Stephen Tobolowsky Talks About the Difficulty and Reward of Making the Classic Movie GROUNDHOG DAY

The Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day is one of those classic movies that has held up over the years, and still delivers laughs with every rewatch. The story follows Murray’s lead character, who is a reporter that goes to cover the Groundhog Day festival, and wakes up the next day only to repeat the day in its entirety. He gets stuck in a loop of repeating this day over and over, and he makes some funny and wild choices, all while learning how to improve his life, and find out what’s truly important.

One of the ensemble characters in the movie is played by character actor Stephen Tobolowsky, who has quite an impressive resume. He has worked on so many movies over the years, that he has seen many various styles of filmmaking, and although he had a small part in this film, he said this movie was really tough to make!

In a recent interview with ComicBook, Tobolowsky explained:

"I'm very proud of Groundhog Day...because it wasn't easy. It was a battle to create the show that it was. After the first week, Harold Ramis got with Danny Rubin, our writer, and he says, 'What's the story we're really telling here?' Are we goign to have a series of sequences where Bill just has no consequences and acts crazy, like he was doing in all of those movies back then, or are we telling the story about, what is the time of our life, and how do we use it? And Harold Ramis and Danny thought, 'Number two.' So they started cutting out scenes right and left that were in the original script, and reshaped it. We were getting new pages every day; it was like guerilla theatre, doing Groundhog Day. And in a way, that either leads to disaster, or leads to something brilliant. In terms of Groundhog Day it led to something just brilliant, what Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin did. And of course, Bill was brilliant, and Andie is just stunning. When you see the movie again, you realize the gift of the film is Andie McDowell. She's just so magnificent."

That must have been wild! I imagine that memorizing scripts is one of the toughest parts of acting, so getting new pages every day would make it much harder. It all worked out to make a great movie, though. So whatever they changed, it must have been the right decision.