I’ve sort of known Julie for some years now, and I’ve loved getting to hang out with her occasionally because we talk about books and old films and music and things that interest us. I’ve always liked her natural feminine intelligence.
Q: There’s a sense in the film that any given encounter with any person can turn momentous for Don…or not. This is perhaps something that is in your films; people come to each encounter pregnant with possibilities. Especially in this film, where Don is looking up all these women?
JJ: Well, it is something that echoes through my other films, I guess, because it’s such a valuable part of life. Randomness, or chance and coincidence – these things guide our lives. You can plan things out as much as you want, but the most beautiful, deep things in our lives are not rational; they’re usually emotional, or connections with other people – and those things are very mysterious. They add up to a whole fabric of life for me, and I’ve always tried to make films that were generally not of a genre. Dead Man used a Western genre as a kind of frame; Ghost Dog makes allusions to different genres of film, but hopefully isn’t any particular one of them, in the way that this film is not – to me – a romantic comedy, nor is it a tragic, morose film. It’s something in-between that I hope doesn’t have a category.
That relates to the question only in that, I like to make scenes where you have no idea what’s going to happen next and it’s not a formula. It’s sort of like Chaos Theory: things don’t happen in a rational way, they happen in more of an emotional way or a random way or by molecules in the universe moving in a way we don’t control…You can encounter any other person at any moment in your life without knowing exactly what’s going to happen. If you know exactly what’s going to happen, it’s not very interesting. You’re not walking away from it really changed in any way.
Q: So for you it’s not an issue of optimism or pessimism?
JJ: Not really. My other side of experience, is not optimistic because I see how people treat each other in the world, and how things that are valuable seem very rarely to be respected. And I get very disillusioned. So, I guess it’s a contradictory Zen answer, which is, it takes both sides to make the whole thing. For me, personally, I think my naïve side is optimistic. And I don’t mean “naïve,” necessarily derogatorily, because there’s a naïveté that allows people to create.
Bill Murray has a valuable childlike part of him. Somebody asked, while we were shooting, “How do you get Bill’s attention?” I said, “Well, if you sit down with some crayons and a coloring book and say, ‘Look, Bill, I’m coloring. Isn’t it fun?,’ he’s not interested. But if you sit down and ignore him and you’re coloring and he comes over and says, ‘What are you doing?’ And you say, ‘Ehhh, I’m coloring.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, can I color?’ ‘Yeah, let’s color.’”
One day, he walked right off the set – Don’s house – and walked across the street. I watched him; he didn’t knock on the neighbor’s door – we weren’t shooting in their house – and he opened their door and disappeared inside. What do you do? Well, it’s Bill; I’m not going to do anything. Ten minutes later, he came out of their house with a plate of cookies they’d given him. Now, how much more childlike can you get? That, to me, is a beautiful part of Bill Murray.
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