Jon Arbuckle buys a second pet, a dog named Odie. However, Odie is then abducted and it is up to Jon's cat, Garfield, to find and rescue the canine. Starring Bill Murray.

BILL Murray has admitted a case of mistaken identity led to him working on the Garfield movies.

In a question-and-answer session with fans on Reddit, Murray explained he had signed on to work on the films when he mistook the writer Joel Cohen for celebrated screenwriter Joel Coen; one half of the Coen brothers.

Murray wrote: "I had looked at the screenplay and it said 'Joel Cohen' on it.

"And I wasn't thinking clearly, but it was spelled Cohen, not Coen.

"I love the Coen brothers movies. I think that Joel Coen is a wonderful comedic mind.

"So I didn't really bother to finish the script, I thought 'he's great, I'll do it.'"

Murray, 63, didn’t realise his error until he was already recording his part in the studio, and commented on how poor the material was. Writer Joel Cohen, who was in the room, piped up.

Murray goes on to describe how hard he worked on improving the script.

"I think I worked 6 or 7 hours for one reel? No, 8 hours. And that was for 10 minutes. And we managed to change and affect a great deal," he wrote, describing the arduous role.

The 2004 cartoon-inspired film was a box office success, garnering more than US$200m ($227m) globally. Its follow-up went straight to DVD. "The second one was beyond rescue, there were too many crazy people involved with it," wrote Murray. "And I thought I fixed the movie, but the insane director who had formerly done some Spongebob, he would leave me and say 'I gotta go, I have a meeting' and he was going to the studio where someone was telling him what it should be, countermanding what I was doing.

"So they sort of shot themselves in the foot, the kidneys, the liver and the pancreas on the second one. If you had a finer mind working on them? The girl, Jennifer Love-Hewitt, she was sweet. In the second movie they dressed her like a homeless person. You knew it wasn't gonna go well."