Harold Ramis
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Harold Ramis is a comedy god. Those credentials were solidified early in his career as a writer/producer on SCTV. That was only enhanced when Ramis turned to the movies as a writer on Animal House, Meatballs and a director on such classics as Caddyshack, Vacation and Groundhog Day. In recent years Ramis has mostly concentrated on such studio films as Analyze This and Bedazzled.

Ramis has long been known as one of the nicest guys in the business but when something went awry it happened in a big way. Supposedly he hasn’t spoken with Bill Murray in 11 years and years ago Rodney Dangerfield and he had a conflict over the work that Ramis put into Back to School. But time heals all wounds and we all hope that Murray and Ramis will work together again.

Ramis’ latest picture, The Ice Harvest, has just been released on DVD and it’s a very dark comedy starring John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton and Oliver Platt. It is Christmas Eve in rainy, icebound Wichita, Kansas and mob attorney Charlie Arglist [John Cusack] and his buddy Vic Cavanaugh [Billy Bob Thornton], have just successfully embezzled $2 million from mob boss Bill Guerrard [Randy Quaid].

Buy the DVD for The Ice Harvest

Daniel Robert Epstein: Hello Harold, it’s a pleasure to talk to you. I’ve been a fan since I was five.

Harold Ramis: Cool. [laughs] That would make you ten?

DRE: [laughs] My father didn’t care; he took us to see Caddyshack when I was five.

HR: The chronologies are getting frightening. I’m sorry to hear how old people are and how old I am.

DRE: [laughs] I’m sure everyone knew that you had a very dark side to your humor and your filmmaking. But we hadn’t seen it much before in your films.

HR: Certainly anyone who has seen my arrest record knew.

DRE: Have you been arrested?

HR: Oh, a few times.

DRE: I know you’ve rewritten dozens of scripts over the years, what made you decide to make a dark film like The Ice Harvest?

HR: It wasn’t really a decision to go dark. It was really a decision to go with the quality of the writing. We read hundreds of scripts and most of them are very formulaic and people tend to not send me things that are outside the range of what I’ve done before. That range in the comedy world is fairly wide because you have the polarities of the big broad ones like Stripes, Caddyshack and Animal House. Then you have the more subtle and mature ones that deal with something a little more thoughtful; Groundhog Day, Multiplicity, Stuart Saves His Family. I’m a big fan of films from the Coen brothers but no one sent me that stuff until The Ice Harvest turned up on my desk. Coincidentally I had just been reading all of Richard Russo’s published fiction. When I saw that Russo was the co-screenwriter with Robert Benton it seemed really fortuitous. So I read it and it’s a really great script. The artful execution of it is just so mature and literary. As a writer/director I’m always looking for stuff I don’t have to rewrite and that’s what this was. There were things that everyone, including me, questioned right from the beginning. But a lot of it had been covered in previous writing they’d done during the development period with producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa. But the art of it always seemed perfect to me and the characters were so well drawn. It didn’t need work in those areas.

DRE: A lot of directors, after they’ve had films that either they’re not super happy with or didn’t do very well will go back or start doing smaller films. I’m thinking of the way Joel Schumacher did Tigerland and Phone Booth after Batman & Robin. Was it in your mind to do something that would have less pressure on you?

HR: No, it’s the same pressure no matter what you do. I’ve spent considerable amounts of studio money but that never fazed me. I never thought “Well it’s more important because they’re spending 80 million dollars.” It’s important but the importance to me is not the financial investment, it’s the creative investment. Do I believe in this enough to invest this much of my time and energy and enough to ask an audience to sit there for two hours without insulting them.

DRE: Besides the Coen brothers, are you a fan of noir?

HR: There are a few that really, that always stood out for me like Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. That’s an amazing movie. Seeing that as a kid awakened a dark, existential, immoral world for me. I realized that everyone’s not nice like in Disney films so that things don’t end well for everybody.

DRE: When Steven Spielberg made Schindler’s List, he said he had to hold back some of himself because he didn’t want it to get sentimental. Did you find yourself trying to resist making Ice Harvest too funny?

HR: No, I thought it was already funny in a very sick and twisted way which is the best kind of funny. That kind of funny usually doesn’t make it to the screen because the studios are afraid of it. The fact that we were liberated from making a studio picture was a big plus. James Schamus and John Lyons from Focus Features were completely supportive of the dark side of the script. That’s what attracted them to it in the first place.

DRE: Why did you pick cinematographer, Alar Kivilo, for The Ice Harvest because he hadn’t done any comedy before this?

HR: No, comedy was not his thing but I never thought to approach the movie like a comedy. I thought the style of the film begged to be a film noir so I started calling it a retro film noir. Alar totally got it. Alar is very scrupulous and very excited by the possibilities when he gets into a job. He came to our first meeting with lots of DVDs that he thought had the look for different environments in our film. He showed me five different bar lightings from different movies that he liked. He had also worked on A Simple Plan with the same production designer Patrizia von Brandenstein who designed our film and she couldn’t say enough about him. He’s a director’s dream because he was well prepared, with really good ideas and he was quick with no temperament whatsoever. He keeps a guitar looped over the back of his chair so while they’re lighting he’s playing. I play guitar as well so we’d play together. It was very cool.

DRE: How was it working with Randy Quaid for the first time since [National Lampoon’s] Vacation?

HR: We had such fun on Vacation so it was good to do it again. We saw a lot of actors for that part in Ice Harvest. But it didn’t occur to me until very late in the casting process to go with Randy. We were a few weeks away from shooting when I remembered seeing Randy in True West, the Sam Shepherd play, opposite Dennis Quaid. Randy played the really scary brother. I went backstage because I knew both those guys and Dennis told me that in the scene where they fight, Randy was really beating the shit out of him on a nightly basis.

DRE: That’s ok when you have an older brother. I have one too [laughs].

HR: Yeah but it usually doesn’t happen on stage. So I knew Randy could be really scary and he had the Texas credentials for the part. I thought he’d really understand this guy. We’d read some scary British actors who were affecting Midwestern American accents but they never seemed quite authentic. Randy is that guy in a certain way.

DRE: A couple of years ago I got to speak to Bill Murray and I asked him if the teachings of Del Close still follow him today. He said, “It’s just in his bones now.” How about for you?

HR: Sometimes what great teachers do is echo something that’s already in you. Del probably didn’t really teach Bill anything he didn’t already know but it might have confirmed something in him especially since Bill had been a social rebel his whole life and an oddball for that reason. To have Del suddenly validate that and say, “That’s great. All your instincts are right” must have been a very powerful connection. For me, it worked the other way. I was the cute nice guy on stage in Second City and Del taught me to tone that down a little bit. I once came off stage having really scored with the audience, just one great joke after another. Del said, “You got a lot of laughs tonight. But someday you’re going to look in the mirror and say, I’m so cute and I’m 50 years old.” That scared the hell out of me.

DRE: [laughs] It sounds like he was especially nice to you that day.

HR: Del was always nice to me. He was very smart and he respected intelligence more than anything. Murray and Del they have very active bullshit detectors. The alarms go off when they see any pretension or hype or anything like that. So I found that around Bill, I always had to be very careful what I said. I really wanted everything to be something I could stand behind or defend.

DRE: Are you seriously considering a film about Del Close?

HR: We’ve been given notes on several drafts of a script and now we’re sort of at a crossroads. The producers have known forever that I’ve been working on my own epic comedy script, which is now finished and out to actor Owen Wilson who likes it. Now it’s got to go to Columbia Studios. If that goes, I would have to put the Del thing on hold for a long time. But I wouldn’t want to hang it up so I would tell them to go ahead with my blessing. It would be so intriguing to try to capture that.

DRE: Would Billy Bob Thornton make a good Del?

HR: He could. But Billy Bob is physically consumptive looking and Del was really buff. Billy Bob looks neurasthenic, which is a very good word. [Bill] Murray would be perfect.

DRE: He’s too tall but I guess height doesn’t mean that much in a movie.

HR: Height doesn’t mean much.

DRE: When I spoke to John Landis a couple years ago I asked him what he thought of Old School and movies like Old School. He said “I thought Old School was hysterical, but I feel like they owe me money.”

HR: [laughs] Yeah.

DRE: Do you feel the same?

HR: Since it was Ivan Reitman’s company it was the same writers from when I worked on the scripts of Meatballs and Stripes. So they’ve just continued down the same path. For Ivan Reitman it’s a franchise. He did the same thing with Evolution, which everyone said was a Ghostbusters rip-off.

DRE: Yeah, don’t worry about that one.

HR: [laughs] I don’t worry about anything. More power to them I say.

DRE: Did you have ever a chance to make up with Rodney Dangerfield before he passed?

HR: Yeah, we did. We actually made up soon after our lawsuit and we were never hostile to each other. For me the lawsuit was a major problem because I didn’t want to be suing him. He even kept offering me pictures to direct even during our lawsuit. He’d call me up and say “I want to do this movie about this and that.” I would respond generally to the material but I was never rude or hostile to him nor he to me. But eventually I’d say, “We’ve got this lawsuit.” Then he’d say “Yeah, what’s that about?” [laughs] I’d say, “You owe me money.” The lawsuit dragged on for three years and after we settled it was a pyrrhic victory. He gave me everything that he owed me contractually and that’s all I wanted. I was so relieved that I cried when we settled and he said, “Hey alright, take it easy.” Then we hung out a little after that, but something had torn with us. But then in the book he wrote the year before he died he wrote some very nice things about me. But I wasn’t hanging around his bedside or anything.

DRE: A few years ago I read an article in Creative Screenwriting magazine where you and Todd Phillips were interviewed together. You mentioned the song and dance scene in Stripes and I got very excited to see it, that is, until I actually saw it. It just wasn’t funny. What did you think of hearing about this extended version of Stripes?

HR: I was amazed that they found the material; because nothing was digitized in those days. That means they had to go to film vaults and dig out the negatives or find the work print. But I was relieved when they cut that originally because we never had an end for it. When a scene lifts so easily from a movie it means it probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place. In Stuart Saves His Family, I lifted a 20 minute scene right out of the film. You wouldn’t even know it which always tells you it shouldn’t be there. Stripes did not need the jungle Interlude.

DRE: Is there enough material out there about Doug Kenney to do a feature film about him?

HR: I’m afraid he didn’t live long enough. It’s hard to do movies about writers. To see someone writing is usually not visually interesting. But Doug was a genius among very smart people. Him and Michael O'Donoghue were so smart it was scary sometimes. But the drama of Doug’s life is that in his heart he probably wanted to be a movie star. But, like me, and a lot of writers he was a little too introverted to take center stage. It would be hard to do a movie about someone who chose to stay in the shadows.

DRE: How about a documentary?

HR: I don’t know that there’s enough material but you could do a documentary about anything. If you look at the whole body of Doug’s work, you have a bunch of lampoon stuff. You have the novel Teenage Comedies from Outer Space, which was never published, the two movie scripts and that’s about it. So to me, my memories of Doug are all about being together and the amazing times we had. He was a really great friend that I got to spend eight hours a day with for a couple years in a row there. But it’s like Belushi, who knows what they would have become if they’d lived. They were both 33 when they died. Our friend Peter Ivers was the third one in that sequence. He died the next year. He was Doug’s best friend.

DRE: You’ve worked with many of the funniest people in the world and many of them are from Canada, why is that?

HR: I think there’s something analogous to Chicago’s place in American comedy culture with Chicago literally being the second city. It gave Chicago an underdog’s perspective to everything. You look at the culture a little bit as an outsider because you’re not making the culture; you’re just reacting to it. Canada is the second nation on the continent. Everything they do is reactive to American culture, because what’s authentically Canadian, no one really gives a shit about, not even Canadians. That’s what was so funny about Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas doing the McKenzie Brothers. That came about because the tax breaks for SCTV depended on having Canadian content.

DRE: That was basically what Americans thought Canadians did.

HR: Right. It was also what Canadians thought Canadians did [laughs].

There were so many funny people up there. But sometimes I think it’s because they were schooled in American comedy which was inescapable. That culture and British comedy as well just pours over the border in one direction. So it is the confluence of those two schools that I think gave them a special edge in a certain way.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Harold+Ramis/