Flashback: Bill Murray on Belushi & Ghostbusters
Bill Murray is back on the big screen with Moonrise Kingdom, his sixth collaboration with indie director Wes Anderson, and we're flashing back to Murray's first major interview with ET in the summer of 1984, just days after Ghostbusters hit theaters.
Watch the video for his take on the big-budget blockbuster-to-be, his rowdy Saturday Night Live days -- and the death of good friend John Belushi.
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"I think people really embraced John and demanded a great amount from him," he said in defense of his good friend, who died of a drug overdose just two years earlier. "They demanded a lot of attention from him because he was something really special; he was a monster on the stage. … He made millions of people laugh. He was a big, big human being. He had extraordinary appetites, he had extraordinary talents. He was like Babe Ruth, you know? Eat 50 hot dogs and then he could hit 60 home runs."
Asked what made Murray impervious to "that whole overconsumption scene," he replied sarcastically, "I don't want you to put me on a pedestal or anything. I'm just as obnoxious as anybody you've ever met. I'm one of the most horrible people you'll ever meet, and I'm this close to you." He added that Belushi's death should be remembered as an accident, and that a fatal accident could happen to anybody: "It could have been me."
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As for his Ghostbusters experience, Murray mused, "We spent a month inside with no doors open and smoke machines and dust machines and wind machines and really terrible conditions carrying these really heavy things on our back, so everyone's body was bent."
Of reuniting with former SNL pal Dan Aykroyd on the now-iconic movie, "We had a lot of fun because it's just so silly. We used to work in a theater with no props, a couple of hats and some chairs, and all of a sudden there's these monstrous machines and giant sets and we're thinking, This has gone too far."