I gotta be careful here, I don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. When I hurt someone’s feelings, I really want to hurt them. [laughs] Harold Ramis said, Oh, I’ve got these guys, they write on The Office [Gene Stupnitsky,Lee Eisenberg], and they’re really funny. They’re going to write the next ‘Ghostbusters.’ And they had just written this movie that he had directed.
‘Year One.’ Well, I never went to see ‘Year One,’ but people who did, including other Ghostbusters, said it was one of the worst things they had ever seen in their lives. So that dream just vaporized. That was gone. But it’s the studio that really wants this thing. It’s a franchise. It’s a franchise, and they made a whole lot of money on ‘Ghostbusters.'”
We kinda feel bad for Ramis/Aykroyd and co. as they seem to be clinging to the project as some sort of last stab at respectability. And we hope people keep asking Murray about the film, if only to hear more of the quips he seems to have saved up in case he gets more questions about the project.
Well he's right on the money about Year One. Seriously how could you ever trust anyone involved with that movie ever again?
But the interview goes on, and it gets a little bit more hopeful:
GQ: Oh, sure, I remember. The soundtrack. The lunchboxes. The action figures.
MURRAY: Right. And it's still one of the biggest movies of all time. And ever since that story broke, everywhere I go people are like, "So are you gonna make that movie?" I was down in Austin at South by Southwest, and you go at it hard down there—fun but, man, you need to sleep for days afterwards. Anyhow, I got into it one night with a bunch of younger people who were like, Oh, I love Peter Venkman! I grew up with Peter Venkman! We got to talking, and the more we talked about it, the more I thought, Oh Christ, I should just do this thing.
GQ: A generation awaits, for sure. You weren't even supposed to play that role, right?
MURRAY: Yeah. Originally it was Belushi. Like a lot of my movies. [beat] God, John died, what was it, twenty-five years ago?
GQ: It was '82, right?
MURRAY: Yeah, I think it was '82. I dunno. That part of life is getting fuzzy.
GQ: I read that you wanted to play a ghost in the movie. That's kind of brilliant.
MURRAY: Well, I hadn't wanted to do the movie. They kept asking, and I kept saying no. So once upon a time I said, just joking: "If you kill me off in the first reel, then fine, I'll do it." And then supposedly they came up with an idea where they kill me off and I was a ghost in the movie. Kinda clever, really.
GQ: But has the Zombieland cameo stolen that gag?
MURRAY: [genuinely confused] But that was a zombie. Not a ghost.
'year one' was a special kind of bad