Wes Anderson Royal Tenenbaums" was nominated for an Academy Award and ranked by an "Empire" poll as the 159th greatest film ever made. Anderson's next feature was "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" (2004) about a Jacques Cousteau-esque documentary filmmaker played by Bill Murray. It serves as a classic example of Anderson's style, but its critical reception was less favorable than his previous films, and its box office did not match the heights of "The Royal Tenenbaums". In September 2006, Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen released a tongue-in-cheek "letter of intervention" for Anderson's artistic "malaise" following the disappointing commercial and
Bill Murray and again in 2006 for "". Murray later said that he only took the role because he was under the mistaken impression the screenplay, co-written by Joel Cohen, was the work of Joel Coen. In 2004, he made his third collaboration with Wes Anderson in "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" and in 2005 his second collaboration with Jim Jarmusch in "Broken Flowers". That same year, Murray announced that he was taking a hiatus from acting as he had not had the time to relax since his new breakthrough in the late 1990s. He did return to the big screen