There are people out there who buy Bill Murray colouring books.

Bill Murray may, in fact, be the only actor with a souvenir industry attached to him: coasters, mugs, art prints and T-shirts, a mobile for the nursery hung with felt dolls of Murray as the various characters he has played over the past 40-odd years.

These things have nothing to do with him; he just lets them happen.



"I don't resent it. It feels kind of nice," he says. "At the same you think 'Oh, wait until they find out who I really am. It's going to be just bone-crushing. It's going to be so sad for all the people who have stickers on their cars'."

Sascha Steinbach A major component of Bill Murray's legend is his ramshackle unreliability.

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We are here to discuss Isle of Dogs, Wes Anderson's much-lauded animation about dogs who have been exiled from a fictional, futuristic Japanese city to Trash Island, a giant offshore rubbish dump, on the spurious grounds that they may spread disease. Murray voices a portly hound called Boss that was once the mascot for a baseball team. The dogs are appealing, but the story is close to the political knuckle; the plight of the outcast is the great story of our time.

"It's kind of a miraculous collision," says Murray. "It wasn't intentional to be this political. But I think that happens with real artists: they kind of feel something before it gets there."

Bill Murray voices Boss in Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs.

This is the eighth film Murray has made with Anderson, whom he clearly reveres.

"I love talking to him about anything. I love to visit him. I love the way he's decided to make making movies his life and he lives his life that way."

Anderson's life is as meticulously planned and designed as his sets. "He has an intentional quality about him," says Murray. "He does not get deterred from what he wants to do. If he says, 'OK, we're going to catch the train at 9 o'clock and before that, at 8 o'clock, we're going to have riesling in the lobby of the train station' – OK, that's going to happen."

27 animators worked on the film.

A major component of Murray's legend, by contrast, is his ramshackle unreliability. Famously, he doesn't have an agent or anyone to field calls, just an 0800 message service that he mostly forgets to check. Just the fact Anderson has managed to track him down eight times is a real achievement. How does Murray know Anderson needs him?

"I sort of hear about it. I get some bumps. Like you feel the barometer drop or something like that and you think 'Hmmm, it's time'." On the whole, he doesn't think he's missed much by not returning calls. Maybe there was one good job he lost. "I can't quite remember what it was, but I remember saying to myself 'Aha, there's one!'. And I thought 'Well, think of all the annoyances I missed to miss this one'. It's good."

Then there are the anecdotes about his eccentric fraternising with the public. Murray hijacking a golf cart in the streets of Stockholm; Murray crashing a student party and ending up in the kitchen washing the dishes; Murray wandering away from a conversation in a park in order to pop up, Zelig-like, in a stranger's wedding photos.

Bill Murray has now starred in eight Wes Anderson movies, starting with 1998's Rushmore.

"Other celebs like Will Ferrell do these weird things," said Tommy Avallone, whose documentary The Bill Murray Story: Life Lessons Learned from a Mythical Man screened at the last South by Southwest film festival. "But they're usually followed by a camera for a stunt. Bill Murray plays to his own audience for himself."

Anderson cast him for the first time on Rushmore (1998), a bizarre boarding school story in which Murray played an industrialist in love with one of the teachers. He had come up from Saturday Night Live to feature as a goofball in comedies like Caddyshack (1980), Groundhog Day (1993) and the monster hit Ghostbusters (1984); being part of Anderson's gang secured him a second career in independent film that has ranged from Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000; Murray played Polonius) to Sofia Coppola's instant classic Lost in Translation (2003).

Now he has a new venture: a show devised by German cellist Jan Vogler that weaves chamber music together with Murray's readings of poetry and American classic novels, such as Huckleberry Finn. For years, as it turns out, Murray has been performing at poetry readings; Vogler, having befriended him after a concert, came to see him reading in Brooklyn and said they should put on a show. Now they are touring the world, including Australia and New Zealand in November. Murray loves it. He also loves the fact that New Worlds, an album he made with Vogler that features him singing Gershwin and Bernstein, went to the top of the classical charts. "It's classical, you know, so who cares, but it's No.1. Yeah!"

Isle of Dogs dogs is the story of a group of canines who have been exiled from a fictional, futuristic Japanese city to Trash Island, a giant off-shore rubbish dump, on the spurious grounds that they may spread disease.

Robert Schnakenberg, author of The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray, thinks it's the fact you never know where – or if – he's going to pop up that gives Murray his Elvis-like status.

"There's ubiquity, but also absence, so people never get tired of him."

The man himself thinks it's more about still being around. "How do I explain it? You know, I would explain it the same way I explain still having a career at this point."



He is 67. "A lot of people start out and then there are fewer and fewer people, less competition all the time. I know older actors who say, 'you know there used to be 20 guys going up for the parts I'm going up for, now there's six!"



So everyone left standing can get a gig.



"And if you don't embarrass yourself too much, you get invited back. We're now at a stage where younger directors go 'Oh I know that guy, he's good; I'm going to get that guy'. So you can be working with a director like Wes or Sofia, these younger people who are trying to do their thing – it's cool! And it's only because you didn't do something too stupid earlier."



But didn't he? That's the thing: probably not. Crazy, yes. Just not stupid. Bill Murray may not be able to explain the difference, but he defines it. Put that man on a mug.





Isle of Dogs (PG) opens in New Zealand cinemas on May 3.