It is a lucky thing for comedy lovers everywhere that Richard Curtis did not turn out to be a better actor.  The screenwriter of such hits as the television series Blackadder and Mr. Bean and feature films Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill had cooled on his initial career choice of journalism by the time he reached Oxford University and instead decided to pursue acting.

It was then that Curtis began to pen the comedy sketches in which he would perform because, as he remembers, "It turned out I was totally bland and had no talent, and the only way of getting onstage was to write the things I would act."

While regularly turning out his sketch comedy, he met up with another actor, Rowan Atkinson, for whom Curtis also began to write.  The partnership lasted through Oxford and then continued out in the "real world" of show business, with the two collaborating on projects for Atkinson and others to perform.

The pair was instrumental in the creation of the BBC's Not the Nine O'Clock News (Curtis' first job writing for television); the popular topical sketch comedy show ran for four series.  With no more lofty goals than "just wanting to write a good sitcom," Curtis and Atkinson then created Blackadder, the internationally popular and award-winning series for the BBC, which also ran for four series, each set in a different century.

It was about this time that Curtis, the successful television comedy writer, began to take his career, "even mildly seriously.  Then I decided to write a film like some of the films that I love--small intimate little movies with love in them."

Curtis' first feature film outing was The Tall Guy, a comedy about an American actor trying to make a go at a career in British theater after playing second banana to a successful comedian (played by Atkinson).  It also featured the film debut of an English actress named Emma Thompson and was produced by Tim Bevan.

"Richard is wonderful at creating those moments where embarrassment and joy collide.  He brings everything he learned during years of sketch and television comedy writing to his film work--it's a deft and fine touch, combining humor and pathos without either one ever taking center stage for too long," observes Bevan.

The writer himself adds, "I do seem to have written a great deal about love.  But I mean if you look at the world, there are huge amounts of love and affection, and yet so much of art portrays the darker side of humanity.  When I look around the world I notice a lot of things that are rather gorgeous, lots of people with kind hearts."

Following more collaborative work between Curtis and Atkinson (including such projects as a holiday telefilm about a boy and a genie and the worldwide television phenomenon of Bean), Curtis wrote another small intimate movie with love in it, about a group of friends, acquaintances and lovers meeting and re-meeting at a series of social ceremonies.  He sent a copy of the screenplay to producer Duncan Kenworthy.

Kenworthy recalls, "Richard gave me a copy of Four Weddings and a Funeral and I read it and told him it was the best thing he'd ever written.  I also told him I couldn't produce it because, at the time, I was on staff at the Henson Company, but that I'd really love to help him work on it."

As the project evolved, Kenworthy took a leave from the company in order to produce the movie and joined Working Title co-chairmen Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, who served as executive producers.  The brilliantly successful film went on to earn more than $250 million worldwide and Oscar® nominations for Best Film and Best Original Screenplay.

Fellner says, "It sounds like such a cliché, to say that something is a 'feel-good' film.  But that's what we had with Four Weddings and a Funeral.  We started out being perceived as this little British film, but the response to it just kept building and expanding.  In the end, it became this enormous hit that sort of revived the fashion of the 'feel-good' romantic comedy."     

After Four Weddings, "a Richard Curtis comedy" was planted even more firmly into the lexicon of movie business jargon. 

Kenworthy explains, "I think the hardest thing to achieve in a comedy is something that Richard seems to manage effortlessly--to make you laugh and care at the same time.  He's not really into ridicule.  It's this quality that often blinds people to the rudeness of his jokes, and vice versa.  The first seven words of Four Weddings were not 'Oh, no, I'm late for the wedding.'  The level of profanity was pretty radical for a romantic comedy in 1994, but it was still a movie that people didn't mind watching with their grandmothers."   

It was while the group was working on another film (Richard writing, Duncan producing and Tim, Eric and Richard executive producing) about love and fame--Notting Hill--that the idea for Love Actually began to emerge.

Kenworthy remembers, "Richard usually gets the idea for his next film while he's hanging around the set of his last one, so it was when we were working on Notting Hill that he was dreaming up Love Actually.  He said he'd had an idea for something that would touch on lots of people's lives.  Richard had promised himself and the family that they would do something very special in the year 2000, and he and Emma and the kids went off to Bali for six months.  Something 'special' for Richard was not working.  And during his walks along the beach in Bali to exercise his damaged back, he was dreaming up ideas for this film."

Richard says, "Love Actually is meant to be a real spoiling experience.  I tried to work out the extra bits of plot and get straight from 'A' to 'F.' It's like watching the edited highlights of several stories, yet put together, they all combine to an overall story--even though there are a lot of different ingredients, they form one cogent taste."

Curtis' story on the genesis of the project is less clear, but echoes Kenworthy's take.  He remarks with a smile, "I can't remember how Love Actually started.  I think it may be that I decided that films take me such a long time--about three years, in the end--and I thought that if I wanted to go on writing romantic films, I would spend the rest of my life doing it.  So I decided that I would try to write nine or 10 of them all at the same time.  I went away on a long holiday with my family and every day, during my walk, it was my job to come up with a story.  I would think around the world that I knew, of little incidents from my past and the lives of people I knew, and slowly the storyline for Love Actually came to me."

Tim Bevan observes, "Working Title has succeeded on the strength of the relationships we have built, and we're proud of that.  For us to have begun very early on with Richard and continued with him up to this point--I can't imagine a more satisfactory arrangement.  The arrival of Love Actually was just a natural evolution, not only for Richard, but for us as well."     
Somewhere before/during/after the script for Love Actually began to emerge, the idea of Curtis directing the project also surfaced. 

"I said to Richard, at one point during Notting Hill," says Kenworthy, "'You know, it's either going to have to be you or me directing the next one.'  I'm never surprised when a writer wants to direct his own work.  It's a genuinely difficult thing for a writer to hand over his work to a director to interpret.  That's why as a producer, I think of myself as the guardian of the script, making sure that everyone working on a film is working on the same film with the same interpretation of the script--because, generally speaking, the writer isn't there."

Except on a Curtis film.

Richard explains, "I've been an unusual writer in that I've been allowed to be on the set every minute of every day of every film that I've ever done."

In addition to being a constant presence on the sets and in the editing rooms of his films, Curtis had also been, since 1987, co-producing the BBC's live fundraising Comic Relief telecasts--all invaluable experience for the filmmaker about to launch into his directorial debut.   

Kenworthy observes, "Richard's always had the skills.  Comic Relief is a fantastic training ground for working with actors.  And he thinks in the round about everything--if the crew ask questions about whether a character wears glasses, where he would live, or what sort of pictures he would have on his wall, he's always had those answers to hand."

Curtis jokingly adds, "I think other directors were finding me hard to work with and I decided if anyone was going to suffer with me as an interfering writer, it might as well be me."

All forces in filmmaking in their own right, the re-combination of Curtis, Kenworthy and Working Title's Bevan and Fellner made for a dream situation when it came time to filling the roles of the seemingly multitudinous cast--the combined rolodexes alone could provide endless possibilities for casting choices. 

Though several of the faces in Love Actually are longtime collaborators (including Grant, Thompson and others), many are new additions to the Curtis/Kenworthy/Working Title troupe.  Kenworthy admits that while Curtis had specific actors in mind when penning selected parts, everyone was required to audition for the filmmakers. 

"Richard definitely had certain actors in mind for certain roles this time, which had never happened before, not even on Notting Hill, but he still wanted to cast and cast and cast.  One of the things we both learned from Mike Newell during Four Weddings is that you see everybody and you keep on looking and testing and casting up until the last minute, until you've got the perfect mix.  That was all the more necessary with the balance of such a large cast in Love Actually," tells Kenworthy.

The director/screenwriter offers, "Love Actually was a huge amount of fun to cast, because normally there aren't enough roles to cast--if I have this actor then I can't have that actor, that sort of thing.  But in this film there are around 20 leading roles and everybody has a really substantial story to tell.  So the casting process was a delight."

The Prime Minister & The Secretary
The idea of writing a film about a prime minister had first occurred to Curtis more than 20 years ago, after Conservative Edward Heath had served in the office from 1970-74.  The writer had mused that it would have been compelling if the character of the prime minister had fallen in love with someone outside of the norm…say, a spiky-haired, 22 year-old blond girl.  Curtis was interested in seeing the politician as a man, an "ordinary bloke--why shouldn't the panic of love set in for a man who's responsible for our health, education and transport?  I wanted to contrast the responsibility and the seriousness of the job with that blind 'what-the-hell-do-I-do'-ness of love."

Curtis also admits that he thought it would be enjoyable for Hugh Grant to play the role ("since he's played such feckless people in my movies until now").

The actor, star of both Four Weddings and Notting Hill, did not see an immediate fit when he first read Curtis' work.  He remembers, "With Four Weddings and a Funeral, I remember taking the script away to Australia where I was doing a film, before we started shooting it, feeling that I couldn't do it, I couldn't hear that voice at all.  When I came back and started rehearsing the film, I started listening to Richard just talking in the course of rehearsal and I realised that that voice is him.  It is quite a unique balancing act that he brings off between London nasty and actually being quite positive about things."

In describing what is so special about Curtis' work, Grant appreciates the author's humorous and deft verbal touch and comments, "The comedy is hugely important in the success of Richard's work, but equally important is this very rare thing of actually quite liking life.  What I admire is that he just completely goes for it in this film and is determined to lay out his optimism in front of the world--I think people actually do quite want that.  And, if you really stop for a moment and think about it, it's as good a take on the world as 'the glass half-empty' view."

Grant was happy to take on the role of the PM in love with his tea lady and also welcomed involvement in a piece that featured such a relatively large cast.  (He off-handedly adds, "A cast of thousands.  I don't know any actors who aren't in this film, actually.")

For the object of the Prime Minister's deep and instantaneous affection, the filmmakers chose Martine McCutcheon (described as "a great television heroine" by Curtis).

McCutcheon, who became a household presence with her three-year run on the popular continuing drama EastEnders, observes, "What's interesting to me is that this is about different types of love with their different challenges and different temptations--that there's love all around us all the time.  That's kind of a romantic view, but it's also true as well.  The script is written in such a real way.  There are those embarrassing moments when you love someone and those moments when nothing else matters.  Richard's really captured that--he is guaranteed to make you laugh at a moment where you feel like you are going to cry.  I'd say that's kind of his stamp."

The Stepdad & The 11-Year-Old Stepson
One of the storylines challenging the standard presumption that love stories deal exclusively with romantic love takes place between a recently widowed man, Daniel, and his now motherless stepson, Sam.  Curtis wanted to look at a story that deals "not just with people falling in love for the first time, but what love is like as it goes on."  Now a father, the filmmaker drew from this newer aspect of his life when creating the look at Daniel and Sam, "two boys who start off a long way apart and end up very close together."
For Liam Neeson, cast as Daniel, the opportunity to work with Curtis provided an opportunity for the leading man to stretch different, lighter acting muscles.
Neeson comments, "I've always admired Richard's writing and was terribly chuffed that he thought of me for this.  There is a kind of gravitas to the character, which
I'm drawn to, but there are also chances to be light, and a little silly, which I loved doing.  Richard has caught an aspect of that side of humanity in the script--that one minute you can be terribly sad, and then be able to flip and be 'happy' and smiling.  That's the stuff of life."
Following his mom's death, Sam isolates in his room, leaving Daniel feeling even worse for not being able to bolster the boy.  Daniel eventually finds that it is love, not grief (or rather the grief of unrequited love) that has driven Sam into seclusion.
The young actor Thomas Sangster was cast opposite Neeson in the role--Sam was the sixth acting job for Sangster since entering the business just two years prior, and he thoroughly enjoyed his work on the set, particularly learning (from his real-life musician dad) to play the drums.
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