Bill Murray has a secret 1-800 phone line to get contacted about prospective parts instead of an agency or manager, and he’s now telling the public why.

Murray said in a recent interview with IndieWire that he created the phone number to avoid the never-ending calls from Hollywood agencies. Murray, who is due to act in Sofia Coppola’s forthcoming On The Rocks and Jim Jarmusch’s horror film The Dead Don’t Die and prefers to work with friends anyhow, has a private line that allows him to choose who he answers to.

“I had a house phone, and it would just ring and ring. Finally, I’d pick up the phone and I’d say, ‘Who in the f*ck is calling me and letting my phone ring like that?’ The agent would say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m calling for so-and-so.’ I’d say, ‘Look, you can’t do this. This is my house. If I don’t answer the phone, don’t do that because you’re making me not like you.'”

He was aware of the strain on the other end of the line. “Their job is, ‘Get me Bill Murray on the phone.’ They have nothing else to do.” So he decided one more step was necessary. “I just unplugged the phone and then I got this 800 number, which is very handy,” he said.

Although Murray found this new mode of contact easy, others did not, notably “St. Vincent” director Ted Melfi, who stated he left multiple messages on Murray’s voicemail over the course of several months in 2014 before eventually reaching him through his attorney.

Murray admitted, “I’m not very disciplined anymore. This was a way you could not answer any phone, and whenever you felt like engaging, you could check to see who had bothered to call and what the message was. It just freed up my life a whole lot.”

Although this allows Murray to maintain his privacy, it is said to be inconvenient for filmmakers and publicists who are frequently kept in the dark about the actor’s availability, with Murray just showing up on red carpets without confirming his presence. But, as Murray explained, this is precisely the point: “The people that know me, they get to me. The people that don’t know me just have a little more difficulty.”

Jim Jarmusch admires Bill Murray’s attitude to business, which is fortunate for him because he now has his genuine phone number. Murray may appear to be a bully to some, but he is ultimately defending himself from a business that wants a lot from him. Murray has been compared by Jarmusch to legendary artist Neil Young, who has a similar commercial strategy. He clarifies.

“I don’t know that many people of that kind of high profile who can. Bill protects what he feels is his directive in his life – what is his job and how he wants to live. So he structures it in a way where he doesn’t have an entourage or a hedge of people around him. It’s very direct, but he can kind of close it off. Neil’s (Young) like that. He’s very much like, ‘Hey man, I’m getting new song ideas right now. The rest of the world can f*ck off. I don’t owe you anything.'”

Murray, after all, prefers to collaborate with his friends rather than take chances on odd proposals. To that end, his circuitous path over the last few decades is not without sense. Sofia Coppola can always reach him. Murray also appears in Wes Anderson’s forthcoming film “The French Dispatch.” Jarmusch hired Murray in a meta-sketch for 2003’s “Coffee and Cigarettes,” in which he plays himself opposite RZA, and subsequently gave him one of his most nuanced late-period appearances in 2006’s “Broken Flowers” (Murray’s son, Homer, also appears in the film’s concluding scenes).