Note that all quotes are taken from the book How To Write Groundhog Day, from Triad Publishing, that’s highly recommended and available to buy now. In it, you’ll find the full original screenplay that we’re going to be discussing, and plenty of annotations as to why certain decisions were made. This article will give you just a flavor of some of them.

The Anne Rice influence

To go back to the very beginning, in the mid-1980s, Rubin had a two-day intensive brainstorming session, to come up with 50 movie ideas, that he’d whittle down to ten. His aim was to interest a new union of the Illinois Film Commission and the founder of The Second City comedy club. They wanted to make films, and they wanted to use Chicago talent.

Tenth on Rubin’s ultimate shortlist was a project called Time Machine, about, in his words, a guy “stuck in a time warp that commits him to living the same day over and over and over again.” His further note read that “each day he can behave differently and the world and people will be different accordingly. (How do you enjoy yourself? How do you get laid? What are the different ways you can spend the same day? Will he become wiser? Sadder? Cynical? Adventurous?)”

The project went nowhere, but fast forward a few years and Rubin found himself mulling Anne Rice’s book, The Vampire Lestat. It set in his head the idea of how someone might act if their life had no end.

Considering how he could take a “self-centred, adolescent-like adult protagonist” to live life forever and see if he changes, he came up against the brick wall of the complications of putting across eternity. How could that work in a film? But then he had his eureka moment: a story of a man who repeats the same day over and over again.