1000+ unique media and news posts every 24 hours…
“Honestly, it’s a huge relief not to have to write so many curse words,” he says Richard Curtis of focusing on a family audience with his debut animated film That Christmas.
The writer, director and producer is known for more adult humor in films like Four Weddings and a Funeral (and the memorably liberal use of F-bombs in the opening scene), Love actually and TV series Blackadder.
But then he teamed up with co-writer Peter Souter to adapt his own series of Christmas books Netflix and on the big screen there are other priorities and challenges for the Bafta and Emmy winner.
At some point it looks like I might interview 68-year-old Curtis Subway in a hotel bathroom after a mix-up with room access.
But while we wait for the official continuation of the interview that started earlier with That Christmas director Simon Otto, Curtis would like to get my thoughts on everything I saw at the London Film Festival – we’ll meet in October when That Christmas premieres. there – with undiminished enthusiasm for the industry.
Once we are in the right place, away from the toilet, we should drop the conversation Lightning, Conclave And Emilia Perez to get back to what turned him off about That Christmas: visual thinking.
‘When I write, I really see stick figures and different fonts talking to each other. I’ve never been particularly visual and one of the great joys of this is saying, well, okay, someone comes into a barn with a lot of turkeys, what are the five funniest things?’
Sorry, the video was not found
For him this was a challenge, but one he enjoyed, especially as he saw it as ‘part of the family nature of it’.
Here we come to his example of profuse swearing in the past, including in 2013 gripping magical-realistic comedy About Time.
“They told me if you can boil it down to sixteen swear words, it could be a – whatever it was – a PG or something like that. And I remember saying to the editor, “Well, that’s great, because there’s only twenty of them!” And he came back the next day and said there are 76 swear words – so it was lovely for me to be able to behave better.”
About Time ultimately got a 12 for “rare profanity” and an amusingly imaginative litany of milder swearing, so it’s safe to say the editor probably lost that round with Curtis.
With That Christmas another festive offering in Curtis’ canon – which already includes Love Actually, Robbie the Reindeer and his much-loved TV specials for The Vicar of Dibley and Blackadder – I wonder if this puts extra pressure on him and the film to perform?
“I don’t feel it and I hope other people don’t feel it either,” Curtis replies, pointing out that “Christmas comes once a year, and adds new Christmas things every year.”
‘What I like about doing Comic Relief (which he founded with Sir Lenny Henry in 1985) is that every time we return to it there are new comedians and pop stars for us to use, and I feel a bit like that with Christmas – that something new happens every year.
“So I guess Christmas is actually the gift that keeps on giving!”
That Christmas features a star-studded cast with Brian Cox, Bill Nighy, Jodie Whittaker, Fiona Shaw, Rhys Darby and Lolly Adefope, who portray characters in interwoven stories of love and loneliness, family and friends, Santa Claus making a big mistake – and much more. turkeys.
It’s the interconnected storylines that most excite director Otto, who makes his feature directorial debut on That Christmas after working as an animator on films like The Prince of Egypt, Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon.
“Telling a multi-threaded storyline with multiple heroes all dealing with the same kind of problem at Christmas made it extremely interesting for animation, because that doesn’t usually happen,” he explains. “We tend to tell stories about individual heroes in a fantastic world and a fantastic journey.”
Otto finds it very satisfying that he helped create a large cast of characters “who behind each of them has an idea that makes them unique” – and that he pulls off a Love Actually-themed joke on Curtis. At one point in the film, some children complain that they don’t want to see “the boring Christmas movie.”
“I assumed it was going to be some sort of posh 1950s British film,” Curtis recalls. “One day I come by, look at the edit and they put in a bit of Love Actually without telling me. And I thought… completely right too. Love Actually, it’s an old movie now!’
“But when it played we all laughed so much, we said we had to keep it,” Otto chuckles.
The chance to change these types of scenes ‘late in the process’ is something Curtis also enjoyed.
“When you’re editing a live-action film, you have what the actors have given you, whereas in this film, three-quarters of the way through the process you could say, I want a new scene here.”
My favorite film from Curtis’ catalog is the aforementioned About Time, which failed to reach the dizzying heights of his previous films as an instant hit. Curtis also adores it as “the most personal of my films.”
‘It’s the one I identify with most now, because it’s about how you spend your time, and about family, parents and children. I saw it recently – and I don’t normally watch my movies – and I thought it was a little weirder than I remembered, but that made me like it more,” he says.
As to why it might not have had an immediate impact, Curtis has a related theory.
‘I don’t think it’s that traditional in form. It’s kind of like two movies, isn’t it? There’s a rom-com in the first half, and then there’s a family story in the second half, so I think it’s a stranger movie, which might explain why it’s not as penetrating.”
Funnily enough, I’m far from alone in my advocacy for About Time, as film fans will most often stop Curtis on the street to talk about ‘because they think I don’t expect it’.
‘People would probably think that if they said I like Notting Hill or Love Actually, I might know. I think people think About Time wasn’t very successful, so I have to tell him!’ he laughs. “And then men in their fifties talk to me about Blackadder all the time.”
About Time also happens to play a role in Curtis’ answer to what he believes is the biggest misconception about himself and his film work.
‘I think friendship has been, or used to be, a bigger theme than people will remember. When I wrote Four Weddings, it was just as much about friendship,” he points out, just as About Time is about friendship, family and love.
He pauses for a moment before continuing with his answer, warning that his next thought will “go a little deep” in a vaguely apologetic tone, before adding, “My life is about the fusion between my films and my work with Comic Relief. And I sometimes think that the people who watch my films think that I don’t know how difficult life is. And I do that because Comic Relief’s job is to observe and record how difficult and complicated life is, and I am very aware that the aim of many of my films has been to offer something beautiful in what I know is often a very harsh world.’
Moving onto lighter territory, I ask Curtis if he’d ever see Four Weddings and a Funeral getting a reboot or sequel treatment, after the 2019 reunion sketch for Red Nose Day (and since he recently unveiled the film The sequel to Notting Hill that Julia Roberts turned down).
‘My wife Emma (Freud) keeps telling me to make a movie called Four Funerals and a Wedding. I’m nervous there won’t be many jokes in there! So I think it’s very unlikely that it will be remade.’
He also can’t choose the film he’s most proud of: “I think I’m probably more critical of them than some people, and less critical of them than others!”
I had taken it so full too A Blackadder revival would never happengiven what Curtis said over the years, but he doesn’t give me as definitive closure as he used to.
‘Rowan and I have a plan for something we might enjoy in the coming years. “I would love to work with Rowan on something again,” he says.
But not necessarily Blackadder? “I don’t know,” is Curtis’s casual response.
Before we say goodbye, I can’t resist asking Curtis about the wave Hugh Grant is currently riding with his villainous role in Heretic after recently claiming that he initially built both his career and his character off-screen around the ‘stutter-y, blink-y’ sign he portrayed in Four Weddings. (Grant will later present Curtis with an honorary Oscar for his Comic Relief work, lovingly giving his collaborator and friend an ‘a*** hole’ in a wonderfully ferocious speech.)
‘A very interesting question! Does the psychotic madman in Heretic look more like Hugh than the nice guy with glasses in my films?’ Curtis grins before defending the change in direction in his career.
“I love what’s happening with Hugh because I think the mix between him not taking risks for 15 years, but I think – more importantly – other people not taking risks for him was a shame. ‘
He says it is ‘so nice’ to see Grant being praised for roles such as Jeremy Thorpe, for which he was nominated by the Bafta, in A Very English Scandal.
‘I really love his performances now – and I especially love that whenever I ask him what he does, he always describes it as the worst performance in film history. And then I’m always pleasantly surprised that he is indeed great.’
That Christmas is now in select cinemas and streaming exclusively on Netflix.
Do you have a story?
If you have a celebrity story, video or photos, please get in touch Metro.nl entertainment team by emailing us at celebtips@metro.co.uk, calling 020 3615 2145 or by calling our Submit stuff page – we look forward to hearing from you.
MORE: Netflix fans declare ‘the world is healing’ with ‘magnificent’ British comedy addition
MORE: Furious WWE fans are launching a petition to ban pubs and bars from showing wrestling shows
MORE: Meghan Markle’s TV comeback confirmed ‘after a year of working on Netflix series’
1000+ unique media and news posts every 24 hours…