Bill Murray Shows Off at Venice Festival

Bill Murray brought his deadpan wit and slightly wild eyes to the Venice Film Festival on Sunday to promote Sofia Coppola’s new film “Lost in Translation,” a brilliantly moving picture set in Tokyo that shows what a fine actor the comedian has become.

“Lost in Translation” is a delicate and sensitively crafted film that makes clear Coppola – who also wrote the movie – has not won success on the coattails of her father, director Francis Ford Coppola.

Offscreen, Murray’s natural funniness is so irrepressible that he can’t prevent a glance or simple comment from prompting laughs. Do people giggle at him wherever he goes?

“Let’s be honest, we all have that problem sometimes,” he said, deadpan of course. “I get probably more laughs from more people because people think I’m trying to be funny, but I’m just being myself. That’s my cross, that’s my burden.”

Murray plays a dried-up actor who agrees to go to Tokyo to do commercials for Suntory whisky. He finds himself in a bafflingly different world, with an incomprehensible language, puzzling manners and the constant flash of Tokyo advertisements and video games.

“It’s very foreign,” Murray said. “Have you been there? You can’t understand them – they speak a completely different language.”

“In Japan, you have no idea what they’re saying, and they can’t help you either,” he said. “They’re very polite but you feel like they’re playing a joke on you. You just have to hope that they’re not going to take you out and cover you in feathers.”

Murray’s character hides out in his luxury hotel while suffering from insomnia and having occasional unsatisfactory phone conversations with his wife. Then he meets a young woman, played by Scarlett Johansson, who is also killing time in the hotel while her photographer husband works.

The story beautifully depicts the passionate connections that strangers can make when abroad and alone, as circumstances strip away inhibitions and heighten the need for human contact.

Coppola said she wrote the script with Murray in mind, and joked that she’d persuaded him to sign up for the film by applying “caviar and champagne.” The director also noted that the film was shot in the sequence of the plot – an unusual move – meaning that the two main actors grew closer as their characters did.

“I wanted to have a romantic jet lag feeling,” she said. “When you’re in Tokyo with jet lag it has a dream atmosphere.”

Johansson, a marvelous young actress, described the atmosphere on this low-budget shoot in an expensive city.

“We had a really crazy working environment, a sort of guerrilla warfare filmmaking,” she said. “We just sort of jumped into it together.”

Despite the depth of this film, Murray said he’d never gotten bigger laughs. Asked if his recent more nuanced roles meant he would not make any more “stupid” comedies, Murray responded: “I’ll never do anything stupid again,” allowing a comic pause while he sipped a glass of red wine.

“I don’t know what your question was, but I hope you’re having a good time here.”

Also Sunday, the makers of James Ivory’s “Le Divorce” – a comedy of manners in Paris based on the novel by Diane Johnson – promoted their film, emphasizing their great warmth for the city despite the current tension between the United States and France.

“My experience in Paris was probably the most exciting I’ve had so far in my life,” said actress Kate Hudson, who plays a young American who becomes the mistress of an older distinguished Frenchman (Thierry Lhermitte). “As we were shooting the film, I was experiencing Paris – except for the sexual escapades – in parallel to my character.”

Actress Naomi Watts plays Hudson’s elder sister, who is going through an ugly divorce from her French husband. “I was playing an American woman who is very immersed and spoke the language, and I was not versed in either. I had to instantly learn French,” she said.

Director Ivory, best-known for period pieces such as “A Room With a View” and “Howard’s End,” joked that for a change he had made a contemporary movie. “Aren’t you glad that I’ve come into the 21st century?” he said.

Meanwhile, films in competition for the main Golden Lion prize that were screening Sunday included British director Christopher Hampton’s “Imagining Argentina” and Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers.” Awards are to be handed out at the end of the 11-day festival on Saturday.