Stephen Tobolowsky talks about the challenges and rewards of making the classic film Groundhog Day

THE Bill Murray movie groundhog day it’s one of those classic films that has held up over the years and still makes you laugh with every re-watch. The story follows the main character of Murray, who is a journalist who goes to cover the Groundhog Day festival and wakes up the next day only to repeat the day in its entirety. He gets caught in a cycle of repeating this day over and over, and makes some funny and wild choices, all while he learns to improve his life and discovers what’s truly important.

One of the ensemble characters in the film is played by a character actor Stephen Tobolowsky, which has quite an impressive resume. She has worked on so many films over the years, that she has seen many different styles of directing, and although she had a small part in this film, she said that this film was really difficult 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 struggle to create the show that it was. After the first week, Harold Ramis met with Danny Rubin, our writer, and he says, ‘What is the story we’re really telling here?” Are we going to have a series of sequences where Bill has no consequences and acts crazy, like he did in all those movies back then, or are we going to tell the story of what’s the moment in our lives and how do it? do we use it? And Harold Ramis and Danny thought, “Number two.” So they started cutting scenes left and right that were in the original script, and reshaping it. We were getting new pages every day; it was like guerrilla theater, doing I start over. And in a way, this either leads to disaster, or it 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 simply amazing. When you re-watch the film, you realize the gift of film is Andie McDowell. It’s simply magnificent.”

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