From Animal House to Groundhog Day, Harold Ramis has been behind the camera for some of Hollywood's biggest comedies. With his latest, Multiplicity, he may have grown up, but he still can't resist a nongratuitous fart joke.
PT: You seem to be able to recognize these big mythologies and transform them into movies. Animal House, Caddyshack, Stripes--they were very important for a lot of people.
HR: My first few films were institutional comedies, and you're on pretty safe ground when you're dealing with an institution that vast numbers of people have experienced: college, summer camp, the military, the country club. I didn't belong to a country club, but I had enough feelings about them. You can't not have feelings about country clubs, whichever side you're on.
PT: Growing up in the Midwest, did you feel like an outsider?
HR: The country clubs I'd heard of were predominantly restricted to Jews. I didn't know yet about Jewish clubs, which are restricted in their own way But I definitely had the sense of being the guy on the outside looking in. When I hooked up with the Murray brothers [Bill and Brian Doyle], they felt like outsiders because they were poor. They were the caddies and the greenskeepers.
PT: So Caddyshack got it right.
HR: When I made the movie, I didn't know what the physical layout of a country club was like, how they looked and felt.Those guys were the reality check.
Those movies are about how an individual relates to the establishment and by extension, how an individual relates to society They are movies about young men going to an institution and deciding what kind of people they're going to be. If the rules are wrong, do you knuckle under and play by those rules, do you change the rules, or do you opt out of the game? Those are the big questions.
We were dropouts who had basically opted out of the game. That's the kind of character I like to write. My characters aren't losers. They're rebels.
PT: They are all incredibly likable. As a matter of fact, they also win.
HR: That's the thing. They win by their refusal to play by everyone else's rules.
PT: As your film career has progressed, you've tackled more serious subjects, but there's almost a refusal to just be serious.
HR: I don't want to depart from comedy as my main mode of communication.No matter what I have to say, I'm still trying to say it in comedic form.
The last couple of films had a lot of things going on. Stuart Saves His Family was really a serious movie about substance abuse and codependency, but we certainly wanted it to be funny and it had some huge laughs. Not that it ever found an audience.
PT: How do explain the essence of Groundhog Day?
HR: It was about a guy discovering how to live his life, making a journey from narcissism to selflessness.
PT: It's an optimistic movie that has a real sense of spiritual yearning. Though I hesitate to say that.
HR: I wouldn't hesitate at all. That's what drew me to the material. it was like It's A Wonderful Life, a moving, mainstream Hollywood picture. It seemed so universal and was so redeeming. But what it lacked was comedy
PT: That's where you came in.
HR: I rolled up my sleeves and made it funny And Bill, of course.
PT: You seem suspicious of many things loosely described as spiritual.
HR: I used to be married to a woman who pursued every spiritual trend with tremendous passion and dragged me along. Dan Ackroyd and I had fun [with Ghostbusters] because even though I don't believe in anything and he does, I could still speak the language. I read books like Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain and had been to the Theosophical Society in London. I'd seen mediums and readers; we went to Bulgaria to find one of the characters in Psychic Discoveries.
PT: Do you believe in psychic powers?
HR: I believe that things happen that can't be explained, but so many people seem intent on explaining them. Everyone has an answer for them. Either aliens or things from the spirit world.
PT: Ghostbusters, in 1984, was so ahead of the spiritual trend.
HR: I know. No one had done it. I don't like to do things that I feel like rye seen before. Dan had written Ghostbusters for himself and John Belushi. When he wrote it, it was really out there, the paranormal thing. But the best thing about it, I thought, was the mundane edge it had; that where I thought the comedy had to go. I played more to the science of it.
PT: And that's where your character came in.
HR: Yeah, I said he was the new wave Mr. Spock. But I'm a guy who always smiles and the character I played never smiles--I don't think he smiled once in the whole movie. I wanted him to be the embodiment of pure science.
I got the character from the cover of a radical architectural magazine--I can't remember the name. It was very obtuse. The guy on the cover was an architectural theorist and his hair was standing up, and he had on a retro suit, though he wouldn't have known it was retro. He looked like such a classic egghead, and I thought, that's the guy I want to play, to have really tall hair, be totally unconscious about the way I dress.
PT: What about your new movie Multiplicity?
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