Mr Bean, who began life on British television screens in 1990, has become a worldwide star thanks to Rowan Atkinson's unique ability to marry endearing physical comedy and slapstick with a lovable personality.  The series sold around the globe, which propelled co-writers Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis to create a feature film, Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie, which saw the star embroiled in the art world in Los Angeles. 
Following the huge international success of the first Bean film - over $260 million worldwide on its release in 1997 - it was only a matter of time before the film's creators decided to give the character a second big screen outing.  However, this time the filmmakers were very keen that they would not retread the same path, both stylistically and narratively.
"We always felt that there was another movie to be made with Mr Bean, but it would be a very different film from the first one," explains Rowan Atkinson, the award-winning actor and writer who co-created the comedy character with Richard Curtis.  "We did the first movie 10 years ago and if we were going to make a sequel it would have been logical to make it eight or nine years ago rather than now, but it just took time to get round to thinking about it."
It wasn't hard for Atkinson to play the character again, despite a decade having passed since he last did so.  "I haven't visited him much since the last film - the last time I played the character was on a British children's TV programme about  two years ago.  But I didn't find it difficult in finding him again, understanding him and knowing how he would behave in any given situation.  I no longer have to work on him or think about him and how he's going to react.  I instinctively know him, his childish instincts are very strong to me.  The challenge of filming for me is being at the centre of the film and being in virtually every scene and making sure that the relationships between Bean and the people he meets work and work well."
Atkinson was also intrigued by the chance to explore a different style of filmmaking that a new film would offer. "I always believed that there was a European style movie to be made with Mr Bean," he says.  "The first movie was more American in style.  It had the story, format and tone of an American family comedy.  I was always interested in the idea of Bean being the pro-active element, being the element driving the story, rather than him being a reactive element, a sort of satellite figure who was in the background while the story was being driven by other characters, which was the shape of the first film."
Tim Bevan, producer and co-chairman of Working Title Films explains how the creative elements came together: "Once we had finished Johnny English I suggested to Rowan that we develop two films one of which would be a sequel to Mr Bean." Both he and Richard Curtis felt that to make another movie about the same character you would want to aspire to a different level of creative ambition and you would want to make it as pure and as cinematic as possible.  "There's a real simplicity about the character of Bean," continues Bevan, "someone then had the genius idea of involving Simon McBurney who co-founded Theatre de Complicite.  He has a lot of experience with movement and mime.  Essentially both he and Rowan strive to do the same thing, which is to engage the audience through more or less silent comedy."
McBurney was immediately intrigued by the prospect of collaborating with Atkinson "Rowan is absolutely unique as a performer.  I first met him and saw him work in the early 1980s when I was very young and I was mesmerised by his stage work because he was one of those performers who could go on stage and nothing would happen and you would be completely entranced, roaring with laughter, but you didn't know what he was doing.  He has a unique physical presence and an incredible imagination as a performer.  He will suddenly see a way of reacting to something which nobody else might see - he's in character and he starts to play with it.  He's constantly playing and inventing and that's what makes him very special."
Working with a character who expresses himself through action rather than the spoken word was also a strong incentive. "I absolutely love silent comedy in all its myriad forms," says McBurney, who has always wanted to make an homage to silent film comedy.  "One of the first things I did with Rowan was to sit down and watch films by Buster Keaton, Charlie Chapin, Harold Lloyd and Carl Valentine. We also watched bits of Jacques Tati and I thought it would be thrilling to try and make a film in which Bean hardly says a thing.  He is the most wonderful character when he's doing something, rather than saying something."
The filmmakers were aware that comparisons might be made with Tati's classic French comedy Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, but as Rowan Atkinson says:  "The film is driven by Bean's ambition to reach a lovely beach. It wasn't particularly inspired by Monsieur Hutot's Holiday. In many ways the essence of that film was that he was travelling for 5 minutes and was on the beach for an hour and a half, whereas we travel for an hour and half of the film's running time and then we're on the beach for 5 minutes.  So it's an inverse of that film."
As the collaborators began to play with possible storylines, one key element emerged: the introduction of a female character. "Before Simon became involved we thought that maybe it should be a film about Bean and a woman," says Bevan.  "When Simon came on board he felt that Bean was not a character that would fall in love on screen, but he found the idea that there should be a woman involved in the story somewhere very interesting.  Simon and Rowan decided that the film should be a journey and that we should keep it as simple and as pure as possible.  Our hero would be going on holiday to the seaside and the film would be entirely about his journey of getting to the beach and all the cock ups and problems that happen along the way."
"As in all silent comedy there is a simple desire that drives the story, in this case Bean's desire to go on holiday in France," McBurney continues. "The story is really motivated by action, very much in the vein of Buster Keaton - he has one idea, he falls in love and then he pursues the girl - or Chaplin in The Goldrush where he sets off in order to make some money.  There's no psychological build-up, it's just really very, very simple  In Mr Bean's Holiday he is trying to get somewhere and he simply cannot get there."
Those initial discussions also brought the team to two further elements: there would be dialogue in the film but it would be either French or another language that few people understand; and Bean would have three words of French which would be Oui, Non and Gracias .
"It was always a slight source of regret to me that Mr Bean spoke as much as he did in the first film," says Atkinson.  "By putting Mr Bean in an environment where he doesn't speak the language he would have to deal with every situation in a silent way, and that way we would be able to maintain a bit of purity to the way Mr Bean works."
The team also decided that Mr Bean would come across two characters on his journey, a boy and a woman. The boy, played by Max Baldry, becomes Bean's responsibility as he struggles to reunite him with his family, and can't speak English; the woman, played by Emma de Caunes, is not a romantic interest but is swept up in Bean's adventure.
"We've been extremely lucky with the casting of the roles," says Atkinson. "Emma de Caunes is everything that we would wish.  She manages to convey tenderness but has a volatility which is our view of the French actress.  Max Baldry is very, active, very lively, very on the ball and very natural."
Co-producer Caroline Hewitt concurs:  "For Sabine, we needed somebody neither too young nor too mature. There was an age beyond which it was not going to be that interesting and too young would be a bit too cute. Emma just hits that middle, she's exactly the right age. She also understands the peaks and troughs of an acting career which was useful for the character.  Max was the first boy to come through the door. It completely changed everything because we realised he spoke Russian which fitted in with us wanting a boy who was fluent in another language.  He really has a fantastic energy.  He has a lot of composure and he's quite precocious, he knows exactly what he's doing."
For Emma de Caunes, one of France's rising stars who most recently starred in The Science of Sleep, the decision to accept the role of Sabine was very simple, as she was already very familiar with the character of Bean, thanks to her father, TV presenter Antoine de Caunes. "When I was 15 or 16, my dad used to bring me back the tapes of Bean and I was really mad for it.  He really made me laugh so I'm a huge fan.  I love the fact that he's really quite innocent, like a child and we can all understand him.  And there's a lot of poetry in the film. It was also an opportunity to work with Rowan who is an amazing actor.  The role is not just burlesque, he's a fantastic actor and I really loved watching him working and improvising.  For me he's like a Charlie Chaplin."
Max Baldry, making his film debut, was also a connoisseur of the Mr Bean television series: "I grew up in Poland and we used to watch Mr Bean.  He's known all over the world.  One day when we were filming at the Arc de Triomphe a coach of Japanese tourists went by and they were all opening the windows and saying 'Mr Bean! Mr Bean!'  It was really funny.  It's very exciting for me be acting with him, although I find him so funny it's sometimes very hard for me not to laugh."
For the character of Carson Clay, the filmmakers approached Willem Dafoe, one of America's top actors whose films have included the award-winning The English Patient,
The Life Acquatic with Steve Zissou and Spiderman. "It's a fun character," explains co-producer Caroline Hewitt, "because it's a caricature of the kind of pretentious art house film director who has to make commercials to make ends meet and then makes the most boring art house movie known to man. Willem came to it so generously and openly and immediately got it.  We gave him a girlfriend who's about 10 feet taller than him for the red carpet scene at the festival.  He understood and went along with it."
dafoe needs little persuading to accept the part. "I'm a great fan of Rowan's," he says, "and I really loved the part.  I play an art house prima donna, a filmmaker who stars in his own films, but who is making a yoghurt commercial for money.  In a way he's the straight man to Mr Bean, who is a constant thorn in his side."
The film also appealed because it was a chance for Dafoe to step outside his comfort zone in terms of genre: "It's different to what I've done before and that usually helps whet my appetite.  It felt like an adventure because I had to learn a new approach. It's physical comedy and that's quite liberating. It really was a lot of fun."
taking the helm is Steve Bendelack, director of British TV hits Little Britain and French and Saunders, and the feature film 'League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse'. He was, according to producer Tim Bevan, the obvious choice:  "We wanted to find somebody who had a sense of comedy and worked with comedic actors, but also had a real sense of cinema. Steve was the right person."
The challenge for Bendelack was to see Bean in a new environment:  "It was interesting to me to combine the tried and tested things that Rowan does as Bean with some things that he hasn't done before. We see him in a much wider context in this film.  It was interesting to put him in a real world with real characters and to play on that juxtaposition.  I was interested by the subtlety of his performance.  It's a collaboration because he knows the character so well.  There is a part of his personality that is genuinely extrapolated into this character, so that's very interesting to work with."
Co-producer Caroline Hewitt testifies to the ease with which Rowan slips into character: "Rowan's focus and concentration are extraordinary.  During filming I got to know Rowan and to watch him transform into Mr Bean was almost a shock. It's a complete personality take-over.  It's not like with other actors who explore their characters. Rowan knows exactly who Bean is, he can say with complete authority, 'I would not, as Bean, do this', he is completely embedded with the character. It's fascinating to watch."
The film is set almost entirely in France, but the filmmakers were keen to portray a France that would subvert Bean's - and perhaps the audience's - preconceptions of the country.
"We talked a lot about the idea that Bean would have a clichéd idea of France," says McBurney. "His idea of France is epitomised by the yoghurt commercial that he ends up disrupting, a France with peaceful ancient villages set in perfect landscapes, full of men wearing berets outside the local café drinking pernod.  Bean's France turns out to be a fiction. The real France is something different.  I lived in France for a long time and I felt it should be portrayed as a very modern country, which is extremely urbanised and with this incredible sense of design.  The real France is motorways, the highly modern architecture of La Defense and the Cannes Film Festival.  Of course, there are some simple jokes which you could only do about France, things to do with the cyclists, hitchhiking or the food.  The key to it was seeing Bean interact with a culture which is not his own.  Very often in the TV shows he was put into an unfamiliar situation. Now he's in an unfamiliar country. So the whole country becomes the situation and anything is potentially disastrous."
Attkinson adds: "France is a very big country with a relatively small population for its land mass and there are many spectacular and beautiful vistas which we have attempted to capture. We tried to capitalise on some of the extraordinary architecture and landscapes that France has because there is something inherently funny about this small figure of Mr Bean set in this vast context. I think it was Charlie Chaplin, who said 'Life is a tragedy in close-up but a comedy in a long shot' and there is that element that the more you draw back, the more inherently amusing the figure in the landscape becomes."
FILMING IN CANNES
Filming took place over 12 weeks during the summer of 2006, in London, Paris, the Luberon and Cannes, where both the beaches and Le Palais, best known for hosting the Cannes Film Festival, were used.
For the first time ever, the crew were even allowed to film on the red carpet during the festival, thanks to the organisers of the film festival. "It was amazing that we were allowed to film there," says Hewitt.  "Giles Jacob, the festival president, turned out to be a fan of Mr Bean and just liked the idea.  They were incredibly welcoming and helped in every single way they possibly could. We filmed one scene live as a real film entourage were going up the red carpet - we cheekily just jumped on the back of it.  And for one of the most complex scenes we took over the equivalent of three public beaches on the Croisette."
For Emma De Caunes it was a strange experience to be filmed climbing the red carpet as a real film was receiving its premiere:  "It was really exciting because nobody really knew that we were shooting a movie.  People know me a little in France so they were shouting 'Emma!'  And I was thinking, 'No I'm Sabine!'  It was funny.  It was great to have some of the craziness of Cannes during the festival in the film."
Setting the film in Cannes was just one way that McBurney wanted to make Mr Bean's Holiday an homage to the art of filmmaking. Throughout the film Bean has a video camera and part of the narrative of the film is told through the images that Bean takes on the video camera. 
"The great silent comedians always played with the idea of cinema," says McBurney. "Nowadays, when somebody goes on holiday they always take a videocamera.  It gave us the perfect means to play with the frame. When Bean has a video camera in his hand it becomes very interesting because you can see what he is looking at and that becomes a window into what he's thinking and feeling. And it pays off by ending up at a film festival. And so inevitably film and the film collide. It provided us with an amusing and clever way of playing with the idea of what is real and what is not real."
"A very important element of the story is that Mr Bean has a video camera with him at all times," continues Atkinson.  "Effectively two movies are playing out throughout our film - there is the film that we are making and then there's the movie that Mr Bean has made of his experiences on the road.  What's interesting is the way those two merge and overlap and intertwine and so there is this sense in which the nature of movies and moviemaking is at the centre of the story."
"I hope that the film is as true, if not more true to the character and what people have enjoyed about the character, than anything we've done before," concludes Atkinson. "I hope it's going to be a more pure representation of Bean than we've seen. I hope the audience will be with the character and rooting for him more and sympathizing with him more than you ever have before. That is my hope."

ROWAN ATKINSON (BEAN)
Rowan Atkinson was born on the Twelfth Night of Christmas 1955.  His middle name is Sebastian. A budding Electrical Engineer with degrees from Newcastle and Oxford Universities, Rowan attracted wide critical notice at the Edinburgh Festival in 1977. After mounting his own Revue at London's Hampstead Theatre in 1978, he became a founding member of the BBC's 'Not the Nine O'clock News' team - this was an experiment which turned into rather a success with four series, Platinum and Gold LP's, many best selling books, a Silver Rose at Montreux, an International Emmy, the British Academy Award and him becoming BBC Personality of the Year.
In 1981 Rowan became the youngest performer to have a one-man show in London's West End - the sell-out season at the Globe Theatre won him the Society of West End Theatre's Award for Comedy Performance of the Year. In 1983 Rowan embarked with writer Richard Curtis on their situation tragedy 'Blackadder' for the BBC.  Over the ensuing five years the four series won three British Academy Awards, an International Emmy, three ACE awards and personal awards for his performance, including Best Entertainment Performance.  Once again Rowan was voted BBC Personality of the Year.
On stage he took the lead in Larry Shue's 'The Nerd' at the Aldwych Theatre in 1985.  In the following year he mounted a new one-man show in the West End and after a sell-out season it was transferred to Broadway, where it was described by the New York Post as 'hilarious' and by the New York Times as 'stunningly predictable'.  This show went on to tour successfully in Australia, New Zealand, the Far East and the UK.  In 1988 he undertook a six month run in the West End, starring in 'The Sneeze', a collection of humorous one-act plays by Anton Chekhov.
Rowan's next major television undertaking was the creation of the silent comedy series 'Mr Bean' for ITV and HBO.  The pilot programme won the Golden Rose of Montreux and was nominated for an International Emmy. Subsequent episodes have continued to win plaudits, including an International Emmy, two BANFF Awards and an ACE Award for best Comedy in 1995.  The programmes have been sold to over 200 territories.  It was the highest rated comedy show of the decade on commercial television and produced by the production company Tiger Aspect, of which he is a partner and for whom he has also appeared in a number of highly successful documentary programmes on subjects ranging from comedy to his passion, the motor car.  In 1995 Rowan starred as the lead role, Inspector Raymond Fowler, in the first series of Tiger Aspect's number one rating situation comedy 'The Thin Blue Line' written by Ben Elton.A second series was produced in the summer of 1996.
For HBO and the BBC, Tiger also produced 'Rowan Atkinson on Location in Boston', a one hour special featuring highlights from his stage shows. The production won an ACE Award (1993). He has appeared in a number of films, including Never Say Never Again  with Sean Connery,  The Tall Guy with Jeff Goldblum,  Nick Roeg's The Witches, and Steven Wright's The Appointments of Dennis Jennings for HBO which won the 1989 Oscar for best short film.  Other film appearances include Hot Shots - Part Deux, Four Weddings and a Funeral and the voice of Zazu in The Lion King.
He also co-produced and appeared in Bean - The Ultimate Disaster Movie (1997).  The Polygram film, produced by Working Title in association with Tiger Aspect was a huge hit, second only to Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill as the highest ever grossing UK film internationally.
Throughout 2000, Blackadder Back & Forth, a 35-minute film shot on 70mm, was shown at the Millennium Dome.  With Rowan portraying Edmund Blackadder for the first time for a decade, the comedy features all the other stars of the original television series and proved to be the most popular attraction at the Dome.
In 2001 Rowan appeared as Enrico Polini in the Paramount film Rat Race also starring Whoopi Goldberg, Cuba Gooding Jnr, John Cleese amongst others and directed by David Zucker.  He also appeared in the 2002 Warner Bros live action movie Scooby Doo, playing the character 'Mondavarious' the villain.
Following this, Rowan completed production on the "Mr. Bean" animated series for Tiger Aspect Productions and the feature Johnny English in which he stars in the title role.  Johnny English was written by Neil Purvis and Rob Wade (James Bond), directed by Peter Howitt (Sliding Doors) and produced by Working Title Films.
Rowan appeared as Rufus the jewellery salesman in Working Title's 2003 romantic comedy hit Love Actually, directed by Richard Curtis, with an ensemble cast including Bill Nighy, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson, Hugh Grant, Keira Knightly and Chewitel Ejiofor; and in 2005 he played 'The Reverend Walter Goodfellow' in Keeping Mum, a Tusk Production, directed by Niall Johnson opposite Maggie Smith and Kristin Scott Thomas.

SIMON McBURNEY EXECUTIVE PRODUCER and STORY
Simon McBurney is an actor, writer and director who was most recently seen starring in The Last King Of Scotland with Forest Whitaker. He also starred with Jennifer Aniston and Frances McDormand in Friends With Money. His feature films also include The Human Touch; Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate; Paul McGuigan's The Reckoning; the title role of Eistenstein; Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow; Tom and Viv; Being Human; Mesmer; Cousin Better; Onegin; Skaggerak and Bright Young Things. He is currently shooting The Golden Compass.
In theatre, McBurney is one of Europe's leading directors. As the co-founder and artistic director of Theatre de Complicite, he has devised, directed and acted in over 30 productions, toured all over the world and won numerous international awards. His production of Mnemonic earned a Time Out Live Award, a Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience, a Lucille Lortel Award and The Critics Circle Award for Best New Play, among others. His plays also include Complicite's The Elephant Vanishes at Lincoln Centre and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui starring Al Pacino, Paul Giamatti, Billy Crudup, Steve Buscemi, John Goodman and Charles Durning. On Broadway he directed the Complicite/Royal Court Theatre production of The Chairs which received six Tony Nominations.  In London, he recently both directed and starred in Complicite's Measure for Measure and A Minute Too Late at the National Theatre.  

STEVE BENDELACK DIRECTOR
Steve Bendelack made his feature film debut in 2005 with The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse for Tiger Aspect and Universal. He is a well-known director of television comedy having worked on numerous series of classic British comedies, including: Little Britain, French and Saunders, The Royal Family, The Lenny Henry Christmas Show, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, The Friday Night Armistice, The Saturday Night Armistice, Spitting Image, Fist of Fun and The League of Gentlemen which won a BAFTA for Best Comedy in 2000 and an NME Award for Best Television Programme in 2001.   He has also directed the live shows of Frank Skinner, Newman and Baddiel and Lee Herring. In 1994 he directed Peter and the Wolf: A Prokofiev Fantasy, narrated by Sting and conducted by Claudio Abbado, which was nominated for a 1995 Grammy Award and won an International Emmy award for Performing Arts. Steve has also directed documentaries for BBC 2's Arena.   In 1995 he made Radio Nights, a football documentary and in 1999 as part of their Blondes strand, a documentary about Anita Ekberg.  He has also directed numerous commercials.

HAMISH MCCOLL WRITER
Hamish is a writer and actor; he is a co-founder of The Right Size, a company which since 1988 has created a unique style of comic theatre. He co-wrote and performed in all their productions, including Flight to Finland, Moose, Bewilderness, Hold Me Down, Stop Calling Me Vernon and the hit show Do You Come Here Often? which won  an Olivier Award for Best Entertainment in 1999, and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award in New York. The company's smash hit The Play What I Wrote won the Olivier Award for Best Comedy in 2001 and Hamish was nominated for Best Actor. The show transferred to Broadway where it was nominated for a Tony Award. In 2005, he co-wrote and starred in Ducktastic! which was nominated for an Olivier as Best Entertainment.  Hamish has written several shows for radio (The Kodo Finish,The Remains of Foley & McColl, Foley & McColl: The Interviews) as well as This Way Up, and This Is Not About The Fridge for BBC television.

ROBIN DRISCOLL WRITER
Robin Driscoll is a comedy writer, performer and co-founder of the Cliffhanger the Theatre Company. Early productions included Gymslip-Vicar, nominated in 1984 for a Society of West End Theatre Award for best comedy, and The World of Les & Robert, nominated for a Perrier Award in 1989. Robin went on to co-write Bean - The Ultimate Disaster Movie, as well as the television and animation series.  Other writing and script-editing credits include Saturday Night Live, Alas Smith & Jones and Lenny Henry's Chef.  He recently had great fun contributing to Flushed Away, a Dreamworks-Aardman Animations production.
Performance-wise Robin has appeared in secveral TV comedies; Waiting for God, Murder Most Horrid, Only Fools and Horses, The Fast Show, The Lenny Henry Show, Smell of Reeves & Mortimer, to name but a few.
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