Every time I think Bill Murray is a perfect and unimprovable paragon of cool, he does something to get cooler. Like this, his speech introducing writer/director Sofia Coppola at last night's National Board of Review Awards. Murray was perfectly suited to the task of winging an introduction for Coppola: She directed him in a titanic performance in 2003's "Lost In Translation," and he has for many years engaged in eccentrically good-natured public appearances that have added up a unique kind of improvisational performance art. (My favorite was last year at SXSW, when Murray showed up at an Austin joint and began tending bar, sloshing out slugs of tequila to the clientele, no matter what they'd ordered.) Anyway, here's Murray at the NBR, chewing on Red Hots and, in a deceptively easygoing fashion, making some moving points about life, work and the places where they meet.
..why do you encourage these people? Because now she's had this success, she's had this work, she has this life, she has this family, she has this thing going, and now is when people like you have chosen well to say, 'Let's give this person another boost, let's give this person another boost to say keep going, because now life will come to you hard, like it's come to everyone that's lived long enough. It comes hard and it gets in the way of your career; it stops your career, it stunts your life — not necessarily your life, but it definitely will make your career go left. You show me an actor doing a shit movie, I'll show you a guy with a bad divorce. [Audience laughs.] Right? Right? [Looking around the room.] You know who I'm talking about.
