Byrum had trouble finding a studio to finance it. At one stage, 20th Century Fox planned to make it. Murray wanted to play the part because "it was a different kind of character, calmer, more self-aware." Dan Aykroyd suggested that Murray could appear in Ghostbusters for Columbia Pictures in exchange for the studio's approving to make The Razor's Edge. Murray agreed and a deal was made with Columbia. Filming For the next year and a half, cast and crew shot on location in France, Switzerland, and India with a $12 million budget. The Indian locations were primarily in the Indian Himalayas. After the last day of principal photography, Murray left to make Ghostbusters. Executive Producer Rob Cohen said, "It's a timeless story about someone looking for values in this world. It's about a transition. Well, who can make a more extreme transition, somebody like Bill Hurt, who looks pensive to begin with, and will wind up simply a little more spiritual than he was in the first place, or a Bill Murray, who can begin as the class clown, go to war, come back, and having had traumatic experiences, start to question?" Reception The film was a commercial failure, grossing a little more than $6 million, half of its $12 million production budget. Critical response Janet Maslin of The New York Times called the film "slow, overlong, and ridiculously overproduced," as well as "so disjointed that Mr. Murray, for all his wise-cracking inappropriateness, is all that holds it together." Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and judged the movie "flawed," pointing to the hero as "too passive, too contained, too rich in self-irony, to really sweep us along in his quest." He placed the blame on Murray's shoulders, saying he "plays the hero as if fate is a comedian and he is the straight man". Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote, "Conceived as a major career departure for comic star Bill Murray, The Razor's Edge emerges as a minimally acceptable adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's superb novel. Tonally inconsistent and structurally awkward, film does develop some dramatic interest in the second half, but inherent power of the material is never realized." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three stars out of four and remarked that "the movie stands or falls on whether Murray is able to disappear into his character of a young man