THERE are certain events you prepare for in life but coming face to face with Bill Murray in a country pub isn’t one of them.

“Hey, how you doing?” says the star of Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day and Lost In Translation.

He puts his beer down on the table and takes a chair as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. I can only mutter something about feeling fine, gawp and wonder, “Where on earth did you come from?”

Surely Mr Murray requires fanfare to mark his arrival, but he’s as low-key as it comes.

The reason for the pub location is its appearance in Wes Anderson’s new animated movie of the Roald Dahl classic, Fantastic Mr Fox.

Nestled on the outskirts of the chocolate-box village of Great Missenden, where Dahl lived and worked, The Nags Head Inn is surrounded by the landscape that inspired the children’s author.

Having just finished an interview with Anderson, I’d presumed the day was over when Murray, who voices the character of Badger in the film, made his unexpected appearance. And it is unexpected. He is famously difficult to ‘get’ for a movie role, let alone pin-down for press time.

“I’m having a lovely day,” he says in his familiar, monotone voice. “The English countryside is great. The town’s a zoo. Anyone in their right mind would be out here in this pub where there’s fresh air and a little bit more room to breathe. I mean look at this beautiful sun we’ve got here today and this landscape. Where are the postcards in this place anyway?”

Slightly dishevelled in a brown corduroy suit, he’s looking every one of his 59 years but then he’s never been one to shy away from enjoying a late night.

Even today, when asked if he’s been to the English countryside before, he says, “Yeah, I’ve been thrown out of cars in the English countryside.” So, lots of happy memories then? “What I remember? Yeah, sure,” he deadpans. This is the fifth time Murray has worked with Wes Anderson, with previous projects including Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. “Wes couldn’t get anyone else to work with him so just keeps calling the same people,” is Murray’s reasoning.

Their movie union began back in 1998 when Murray took a gamble on Anderson in agreeing to star in Rushmore without having ever having met the director or viewed his work.

“I read the script and thought anyone who can write this knows exactly what they want to do,” says Murray before adding in a mock aside, “If I knew what he looked like I might have changed my mind.”

As for how Wes now approaches him with a new project, he says, “There’s usually a warning shot across the bow, like ‘I’m going to be doing something’. You know, just a little bit of talk. I never know if he means, ‘Are you interested, or are you alive?’ It could be both.”

Anderson is known for taking a more oddball approach on his films and Fantastic Mr Fox is no different. Instead of CGI, he opted to use stop-motion, one of the oldest and most labour-intensive forms of special effects, which involves 24 frames of film per second of screen time.

Another departure from the norm saw the cast spend a few days on a farm in Connecticut recording the dialogue as ‘live’, rather than in a studio. If there was a scene set in a field, they’d run around the field with the boom operator chasing after them and if there was a digging scene, they’d get down on their hands and knees.

“We really did have a chunky good time for the amount of work we did on this movie,” Murray says.

That’s not to say everything went entirely as he’d wished though, particularly with regards to his character’s accent.

“Well, you know, it’s an ugly footnote to the whole film,” he says, keeping a straight-face. “I did prepare what I thought was a beatific Wisconsin accent to go with the Badger. It was beautiful but no one really cared or noticed, they just went ‘No, maybe not’.

As for working with George Clooney, who plays the wily, anti-hero Mr Fox, he says, “It takes a while to understand George because he’s a motormouth. He really can talk, so you’ve got to kind of wade through a lot of it but George is a real force, you know? He’s probably the one person who’s living the movie star life really, really well and doing great at it.

“I think he did an amazing job as the Fox because he is the tone that everything works off. And he’s committed. There’s no mucking about or rehearsal takes, this guy’s just full-go all the time.

It’s what great actors do. They say ‘I’m going to set this standard’, and you’ll go ‘Ok, I’m going to set this standard’ and you keep boosting each other up.”

As the sun sets on our interview, I ask Murray what he thinks the message of Fantastic Mr Fox is. “Be free,” he says. “I think everything in the film says be free, be present, right now . . . this moment.”

And what does that mean for Murray? “I’m going to the bar right over here.”