Bill Murray on Pain & Glory of Returning For Ghostbusters: Afterlife

Bill Murray shared his experience working on the forthcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife in a Q&A when he was awarded the Maltin Modern Master Award at the 36th Santa Barbara Film Festival. Collider highlighted the Q&A, where Murray looked back on the Ghostbusters legacy and opened up about being approached to join the cast of Afterlife.

Murray shared how the conversation between him and director Jason Reitman began, “I remember him calling me and saying, ‘I’ve got an idea for another ‘Ghostbusters.’ I’ve had this idea for years.I thought, ‘What the heck could that possibly be?’ I remember him when he was a kid. I remember his Bar Mitzvah. I was like, ‘What the heck? What does this kid know?’ But he had a really, really wonderful idea that he wrote with another wonderful guy that I got to work with, Gil Kenan, who made ‘City of Ember.’ The two of them wrote a ‘Ghostbusters’ movie that really brings it back to life. It really has the feel of the first one, more than the second one or the girls’ one. It has a different feel than two out of four.”

The film was originally slated to be released last year and has since reshuffled its opening to November 11. Murray talked about Reitman’s task to carry his father Ivan Reitman’s mantle while creating a story with new leads that brings the legacy characters back in some way.

“I think he’s really got something,” Murray continued, “It was hard. It was really hard. That’s why I think it’s gonna be good. We were just in it for a little while, but it was physically painful. Wearing those packs is extremely uncomfortable. We had batteries the size of batteries. They now have batteries the size of earrings. It’s still a really heavy thing to wear, all the time. The special effects in this one are a lot of wind and dirt in your face, and there was a lot of going down and getting back up. I was like, ‘What is this? What am I doing? These are like Bulgarian deadlifts, or a Russian kettlebell, getting up and down with this thing on my back.’ It was very uncomfortable. Usually, when something has a very high misery quotient, something comes of that and some quality is produced that, if you can capture it and project it, comes on the screen and affects you. I think it comes out sometime in the fall. They’ve delayed it for a year or a year and a half, but I’m glad they did. It will be worth seeing.”

Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife will focus on single mom Callie (Carrie Coon) and her two kids, Trevor and Phoebe (Finn Wolfhard & Mckenna Grace). The family moves into a beaten-down farmhouse in Oklahoma only to discover that there’s something strange in the neighborhood. Unexplained earthquakes shake the town soon after and there’s an old mine nearby that bears the name of Ivo Shandor, who built the Manhattan building that channeled the forces of evil in the original film. Paul Rudd costars as a local teacher who befriends Callie and her kids and helps make the connection between the current weirdness and the events of three decades before.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife co-stars legacy actors Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver and Annie Potts who will return to reprise their original roles. Ivan Reitman, who helmed the first two, will produce.