The 10 Best Things Bill Murray Said at Comic-Con

Bill Murray took the Hall H stage to promote his new film, Rock the Kasbah, and shared a lot of wisdom

The very first Hall H panel of this year’s Comic-Con International was reserved for Open Road Films, although no announcement of what to expect was made available, listed in the official schedules as “TBD.” Congoers that made it into the 7,000 set auditorium were not disappointed, however, as the entire panel wound up being dedicated to director Barry Levinson’s upcoming comedy drama Rock the Kasbah. Making his first-ever Comic-Con appearance, the legendary Bill Murray took to the stage alongside screenwriter Mitch Glazer.

Glazer and Murray first worked together on Richard Donner’s 1988 Christmas comedy Scrooged, although they met some time prior with Glazer recalling being introduced by John Belushi on the set of “Saturday Night Live” as “the new kid.” Ever since, Glazer and Murray have been close friends.

“He sang every verse of ‘Brandy’ at my wedding,” Glazer laughed. “There’s still people waiting for it to end, I think.”

Glazer likened Bill Murray’s Rock the Kasbah character, aging rock manager Richie Lanz, to his old recurring “SNL” role as Jerry Aldini.

“This character is Aldini three or four decades later,” explained Glazer. “It hasn’t gone well, unfortunately.”

“If you’ve ever tried to get in the side door of any venue,” Murray added, “You’ve met a guy like this.”

The highlight of the panel came in Bill Murray’s responses to fans with his answers ranging from anecdotes about his co-stars to some impressive philosophical statements about finding one’s own place in the universe. We’ve assembled ten of the best things that Murray had to say and you can check them all out below! You can also take a look in the gallery viewer at the bottom of this page for some stills of Murray in and around Hall H, including several of his run-in with a very excited Jennifer Lawrence!

Bill Murray on Comic-Con International

“I have a taser with me,” Murray laughed. “I didn’t know what to expect. I honestly didn’t know what my place was [at Comic-Con] before I came. I’ve been nearby and seen just sort of television coverage of what’s happening. I must say, it feels wonderful to be in this room. It really does…  I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it’s passion or what. I liked when a lot of people get really excited about something. There’s a lot of people who don’t get excited about much at all. That only get excited about food or TV or something. The fact that you’re all excited and, really, the forums. The creative forums. That’s pretty cool. It’s nerdy, but some of the best parties I’ve ever been to were with really insane nerds.”

Bill Murray on His Approach to Working

“Try to be as relaxed as possible,” he said. “That’s really the key to how I like to work. Be as relaxed as you can be. That makes people feel comfortable. I came from Chicago and the Second City Theatre where I was taught by a guy named Del Close. You don’t have to get intense when you’re working. Just try to make the other person look good and then you don’t have to worry about yourself.”

Bill Murray on His Favorite Role

“Well,” Bill Murray smiled when a fan dressed as a Ghostbuster asked him about his favorite part he ever played, “Once upon a time, I did save the city of New York. And I had the coolest damn car to drive around Manhattan.”

Bill Murray on Bruce Willis

“I got to work with him on ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ and we had a great time,” Bill Murray recalled of working with Bruce Willis, first on the Wes Anderson film and now on Rock the Kasbah. “It turns out we had an ancient history that no one was aware of that he was aware of… When I was on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Bruce was a page. That’s a job that’s kind of like a slave. Like an intern/slave. His job was actually to refill the M&M and peanut bowls in the actors’ dressing rooms. Years later, after a couple of tequilas, he said, ‘Only you and Gilda were nice to me!… He’s a movie star. You hear stories about people, but when you’re the movie star — a real movie star, and he’s a good one — you sometimes have to take matters into your own hands. In the name of entertainment, for one. In the name, more often than you’d think, just of respecting the crew. There are people who try and sort of take over situations and dominate people. I don’t want to say ‘producer slime’ specifically, but there are people that want to take control of a group situation and dominate. That’s a personality flaw. A movie star can step into the middle of it and say, ‘That ain’t gonna happen, boss! That ain’t gonna happen!’ They’ll get a little loud and they’ll get in someone’s face. That story gets repeated because that person got loud or that person got in someone’s face… Sometimes they get really loud and ugly and cantankerous in the name of protecting the integrity of the job. It’s not just the script or the hours that you have to work, but how the crew is treated or the food they’re serving. It’s a lot of things.”

Bill Murray on Zooey Deschanel

“She can really sing,” said Bill Murray of another Rock the Kasbah co-star. “Actually, we had a wrap party on a galleon. A ship. Literally a three-masted ship that they turned into a bar somewhere in Morocco. It’s karaoke night, right? She chooses to sing ‘We Are the World’ as her karaoke song. Do you know how hard that is to sing that song? Try it sometime. It’s up there to sing. She’s got to imitate the pitches and notes of like 14 of the greatest singers in America. It’s a staggering piece of work. If she died tomorrow, I’d say her karaoke work will live forever.”

Bill Murray on Miley Cyrus

“I’m going to say this officially,” Bill Murray proudly announced. “Miley Cyrus is good. I wasn’t convinced at first, but Miley Cyrus is really f–ing good. She can really sing. I thought she was just a knucklehead crazy girl. The kind of girl you want to go on a road trip with who didn’t have ID or something. She can really sing. She floored everybody. Paul Shaffer. George Clooney. Everybody. So I don’t want to hear anymore bad rapping on Miley Cyrus.”

Bill Murray on Being Nervous

“See if you can make it move up to your hips,” Bill Murray told one fan who said that his knees were shaking as he tried to ask a question. “If you get your hips moving, your arms are going to go above your head and it’s all going to happen.”

Bill Murray on Educating Through Entertainment

“You don’t have an obligation to educate through your work,” Bill Murray told the crowd “… You just do it, if you do it correctly. But I think that if you set out with that intention of ‘I’m going to educate people with my work,’ you’re sort of aiming at the curb. You’re not exactly aiming at the stars. I think that if you educate people with your work, you’re aiming even higher. You’re not even offering to educate people about, say, the issue of women in Afghanistan or freedom somewhere. You’re talking about trying to live by principals that we only aspire to. That we most don’t achieve. That we mostly don’t attain. You don’t take yourself so seriously, but you try your hardest to comport yourself to be alive. Now. To be alive now. If we can all just be alive inside our skin now and not next to us or in the aisle in front of us or down the road. If we can be in our skin right now then, as a group, we’re all elevated. We’re all going up. We’re all rising.”

Bill Murray on Personal Responsibility

“When you got to a place that’s so foreign,” Bill Murray said, “you’re on another continent. You’re in another culture. A combination culture. A country that has been invaded by the French and the Spanish and the Berbers. They’ve had their own wars. You can feel the wind get pulled from the ocean by the Sahara. Full, moist air to the desert. It’s an extraordinary sensation to be there… There was a night in Marrakech where we were at a restaurant which you wouldn’t even notice. It looks like a sort of industrial, Stucco building downtown. You open the door and it’s this magical tile, fern, water, light building that has been there for centuries. You go inside this thing and you march through this entire building to the roof. On the roof, they’ve made the accommodation where they serve vodka and tequila. There’s a two-man band. Just a man with a four-string instrument and a drum. They’re playing something you’ve never heard in your life. You’re on top of the city overlooking the market. The stars are above you and there’s this rhythm that’s thousands of years old and you think, ‘I’m just a guy from Illinois and I’m here being able to touch and listen to something that has affected people for many centuries.’ You’re just reminded that you have a responsibility to take what you’re given and pass it on. Transform yourself somehow and pass it on.”

Bill Murray on Bringing About Change

“The world is changing,” Bill Murray eloquently put it, “It’s very slow. It’s very slow and it doesn’t change the way we want it. There is a justice in the world. It just doesn’t come when we want it. It comes slowly. It’s planetary. It’s universal. It comes, but it comes very slowly. You can hit a table and say, ‘This is wrong!’ That doesn’t mean it’s going to change overnight. There’s a flag flying from a building in South Carolina that people are really upset about. It’s going to change. But it doesn’t change because someone says so. There’s something that’s gotta change in the way that it is. We were a country that was founded with a glorious Declaration of Independence at a time when we still had slavery. The deal was, ‘Okay, we’ll sign it,’ but in 1820, the laws started changing and people had to start giving away their slaves. If you really look at the history of it, they made a deal. They were like, ‘We’re going to end slavery, but we can’t get it done today.’ They made a 50-year plan to get it done. It’s insane, but that was the way where you had to make some kind of compromise with the people who wouldn’t bend back then. It was wrong. It’s still wrong. But you can only make it happen so fast. So how do you make a change? It really starts with yourself. We are slaves ourselves. We’re slaves to our weakness. We’re slaves to our bodies. We’re slaves to our emotions. If you can free your own self, that’s really the best thing you can do. That state that you attain affects everyone around you.” 

If you haven’t seen it yet, be sure to check out the trailer for Rock the Kasbah, which hits the big screen October 23 and also stars Kate Hudson, Zooey Deschanel, Danny McBride, Scott Caan, Bruce Willis and Leem Lubany.