Coffee & Cigarettes – Delirium is a short movie from an ensemble film made by Jim Jarmusch and well worth a moment of your time if you’ve never seen it before.
Bill ‘Groundhog Day’ Murray and Jim Jarmusch have collaborated three times on film, the most notable being the standout movie Broken Flowers (2005), in which Bill plays a man trying to find a son he didn’t know existed.
Their most recent celluloid collab was The Dead Don’t Die (2019), but before them there was the short film Delirium, with Wu Tang’s RZA and GZA.
Speaking together after filming The Dead Don’t Die, Bill and Jim recalled making the Coffee & Cigarettes short, which you can watch in the video box here:
Bill Murray recalled: “My memory of making it was being with RZA and GZA. They were free thinkers at the time.
“They were blazing weed through the day, sort of maintenance level, all the time. I thought, OK. We had lines but they weren’t necessarily written in stone because they never said the same thing twice, which I had no problem with.
“But I remember taking them to lunch. I took them down the street to a Japanese place. They had never drank sake before, and I said, “What? You’ve never had sake?” So I got a big bottle of sake, which we drank. I thought, “Oh, God, I’m going to get in trouble.”
Jim Jarmusch: “I didn’t know this story…”
Murray: “Well, how would you know that they’re high? So we went back and it had affected them. But they didn’t panic.
“They just immediately started smoking another joint or two, just to completely obscure any sake.
“And then they went on a crazy riff and it was funny. That’s what ended up in the movie, their crazier stuff.”
Jarmusch: “When I’m talking with GZA or RZA, they always ask me, “Yo, what’s up with Bill Murray? You seen Bill Murray, man?” And they’ll tell me, “We ran into Bill Murray in Texas, man. We got to hang out with Bill Murray. Send our best to Bill Murray.” They love Bill Murray.”
We do too. Bill Murray – ply us with sake during work… we salute you!