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 hasnt 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 its 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, its a pleasure to talk to you. Ive been a fan since I was five.
Harold Ramis: Cool. [laughs] That would make you ten?
DRE: [laughs] My father didnt care; he took us to see Caddyshack when I was five.
HR: The chronologies are getting frightening. Im sorry to hear how old people are and how old I am.
DRE: [laughs] Im sure everyone knew that you had a very dark side to your humor and your filmmaking. But we hadnt 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 youve rewritten dozens of scripts over the years, what made you decide to make a dark film like The Ice Harvest?
HR: It wasnt 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 Ive 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. Im 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 Russos published fiction. When I saw that Russo was the co-screenwriter with Robert Benton it seemed really fortuitous. So I read it and its a really great script. The artful execution of it is just so mature and literary. As a writer/director Im always looking for stuff I dont have to rewrite and thats 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 theyd 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 didnt need work in those areas.
DRE: A lot of directors, after theyve had films that either theyre not super happy with or didnt do very well will go back or start doing smaller films. Im 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, its the same pressure no matter what you do. Ive spent considerable amounts of studio money but that never fazed me. I never thought Well its more important because theyre spending 80 million dollars. Its important but the importance to me is not the financial investment, its 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 Wilders Ace in the Hole. Thats an amazing movie. Seeing that as a kid awakened a dark, existential, immoral world for me. I realized that everyones not nice like in Disney films so that things dont end well for everybody.
DRE: When Steven Spielberg made Schindlers List, he said he had to hold back some of himself because he didnt 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 doesnt 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. Thats what attracted them to it in the first place.
DRE: Why did you pick cinematographer, Alar Kivilo, for The Ice Harvest because he hadnt 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 couldnt say enough about him. Hes a directors 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 theyre lighting hes playing. I play guitar as well so wed play together. It was very cool.
DRE: How was it working with Randy Quaid for the first time since [National Lampoons] 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 didnt 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: Thats ok when you have an older brother. I have one too [laughs].
HR: Yeah but it usually doesnt happen on stage. So I knew Randy could be really scary and he had the Texas credentials for the part. I thought hed really understand this guy. Wed 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, Its just in his bones now. How about for you?
HR: Sometimes what great teachers do is echo something thats already in you. Del probably didnt really teach Bill anything he didnt 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, Thats 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 youre going to look in the mirror and say, Im so cute and Im 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: Weve been given notes on several drafts of a script and now were sort of at a crossroads. The producers have known forever that Ive been working on my own epic comedy script, which is now finished and out to actor Owen Wilson who likes it. Now its 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 wouldnt 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: Hes too tall but I guess height doesnt mean that much in a movie.
HR: Height doesnt 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 Reitmans company it was the same writers from when I worked on the scripts of Meatballs and Stripes. So theyve just continued down the same path. For Ivan Reitman its a franchise. He did the same thing with Evolution, which everyone said was a Ghostbusters rip-off.
DRE: Yeah, dont worry about that one.
HR: [laughs] I dont 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 didnt want to be suing him. He even kept offering me pictures to direct even during our lawsuit. Hed 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 Id say, Weve got this lawsuit. Then hed say Yeah, whats that about? [laughs] Id 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 thats 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 wasnt 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 wasnt 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 shouldnt have been there in the first place. In Stuart Saves His Family, I lifted a 20 minute scene right out of the film. You wouldnt even know it which always tells you it shouldnt 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: Im afraid he didnt live long enough. Its 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 Dougs 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 dont know that theres enough material but you could do a documentary about anything. If you look at the whole body of Dougs 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 thats 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 its like Belushi, who knows what they would have become if theyd 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 Dougs best friend.
DRE: Youve worked with many of the funniest people in the world and many of them are from Canada, why is that?
HR: I think theres something analogous to Chicagos place in American comedy culture with Chicago literally being the second city. It gave Chicago an underdogs perspective to everything. You look at the culture a little bit as an outsider because youre not making the culture; youre just reacting to it. Canada is the second nation on the continent. Everything they do is reactive to American culture, because whats authentically Canadian, no one really gives a shit about, not even Canadians. Thats 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 its 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
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 hasnt 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 its 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, its a pleasure to talk to you. Ive been a fan since I was five.
Harold Ramis: Cool. [laughs] That would make you ten?
DRE: [laughs] My father didnt care; he took us to see Caddyshack when I was five.
HR: The chronologies are getting frightening. Im sorry to hear how old people are and how old I am.
DRE: [laughs] Im sure everyone knew that you had a very dark side to your humor and your filmmaking. But we hadnt 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 youve rewritten dozens of scripts over the years, what made you decide to make a dark film like The Ice Harvest?
HR: It wasnt 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 Ive 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. Im 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 Russos published fiction. When I saw that Russo was the co-screenwriter with Robert Benton it seemed really fortuitous. So I read it and its a really great script. The artful execution of it is just so mature and literary. As a writer/director Im always looking for stuff I dont have to rewrite and thats 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 theyd 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 didnt need work in those areas.
DRE: A lot of directors, after theyve had films that either theyre not super happy with or didnt do very well will go back or start doing smaller films. Im 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, its the same pressure no matter what you do. Ive spent considerable amounts of studio money but that never fazed me. I never thought Well its more important because theyre spending 80 million dollars. Its important but the importance to me is not the financial investment, its 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 Wilders Ace in the Hole. Thats an amazing movie. Seeing that as a kid awakened a dark, existential, immoral world for me. I realized that everyones not nice like in Disney films so that things dont end well for everybody.
DRE: When Steven Spielberg made Schindlers List, he said he had to hold back some of himself because he didnt 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 doesnt 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. Thats what attracted them to it in the first place.
DRE: Why did you pick cinematographer, Alar Kivilo, for The Ice Harvest because he hadnt 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 couldnt say enough about him. Hes a directors 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 theyre lighting hes playing. I play guitar as well so wed play together. It was very cool.
DRE: How was it working with Randy Quaid for the first time since [National Lampoons] 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 didnt 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: Thats ok when you have an older brother. I have one too [laughs].
HR: Yeah but it usually doesnt happen on stage. So I knew Randy could be really scary and he had the Texas credentials for the part. I thought hed really understand this guy. Wed 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, Its just in his bones now. How about for you?
HR: Sometimes what great teachers do is echo something thats already in you. Del probably didnt really teach Bill anything he didnt 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, Thats 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 youre going to look in the mirror and say, Im so cute and Im 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: Weve been given notes on several drafts of a script and now were sort of at a crossroads. The producers have known forever that Ive been working on my own epic comedy script, which is now finished and out to actor Owen Wilson who likes it. Now its 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 wouldnt 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: Hes too tall but I guess height doesnt mean that much in a movie.
HR: Height doesnt 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 Reitmans company it was the same writers from when I worked on the scripts of Meatballs and Stripes. So theyve just continued down the same path. For Ivan Reitman its a franchise. He did the same thing with Evolution, which everyone said was a Ghostbusters rip-off.
DRE: Yeah, dont worry about that one.
HR: [laughs] I dont 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 didnt want to be suing him. He even kept offering me pictures to direct even during our lawsuit. Hed 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 Id say, Weve got this lawsuit. Then hed say Yeah, whats that about? [laughs] Id 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 thats 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 wasnt 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 wasnt 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 shouldnt have been there in the first place. In Stuart Saves His Family, I lifted a 20 minute scene right out of the film. You wouldnt even know it which always tells you it shouldnt 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: Im afraid he didnt live long enough. Its 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 Dougs 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 dont know that theres enough material but you could do a documentary about anything. If you look at the whole body of Dougs 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 thats 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 its like Belushi, who knows what they would have become if theyd 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 Dougs best friend.
DRE: Youve worked with many of the funniest people in the world and many of them are from Canada, why is that?
HR: I think theres something analogous to Chicagos place in American comedy culture with Chicago literally being the second city. It gave Chicago an underdogs perspective to everything. You look at the culture a little bit as an outsider because youre not making the culture; youre just reacting to it. Canada is the second nation on the continent. Everything they do is reactive to American culture, because whats authentically Canadian, no one really gives a shit about, not even Canadians. Thats 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 its 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
courtneyriot:
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...
anderswolleck:
COMMENT H ERE PUNK ASSES