Chad Taylor

I never lend books to coal miners

In an interview at GQ.com Bill Murray explains how he got a green light for his version of Somerset Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge:
Back when I wanted to make The Razor's Edge, [Dan Aykroyd] sent me the first twenty-nine pages of Ghostbusters to read. And you know, they were great, even better than what we filmed, so I said, "Okay, okay, gotta do it." And Danny said, "Uummm, okay. Where should we, uh, er, do it?" And I said, "Well, I'm trying to get this movie made over at Columbia [Pictures]." And he said, "All right, well, you tell 'em that they do your movie there and they'll have the GBs." We had a caterer for Razor's Edge in forty-five minutes.
The 1984 version of The Razor's Edge was a failure with critics and audiences. It was the second adaptation of Maugham's novel; the first in 1946 with Tyrone Power didn't go down that well either. (A third version was made in 2005.) Maugham's story is attractive but notoriously challenging to dramatise. The main character, Larry, is off-stage for most of the novel, his actions reported to the reader by third parties, and his journey of enlightenment is internal. This puts any screenwriter two steps away from the tools he needs.

Director John Byrum collaborated with Murray on the screenplay which puts Larry at the center of events while several different worlds collapse around him. In some ways their version is better structured than the source: after seeing the movie and going back to the book you can see Maugham's glissando style for the soft lens that it is.

In The Razor's Edge Larry moves through life's terrible events without being dragged down: he remains cheerful, flip, serenely detached. All Murray had to do to remain true to the character was to be himself, which he did. He couldn't muster the dramatic moments and there are some cute bits in there that didn't work but I still think the 1984 version is a great adaptation of a good book. Theresa Russell pours it on in a bob and there is a wonderful scene when Larry, living in North England and literally working at the coal face, is chided by a fellow miner: 'You've never read The Upanishads? You really don't know anything, do you?'