This bond goes deep

Muses are most often thought of as comely, lithe and young. Throughout history, they’ve usually been depicted as female guides to inner wisdom that spark the imaginations of great men. But for director Wes Anderson, whose loopy reimagining of the filmmaking experience, “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” opens this week, the muse has recently taken the form of a middle-age man with faintly pockmarked skin, tufts of graying hair and sad, teardrop eyes -- the comedian Bill Murray.

In fact, he’s standing at the exact spot where the two first met eight or so years ago.

“That’s the couch!” says Anderson, pointing to the divan in the bar at the Four Seasons Hotel, a lush expanse now covered with hipsters on the make.

“That’s the couch!” deadpans Murray, who’s in tow on this expedition.

The two have just spent an afternoon junketeering with the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. It’s the beginning of the pre-Oscar Christmas rush, where filmmakers and stars spin through special insider screenings in all the places where Hollywood tastemakers might congregate. Murray, who keeps a 1-800 number -- which he never answers -- for dealing with the business, isn’t a common sight on the publicity circuit.

Yet here he is -- affable and genially uninhibited, in a blue blazer, blue sweater and gray pants. He stops to smell a riotously gigantic bouquet of lilies and to rush over to check out the signature on a painting of monkeys to see if it belongs to a friend (it does). When it’s time to sit down, he is almost courtly, pulling out the chair for a reporter and helping with her coat.

Although he’s the same height as the 6-foot-1 Murray, Anderson seems half that size. He’s thin like a stretched out rubber band, with a long nose, long hair and a close-fitting olive corduroy suit, Hush Puppies and a white, roll-necked sweater, which in another era would have been finished off with a cravat. At 35 he seems like a precocious kid wearing his dad’s suit.

Drinks with the pair and one of the film’s producers, Barry Mendel, has an amiable, off-kilter quality, a semi-ironic jaunt through an interview process that Anderson in fact lampoons with relish in “The Life Aquatic.” As in a Wes Anderson film, the surreal quality is softened by warmth, born here by the real affection between wunderkind director and his world-weary yet jaunty star.

Anderson, after all, enticed Murray to spend six months in Italy, for less than his customary fee, to play Zissou, a narcissistic and broke oceanographer (Jacques Cousteau on a very bad day) who drags his band of misfits, his mistrustful brainy wife (Anjelica Huston), a pregnant journalist (Cate Blanchett) and a Southern pilot who might be his long-lost son (Owen Wilson) on a quixotic search for the mythical jaguar shark that ate his best friend.

If there was any doubt that Murray would be game for “The Life Aquatic’s” exercise in existential silliness, it was dispelled at that meeting on the couch, all those years ago, says Anderson.

The skinny director trills the lyric, “You know I’m back!” adding, “It’s an Animals song he sang walking in circles a few minutes after we met.” A waiter comes to take an order, and Anderson asks for flat water, as does Mendel.

“Who am I hanging with?” says Murray with mock outrage. “Let’s get a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon for putting you through your misery.” Murray combs through the list, and then takes up the Animals’ song with twee panache, like a demented lounge singer. “You know I’m back. I’m back like Al Capone. I’m back like Sonny Liston.”

Before the song interlude, Anderson spent months just trying to get Murray’s attention, mostly by plying him with copies of “Bottle Rocket,” his well-received but little-seen first effort.

“I had the largest collection of ‘Bottle Rocket’ tapes on the Eastern Seaboard,” says Murray. “I still haven’t seen it.”

Finally, the “Rushmore” script showed up and he read it, and decided the guy could direct. He tracked Anderson down by telephone and they spent 45 minutes discussing Akira Kurosawa’s film “Red Beard,” whose shape reminded him of “Rushmore.”

Murray gives an excited recap of the story of a country doctor (Toshiro Mifune) who happens to be a martial arts expert; he’s most taken with the story’s emotional reveals, which “go off like cherry blossoms” before the actual “feel good” ending, which he says “is completely obvious, but you’re so overwhelmed by what just happened, it’s almost like being told the truth.”

The truth appears to be important to Murray, as does loyalty. There’s also the concept of shame -- of all the comics he came of age with, he’s the only one who still commands the big screen. It’s the unspoken current.

Ask Murray about his recent career reblossoming -- with his adoption by two of the leading young filmmakers of this generation, Anderson and Sofia Coppola -- and he deadpans, with flirtatious faux naivete. “I’m an adult now. I’m not an ingenue anymore. I’m sort of like, who’s the girl in ‘The Last Picture Show?’ ”

“Cybill Shepherd?” offers Anderson.

Cybill Shepherd, Murray agrees.

“I’m not an ingenue anymore. I’m a leading lady. But it’s interesting, I’m yet unseen as a leading lady.” Pressed, he answers more seriously. “I know why they’ve asked me. It’s because I haven’t really embarrassed myself. I don’t think I’ve ruined myself, and I don’t think Wes has, either. I’m not overused. If you can do funny things, you can do serious things too. I can do whatever’s required.”

Movie is Murray-centric

Murray lent “Rushmore” an air of sad despair, along with his stardom, enabling the tale of 15-year-old precocious prep-schooler Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), in love with a schoolteacher, to be made. “I guess they blew the big money on my salary because a lot of the actors are from his grade school or his high school or whatever neighbors. You’re always looking over your shoulder going ‘Is there anyone in the union?’ ” he jokes, noting Anderson’s penchant for stocking his films with nonactor friends in bit parts. Murray’s comic performance as the lonely industrialist Herman Blume, who befriends Max and falls in love with the same teacher, earned him a raft of critics’ awards and boosted Anderson’s career.

Cousteau is a motif in that film as well. The book that first leads Max to his beloved teacher is about Cousteau, and he is inspired to get an aquarium built in her honor. It was on the set that Anderson told Murray, “I’ve got an oceanographer movie that we’re going to do after this,” says Anderson who with everyone else is drinking a superb $145 bottle of wine that Murray ordered.

“I didn’t take it seriously because it just seemed so casual,” says Murray. “I just decided he was trying to keep me calm during the shooting.”

He insists that the reason he needed to be soothed was costar Seymour Cassel’s penchant for intense conspiratorial conversations on eccentric subjects. “You want to laugh at him and it’s not a good choice,” says Murray.

Cassel returns for “The Life Aquatic” to appear in flashbacks as Murray’s deceased friend. “By the time they got to making this movie together, they had rebonded, “ Anderson says with a laugh.

“It’s revisionist history,” demurs Murray. “It turns out we were happily married for all those years, Liz.”

Writers and critics are going to have a field day trying to come up with the appropriately insouciant adjective to describe “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.” Loopy. Zany. Wacky. Offbeat. It features one character who sings David Bowie songs throughout the movie -- in Portuguese.

Anderson, who has worked with the precision of a short-story writer, has been unleashed structurally as well as financially with “The Life Aquatic.”

He’s made a picaresque opera, a Don Quixote-esque saga that costs in the neighborhood of $50 million, more than twice the price of his last film, “The Royal Tenenbaums,” which earned $52 million at the domestic box office. For the Walt Disney Co., which financed the film, this is certainly a nervy move.

In the movie, Anderson again evinces his distinctive blend of solipsistic, pain-fueled humor, although the balance has tipped toward the comedic, with moments of wonder. In particular are the underwater sequences featuring such imagined sea creatures as the rattail envelope fish and 2-inch crayon pony fish, designed by Anderson, co-writer Noah Baumbach and stop-animation wizard Henry Selick (who directed “Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas”).

Anderson wrote the film with Baumbach (“Kicking and Screaming”) instead of longtime partner Owen Wilson who, he explains, was off being a movie star.

Their first motivation was to write a part for Murray. “We picture [him] with a beard, and every now and then there might be something stolen from some moment of real life,” says Anderson, who refers to a snippet when Zissou tells an overly ambitious autograph-seeker to scram.

“My inspiration is ‘8 1/2 ‘ and ‘Day for Night,’ movies about filmmakers,” adds Anderson. “In the movie, as much as he is an oceanographer, he’s a maestro.”

For a final-cut director involved in the details of his films down to the typeface on the poster, Anderson isn’t too keen on explaining the mysterious meaning of it all. Like a primitive native who fears a photograph will somehow steal his soul, Anderson is suspicious. “There’s stuff that’s thematic that’s in there, and I don’t want to explain it to myself even.” But he touches on the highlights: improvising families out of workmates, the father-son/mentor relationship.

Whether it’s out of politeness or accessibility, Murray winds up explicating for Anderson. He’s seldom played a father before, although in real life he has six sons, and he certainly knows the tricky terrain that the hapless and selfish Zissou is trying to traverse in exploring when to be a friend and when to be a father. “That’s true. That’s a moment you have,” Murray says. As in “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums,” the film is redolent with the romance of failure.

“Failure is more interesting than success,” says Anderson. He stops himself. He is after all an extremely successful film director now. “I don’t even want to say that. I’m more interested in failure. I don’t know why.”

Murray steps in for him. “You learn much more from failure than success. It’s much more instructive.”

“I think more about it,” admits Anderson. “I kind of like the ending of ‘The Bad News Bears.’ They lose the game, but the kids are drinking beers on the baseball field anyway.”

Anderson prefers to discuss the grind of making a movie. He tells of rehearsing the film during a motorboat ride, scouting locations off the coast of Italy. They stopped at a tiny island, Ponza, where they had to swim to shore to have lunch. Later, when they were preparing to go home, Anderson spotted Murray climbing onto the dock, bag in tow.

“I go, ‘Wait a second. What are you doing?’ He goes, ‘I’m going to stay on the island.’ He had 7:15 dive training the next morning. ‘How are you going to get back?’ He says, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ ”

How did Murray while away the hours? He met a guy who owned a great restaurant. “I marched around most of the night, carried a drink with me. When it ran out, I bought another. Went down some dark stairways. You’re not afraid of the dark in a place like that,” he says. “When you go to a place that primitive, you hear the sounds of life underneath the windows.”

Gathering what falls away

A few minutes later, the director, who’s been monitoring the clock on his cellphone, leaves. The mood at the table somehow feels more intimate as the topic shifts, the way these conversations go, to the man who just left the room. Has success changed Anderson? “Everyone changes a little bit when they have success and celebrity,” says Murray, sounding like a grizzled eyewitness to that perpetual battle between ego and gratification.

“He lives a funny lifestyle [apparently he is itinerant at the moment]. He’s a gleaner. Gleaners were the people that were so poor that they would come to the fields after the fields were picked and they got to pick up what was left behind. This comes to mean someone who by watching takes what falls from the life of the culture and puts it into something. He knows a lot of famous people. He sees that there’s a value in what they have lived.”

“It’s like Bogdanovich,” adds Mendel, referring to the director of “The Last Picture Show,” who as a young man interviewed the great directors including Hitchcock and Ford, and has been publishing the research and his insights for decades. “Similarly Wes has gone down that road. All the generation of people, who are 20, 30, 40 years older than him, he’s been fascinated by from the start. Now if he calls them, they might just call him back. He’s taken total advantage of that, and over time that’s had a lot of influence on him. That’s part of the genesis of a [film] like this one.”

Has Murray’s recent artistic success changed him? The actor seems genuinely pleased to be a part of Anderson’s oeuvre, just as he was to be part of Coppola’s success last year with “Lost in Translation.” Though he didn’t win the best actor Oscar, “I didn’t care,” he says.

“It was a relief not to win. I might have enjoyed winning. It might have been nice to have someone say, ‘You’re the greatest, baby.’ But I was OK. I made a real conscientious choice that I was not going to lose myself over this. I would have been very disappointed if I had.”

He admits he likes playing the room at awards ceremonies, and his speech would have been “different.” After the Oscars, he appeared on “The Late Show With David Letterman,” in his tux, rolling in a gutter. “I think it’s going to be a regular thing,” he joked. “Every 25 years I’m going to get nominated.

“Honestly, I think I was in the best film of the year,” he says, over the last sips of wine. “ ‘The Lord of the Rings’ -- I may never see it, ‘The Lord of the Rings 3.’ I missed [parts] one and two. I may never get around to it. I loved my movie.

“That was the prize.”