Going to the ‘Dogs’
Murray gets emotional about canine role in stop-motion ‘Isle’
NEW YORK — Since his Academy Award-nominated best actor performance in “Rushmore,” Bill Murray has acted in every Wes Anderson movie. In the Japanese-set, stopmotion animated movie “Isle of Dogs,” Murray, 67, voices Boss, the leader of the desperate, depressed canines exiled to Trash Island, a garbage dump, by an unscrupulous mayor. Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Scarlett Johansson,
Tilda Swinton and Liev Schreiber voice other Trash Island denizens.
Asked about his own relations with dogs over the years Murray was surprisingly serious.
“Your relationship with dogs isn’t often a thinking thing, it’s an emotional thing,” he began, speaking quietly.
“You have to get yourself together to correctly receive those feelings if you want to get completely connected. I’ve had emotional feeling moments with dogs. My current dog, Timmy (Timber, a terrier-Jack Russell mix), was left for dead and attacked by a coyote — and survived.
“I picked him from his mother’s litter and he was
small but I knew. My friends said he’s chill. I knew he’s beyond chill.
“To think about what we are as: How do I want to say what I feel about dogs? That’s what all the actors had to do. It wasn’t thinking, it was trying to get to emotional feeling — and that’s what we were able to do together.” Murray’s other current gig is surprising: He’s touring with German cellist Jan Vogler in an unlikely classical music and poetry duo. Their album “Bill Murray, Jan Vogler and Friends — New Worlds” was “No. 1 on the classical charts for most of the year,” he said. “This started about a year ago. We played a bunch of shows in Germany and now we’re going through the Northeast Corridor and then the Middle West, Iceland, Scotland.”
It all began when Murray was at the Berlin Film Festival with George Clooney for “The Monuments Men.”
“I met this guy on the airplane (going home). We started hitting it off,” he said of the Berlinbased Vogler.
“He’s a great cellist. I invited him to a poetry thing, a (Brooklyn) Bridge Walk I do here in New York, and I went and saw a couple of his shows and he said, ‘We could do a show together.’ ” Cinematically, Murray next reunites (for the fourth time) with another auteur, “Broken Flowers” writer-director Jim Jarmusch. “It’s a funny one,” he promised. “Very funny.”