While the saga of a new Ghostbusters drags ever-onwards, Bill Murray has given a revealing interview to Variety about his reluctance to return as goofball scientist/phantasm exterminator Peter Venkman while hinting at being open to the reboot Paul Feig will direct.
“The studio gets really crazy about it,” Murray said. “What they really want to do is resurrect a franchise. The first one was a spectacular movie, one of the greatest movies. The second one was [makes an unimpressed sound]. It had some moves. It had a few good scenes in it. People say, ‘Bill, you could get so rich!’ I’m ok. I don’t look it, but I’m doing ok.”
Murray is also surprisingly–or perhaps not so surprisingly–candid about some of the treatments he’s read over the film’s decades-long development hell period, including by his old pal Dan Aykroyd… you know, the one he allegedly shredded and sent back.
“I read one that Danny wrote that was crazy bizarre and too crazy to comprehend,” Murray says, while also commenting on the draft that Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg wrote for Ivan Reitman to direct. “It was kind of funny, but not well executed.”
Reitman has since dropped out of the race to make a third Ghostbusters after the death of Harold Ramis, although Murray supposedly “left the door open” to appear in the version Paul Feig and Katie Dippold are writing right now, potentially as a different character.
“Those guys, Danny and Harold, were at the top of their game,” Murray says of the original creators in 1984. “They were burning nitro at that moment. Unless you have a really clear vision, you’re always trying to recreate that.”
After completing three potentially big comedies, St. Vincent, Rock the Kasbah and the upcoming Untitled Cameron Crowe project, Murray hopes that he could be “sitting in a different chair in a year. If all three of these are as good as I think they are, it could be easy. I won’t have to think about ‘Ghostbusters’ all the time.”
