Bill Murray, left, and Naomi Watts in a scene from ‘The Friend.’Matt Infante/The Associated Press
“You have to be very fond of men,” Margeurite Duras wrote. “Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they’re simply unbearable.”
I happened upon that quote just after I’d seen The Friend, the new film written and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, based on the novel by Sigrid Nunez, which opens in theatres Friday. It had me thinking about charismatic rogues I’ve known, irrepressible charmers who blaze through life, trailing enthralled women behind them like the tail of a comet. They’re equal parts endearing and exasperating, these men – especially exasperating because no matter what they do, they remain endearing. But I was wondering if rogues have gone out of style. Will future generations, more wised-up than mine, reject their nonsense? Or will a foxy glint in the eye always be irresistible?
In The Friend, Bill Murray plays an archetypal rogue: Walter, a New York novelist and ex-academic on his third wife – all splendid women – with gallons of joie de vivre, a misconduct scandal he walked away from, an illegitimate adult daughter, Val (Sarah Pidgeon), circles of erudite friends and a massive Great Dane he rescued and grandly named Apollo (played by Bing, awfully charismatic himself). Naomi Watts plays Iris, a former lover of Walter’s who’s managed to remain an exasperated/enduring friend; he even gave her the great “gift” of convincing her to set aside her own novel to co-edit his correspondence – and thereby improve his relationship – with Val.
But as the film opens, Walter stuns Iris and everyone else by killing himself – and saddling her with Apollo, who at 68 kgs (150 lbs) outweighs her and overwhelms her rent-controlled apartment. Woman and dog are left to stumble through their grief together, and figure out how to mourn someone who literally hounds them even in death.
In a video interview on a recent Monday, I asked the writer/directors about the appeal of a rogue. (The duo has made several films together, including The Deep End, starring Tilda Swinton, and What Maisie Knew, starring Julianne Moore.) “It’s always interesting to tell stories about problematic people,” Siegel replied carefully. “Because if we’re honest with ourselves, we’re all problematic on some level.”
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Murray was the first rogue the pair thought of, too perfect to let typecasting get in the way. “He has gravitas, but he’s light on his feet,” Siegel says. “He keeps even dark things feeling like there’s a humorous undertone. Walter’s ego, his bon vivant relationship with women – Bill embodies those things before he opens his mouth.”
“Walter is absent from most of the movie,” McGehee adds. “But Bill is the kind of actor whose absence is a presence. You understand why people are thinking of him, even when he’s not around.”
Murray is notoriously hard to hire – hard even to reach. He has no assistant or agent; he manages his life by himself, on his phone. Inadvertently echoing their film, the writer/directors relied on Watts, who’d worked with Murray on St. Vincent (2014), to reach out to him. “She was a little allergic about us putting that on her,” Siegel admits. But Murray quickly signed on.
“All the stories about him are true,” McGehee says. “He’s idiosyncratic. You prepare for the week Bill Murray is coming, not 100-per-cent sure he’s going to. And there’s no one to call if he doesn’t.”
I can relate. Back when St. Vincent premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, I was next in line to meet with Murray when he spontaneously decided to take the entire cast to lunch. Which was jolly for them, but less so for we journalists who were robbed of interviews. On this Monday, here we are again: As the clocked ticks an hour past my appointed 10 minutes with Murray and Watts, the publicist admits, “We’re all waiting for Bill.”
And yet, and yet – the minute Murray appears on my screen, I feel my face softening. I’ve just liked watching him for so long.
I ask him if rogues know they’re rogues. “They know they feel authentic,” he replies. “They see what else is there and they go, ‘Nah, I’m not going to be that. I hear a voice that is mine, that I’m going to respond to, and that’s the voice that’s going to come out of me.‘”
“Walter was a truth-teller, even if it was hard to hear,” Watts says. “He was funny and smart and wise, so of course, he had a group of women completely enamoured with him at all times. Eccentric people will always stand out. But they need to be kind as well.”
Kind! Yes! I realize that in the pull of Murray’s magnetism, I must do what the filmmakers do in The Friend: Listen as attentively to the woman as the rogue. So Watts and I talk about how woman and dog “slowly melted into each other and grew from that connection.” How, in the many scenes of Iris alone with Apollo, she “didn’t feel alone as an actor, ever. There isn’t a creature that listens as well as a dog.”
We discuss how Iris begins to own her life in a more complete way, and how that dovetails with Watts’s real life, especially in her advocacy around menopause. (Her recent book about that, Dare I Say It, is an audacious thing for a 56-year-old Hollywood actress to publish.) “Naming your vulnerabilities, leaning into them and sharing them brings a freedom,” Watts says. “Fighting the fear of, ‘How do I stay relevant, how do I keep up?’ I don’t want to be invisible. I still have ideas, plans, things I want to do.”
The Friend’s directors call Watts “strong and compelling,” “open, present, willing and game;” they praise her “great ability to convey vulnerability,” how she “conveys depths of feeling just in her face.”
Still, I don’t want to exclude Murray, so I ask what he’s glad to know at 74. “I can do so much better,” he says. “‘Scratching the surface’ doesn’t get to how little I know about myself, about the world. But that’s exciting. It makes it both easier and more demanding to get out of bed.
“It’s also important to start thinking about grief a little bit more,” he continues. “Not so much that it’s happening to you, but it’s happening to someone around you all the time. To try to understand that, it’s an education.”
“That’s why I love you so much,” Watts says, also in his thrall I guess, and why not? That’s the thing about charm. It’s charming.
In The Friend, Iris gets the last laugh – she deliberately writes a version of Walter that would drive him nuts. In this interview, I plan to give Watts the last word. But damn if Murray doesn’t stick around an extra minute to ask about my voice, raspy from a cold, “What are you doing for that throat, hon?”
Whiskey and lemon, I reply. “Yeah, I go for whiskey, too,” he says. “In a few days when you wake up, you feel a lot better.”
Maybe one day I’ll outgrow rogues. I guess I haven’t woken up yet.
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