Making the film

Shooting

"This is it. This is definitley the ticket. We don't need Bombay"

John Byrum

Location shooting began in South West England for the World War 1 scenes in the summer of 1983.

The crew then moved on to locations in France including the Bastille and Paris red-light district to shoot the Paris scenes.

Around September 1983, the crew then moved onto India in which they encountered everything from food poisoning and bad weather to geographic and language barriers. Communication was difficult until the arrival of an Indian called Chiptan ‘Tip’ Chostock who played one of the monks in the film.

It was at a dinner with Tip’s family that Bill had his “religious experience” (covered in more detail in the Rolling Stone interview) The crew spent a week in Delhi and then chartered a jet to Srinager on the 21st September (Bill's birthday) “as we took off I was sitting in the back screaming “yeaugh yeaugh” just whipping this jet to go. I was so excited that we were actually going up to the mountains on my birthday”.  

The crew then ventured up to Ladakh to shoot the scenes in the monastery. They were met at the airport by a fleet of black jeeps driven by Tibetan monguls. The crew stayed in the nearby town of Leh. During shooting Bill received regular telegrams asking when he would be ready to start Ghostbusters.

“All the time we were in Ladakh we’d get these messages that were like three days old saying “Is Bill finished? He’s supposed to be doing Ghostbusters on the 25th”. 

Bill Murray finished shooting in October 1983. He spent a short time in Delhi where he mostly slept. He then travelled by Concorde to Thorn-EMI Elstree studios to view a rough edit of the film before moving on to work on Ghostbusters. Editing of The Razor's Edge continued through to around June/July 1984 as Ghostbusters opened.