My God Has an Answering Machine

Everyone worships something. Mine is Bill Murray. I arrived at this somewhere around my third viewing of Lost in Translation and never reconsidered. Someone who can move from Ghostbusters to Groundhog Day to Scrooged and then, quietly, make the most melancholy film of the early 2000s with Sofia Coppola—that isn’t a career. That’s a theology.

In a 2018 Arte Tracks interview, Murray, then 67, explained the phone situation: an answering machine. No agent, no manager handling his messages, no publicist as filter. You want him in your film, you leave a message. He might call back. Award ceremonies he compared to dental appointments—necessary, tolerable in retrospect, unpleasant in the exact moment of sitting through them—which is the most accurate description of those events I’ve encountered.

On why he operates this way: I shut myself off to have a bit more freedom, for the things I have to do and want to do. I can really turn anything into a disaster. If I manage to keep a certain amount of disaster out of my life—some of the chaotic influences—that’s good. It gives me a real chance at a life.

The part that stays with me is what comes next. Going out into the world without hesitation, throwing himself into unfamiliar situations—that’s the counterweight to the hermetic existence. He lives in a creative bubble, he says, but he’s not afraid of people. He just doesn’t give them his number. The silence funds the courage for everything else.

I don’t know if this is wisdom or an elegant rationalization for being a recluse. Probably both. But the idea—that you protect the quiet not to avoid the world but to be able to actually enter it when you do—is something worth sitting with for a while. Whether your own god has said anything this useful lately is entirely your concern.