Feuding with director Harold Ramis, the star made the set of the beloved comedy a nightmare – one which repeated every single day. Photo / Getty Images
In 1988, Danny Rubin headed to the Writer’s Guild Theater in Beverly Hills on his own, a copy of one of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles books in his pocket.
The writer had just arrived in Los Angeles from Chicago. His agent was pressing him for a new script, and an old idea about a man trapped in a time loop was in the back of his mind as the lights went down.
“I liked that vampires were just like people, only some of the rules were different,” Rubin says now. “And one of the rules was you could live forever. And I was thinking, what would it be like to live forever? And then, what would it be like for somebody who didn’t quite grow up in one lifetime to live forever?”
The story Rubin came up with, Groundhog Day, was released 30 years ago this month and went on to take more than $100 million at the box office. But more than that, it’s seeped into the culture in a way that few films do over the last three decades. Since 1993 it’s been mentioned in Hansard 438 times. You’ve probably said it yourself when you’re stuck: it’s just like Groundhog Day.
Rubin’s time loop conceit opened up infinite possibilities. The tricky part was choosing the right ones. His script focused on local news weatherman Phil Connors, and we met him in the middle of the loop: he predicted his landlady’s questions and lamped a salesman for apparently no reason. The tone was weighty and thoughtful, and Rubin thought of it as a bildungsroman like Hermann Hesse’s epic Siddhartha. A lot of producers liked it, but none wanted to make it.
“Now Danny’s script would be considered ‘independent movie style’,” producer Trevor Albert explained to Ryan Gilbey in his book Groundhog Day. “At that point it was ‘European’.”
Harold Ramis, then looking for a gig after Ghostbusters II, loved it though. The script went back and forth: Rubin says his style was “playful and a little whimsical” while Ramis was “sweeter and more romantic”; his partner added a love interest in producer Rita, but also turned up the raunch – Phil organised an orgy in one of his drafts.
Ramis was also insistent on explaining why Phil was stuck in his loop: one solution was for a jilted ex-lover of Phil uses a book called 101 Curses, Spells and Enchantments You Can Do at Home to trap him; another was for a scientist to explain to Phil that it was theoretically possible for “a black hole or singularity of sufficient magnitude to actually bend time enough to cause it to fold back on itself”.
Rubin dug his heels in, and neither scene was filmed. But though Rubin and Murray tried another pass together, the script was still a mess three weeks before shooting. It began in Woodstock, Illinois, during an intensely harsh cold snap. “Somehow it got into your bones and just rattled you around,” Rubin says.
At 6.30am on the first day, Murray was grumpy about dunking his foot repeatedly into a pothole of icy water. The chunks of ice floating on its surface were only styrofoam, but the biting chill made it an ordeal all the same.
“The foot would have to be amputated, it was so cold,” Stephen Tobolowsky, who plays the deeply irritating insurance salesman Ned Ryerson, explains over Zoom. “Bill was not happy shooting this, so he had his foot up to his knee wrapped in saran wrap. Then he had a neoprene sleeve over his foot, ankle and calf. Then he had all that wrapped up, and then he had his pants on.”
The story kept evolving even as shooting went on.
“At the end of the first week, Harold and Danny start writing the script again, and all of us start getting new pages after we’ve already started shooting,” says Tobolowsky. “None of us know this stuff is coming.”
Bill Murray was in particularly mercurial form. “When he was up, his arrival on set would be heralded by loud ‘feel good’ music to match his mood,” Ramis said. “At other times it’s like working with Vincent Van Gogh on a bad day.”
Ramis and Murray had worked together for close to 20 years by this point, from their breakthrough with National Lampoon through to Caddyshack and Ghostbusters. But Groundhog Day broke something between them. The two men would be estranged from each other until near the time of Ramis’s death in 2014. Ramis’s daughter Violet Ramis Stiel wrote in her autobiography that her dad was “heartbroken, confused, and yet unsurprised by the rejection”.
“At times, Bill was just really irrationally mean and unavailable; he was constantly late on set,” Ramis told The New Yorker. “What I’d want to say to him is just what we tell our children: ‘You don’t have to throw tantrums to get what you want. Just say what you want.’”
They did eventually reconcile, not long before Ramis died. Stiel remembered Murray arriving at Ramis’s house at 7am with a box of doughnuts. Though Ramis couldn’t speak much, the two men made their peace.
Yet on set, Murray, whose first marriage was falling apart at the time, became more obtuse. Exasperated by finding that he couldn’t be contacted, Ramis suggested Murray get a personal assistant.
“So he hired a personal assistant who was profoundly deaf, did not have oral speech, spoke only American sign language, which Bill did not speak, nor did anyone else in the production,” Ramis told Entertainment Weekly later. “But Bill said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to learn sign language.’ And I think it was so inconvenient that in a couple weeks, he gave that up.”
Tobolowsky didn’t see that side of Murray. “Bill can be difficult at times during a shoot, but I have to say from my point of view [he’s] one of the best actors I’ve ever worked with,” he says. “Every scene he was in the moment, every scene it was like he listened, he responded.”
And Murray’s final act of intransigence saved the film’s ending. He refused to shoot the climactic scene revealing that Phil has finally escaped Groundhog Day until he knew what clothes he and Rita were wearing. Were they in pyjamas? Were they nude? Had Phil and Rita slept together? It was put to a vote among the crew, and ended in a tie. One production assistant on her first film broke the deadlock.
“And she says, they’re wearing exactly the same clothes that they did the night before. If you do anything different, it’ll ruin the movie,” Tobolowsky says. “And Harold turned to Bill and Andie and says, ‘There, you heard it. You’re wearing exactly the same clothes you wore the night before.’”
Groundhog Day was met with near-unanimous praise, and it’s since gained a status as the most philosophically rich Hollywood hit of them all.
“People started writing to us and saying, that’s the perfect Christian movie, that’s the perfect Buddhist movie, that’s the perfect Jewish movie, this is the perfect articulation of Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence,” Rubin says. “It’s lovely.”
Some critics have seen Phil as Sisyphus, pushing his boulder every morning from 6am; others say he’s trapped in purgatory, or gradually nudging his soul further to perfection through the cycle of death and rebirth of Buddhism. (Ramis, who was raised in a Jewish household, described himself as “Buddhish”.)
The story itself has gone through a rebirth too. The Groundhog Day musical which opened to similarly rave reviews in 2016 is returning to London later this year for a run at the Old Vic. Rubin, director Matthew Warchus and composer Tim Minchin have retooled it slightly.
“It’s just a matter of making the show a little bit lighter,” says Rubin. “It was an amazingly kinetic show before, and it still is, but we’re rethinking that to just settle it a little bit so everybody’s not having whiplash.”
Their own Phil is a slightly different comic beast to the film’s Phil. “We tried different people and tried to see how unlikeable Phil could be and still have us want to go along the journey with him. What kind of Phil would break into song? Clearly a Bill Murray kind of character would not be the kind of character to break into song.”
The last run of the show was before the pandemic, when complaints that the various lockdowns made every day feel like Groundhog Day became a familiar refrain.
“I think that’s part of the longevity of the movie and the story in general,” says Rubin. “It’s not just as individuals – one by one we see the movie and go, oh, this relates to my life because of my problem with drinking or this repetitive issue with my partner or something like that – but society moves forward in stories as well.”
Despite the sardonic tone, it’s the optimism of Phil’s plight which keeps people coming back to Groundhog Day. Phil was stuck in a dead end, but he made it out.
“And it didn’t happen in a movie way, where he found the mad scientist and got the formula,” says Rubin. “It seemed organic. It felt like he went through a process where in the end he was able to see out of his repetitive patterns and see different universes – within the lives of other people, as it turns out.”
Tobolowsky agrees. “You begin to get a real sense of what real love is, and [of] being at work in the community and everything to make things a little better instead of a little worse,” he says. “And I think people are moved by Groundhog Day for that reason too.”
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