FAQ

It's from a song: Jacques Brel, "La bourrée du célibataire" (1957).

Arrogant Pittsburgh TV weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is assigned the job of covering Punxsutawney Phil's emergence to see his shadow on Groundhog Day (February 2nd), a duty he's been reluctantly covering for the past four years. He makes it through the day in his usual egoistic manner, incurring the disdain of both his pretty new producer (Andie MacDowell) and his long-suffering photographer Larry (Chris Elliott). When he awakens the next morning, however, he finds that it's Groundhog Day again, as is every day thereafter, forcing Phil to relive the day over and over again. Unable to leave Punxsutawney due to a severe blizzard, Phil struggles to find a way to make this quirk in the fabric of time work to his advantage. The one bright spot is that this gives him a new chance everyday to get to know Rita to whom he is attracted.

Groundhog Day is based on an original script by screenwriter Danny Rubin and further adapted for the screen by Rubin and director Harold Ramis. The time-loop idea was inspired by the novel Replay (1987) by Ken Grimwood.

There is no definite reason as to why the time loop started. It was originally planned for the time loop to have started with an ex-girlfriend of Phil's putting a voodoo curse on him in order to get revenge, which was later considered a bad idea. It was deliberately decided by director Harold Ramis to let the reason as to what triggered the time loop remain a mystery and is completely left to the viewer's interpretation.

No. The man was simply a homeless man that Phil decided to help. Phil just affectionately called him "Dad" and "Pop". Notice that Phil seems to do this with older people anyway, referring to his B&B hostess as "Mom" on at least one occasion.

He did try staying up all night. After Phil gets Rita to believe that he has been reliving the same day over and over again, she decides to stay with him just to see what happens. First she thinks it will end at midnight, but finds out that it starts over at 6:00 AM every morning. She falls asleep but Phil stays awake all night just whispering to her as she sleeps. The alarm then goes off and he looks where Rita was just sleeping to see that she has disappeared. Although we do see him getting thrown in jail, we don't know what time it is. Then we see him waking up the next morning, happy that he is no longer in jail.

Just because we don't see Phil try certain things in order to prevent the recurrence of Groundhog Day doesn't mean he didn't try it. Some things occur off camera. Considering he mentions dying in every way there is possible, but we only see him kill himself a few different ways. Also, he gets to know everything about every person in the town. He is clearly not seen doing this throughout the film. So we are led to believe he took at least one day to get to know every single person.