Richard Curtis has created some of the most memorable comic characters of the last 20 years and enjoyed huge success with his quintessentially British rom-coms. Yet with his latest film, about a 1960s pirate radio ship, he's abandoned the safe sophistication of "Curtisland" for blokey laughs and knockabout farce. He tells David Gritten why.
We all know what a Richard Curtis film looks like. It's a romantic comedy, peopled by characters who are usually English, financially comfortable, well-intentioned, lacking in self-knowledge and confused about relationships. They fall in love, they say and do embarrassing things, they endure sorrow (even bereavement), bouts of soul-searching - and finally achieve joy. Within the boundaries of this loose, flexible formula, Curtis stole romantic comedy from under the noses of Hollywood studios and reinvented it as a Very British Movie Genre in a dazzlingly successful run that lasted for a decade. In his films, Britain became a gentrified, picturesque place where true love lies just around the corner. Flowers abound, the sun shines constantly on London, people live in lovely, rambling, faintly shabby houses, where groups of loyal pals congregate. Upbeat pop music can be heard everywhere. The British arts journalist Sarah Crompton coined the word "Curtisland" for this happy, mythical kingdom. Uniquely in the film world, Curtis became a global brand not as an actor or a director, but as a screenwriter. His scripts delivered hit after hit: his astonishingly successful breakthrough film, the bittersweet and genuinely witty Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994); Notting Hill (1999), a film about romance and celebrity that made the west London suburb of its title a tourist destination; and two Bridget Jones films, released in 2001 and 2004. Only with the portmanteau romance Love, Actually (2003) did he start to direct his own work. He seemed an unstoppable force. Yet when I visited him at his office in (where else?) Notting Hill around the time Love, Actually was released, he observed that the film, with its nine separate but intertwined love stories, felt like a "greatest hits" summing-up of his previous films. He now wished to strike out in other directions. "My taste," he said, "has started to drift away from my work." It was easy to take this remark with a pinch of salt. After all, audiences the world over loved Richard Curtis's films; he could seemingly do no wrong. Why would he change tack when he was so far ahead? Yet Curtis has been as good as his word. His new film The Boat That Rocked, which opens here next week, is utterly different. It's a broad, laddish comedy set in the 1960s on board a fictional pirate radio ship (clearly based on Radio Caroline), illicitly broadcasting joyous pop music to Britain from the North Sea. "I was quite keen to write a film that had a messy narrative structure," Curtis says of the film. "Having written all those romantic comedies, which have such a rigorous timeline, I wanted one that didn't have that. I just wanted stuff happening." He certainly achieved it. The Boat That Rocked is more like a series of extended sketches, many of them featuring juvenile humour. Bill Nighy, who has now replaced Grant as the constant presence in Curtis's repertory company, plays Quentin, the languid, dandyish boss of Radio Rock. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays The Count, the only American among the disc jockeys, clearly based on Radio Caroline's legendary Emperor Rosko. Rhys Ifans is Gavin, a louche, glamorous type who jousts with The Count for the title of "alpha DJ". Chris O'Dowd plays a dim, well-meaning record-spinner who marries a beautiful, fickle young fan one day, only to lose her the next. Tom Sturridge is Quentin's godson Carl, a shy public schoolboy who aims to lose his virginity on board ship - even if it involves switching places with another disc jockey in the dark to creep into bed with his girlfriend. On dry land, Kenneth Branagh is a pantomime villain named Dormandy, a joyless government minister determined to shut down the pirate station and deprive Britons of the pleasure of pop music (which in the early 1960s was rarely heard on BBC radio). All this is certainly a sharp left turn for Curtis, whose romantic comedies trade in sophisticated wit. Some film critics have been withering about The Boat That Rocked and its knockabout comedy. Adjectives such as "listless", "limp" and "dismal" have been freely used in the British broadsheets. "Hopelessly crass," sniffed The Independent. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian complained that the few women in the film were portrayed as "centrefolds". And trade journalist Fionnuala Halligan of Screen International predicted the film "could go down as Curtis's personal Titanic". Still, the views of mainly middle-class, middle-aged critics will not determine the film's global success or failure. And even writers who disliked the film admitted its soundtrack of 1960s pop classics was extremely jolly. Perched on a sofa in the same office, Curtis feels no reason to be defensive. "Anybody who's looking forward to having a cheerful night will enjoy it," he says. "I certainly enjoyed making this one more than the others. I intentionally wanted to make a fun film, because I'd just come off a serious two years." This is his first allusion to his other life. Curtis spends literally half his working life raising huge amounts of money for charity. In 1985, he co-founded Comic Relief, which has since raised a staggering £600 million (Dh3.3bn) to help hardship and famine in African countries. This year's drive alone recently raised £60 million (Dh329m), much of it on Red Nose Day, with its marathon fund-raising broadcast on BBC TV. He organised the Live 8 concerts with Bob Geldof to highlight global poverty, and devoted the two years before shooting The Boat That Rocked to the Make Poverty History campaign, which he also co-founded. His achievements in raising money for worthy causes are astonishing, though there are those who carp that these charities perpetuate a sense of victimhood in the Third World. Curtis will have none of it: "Cynic Relief never raised a penny for anyone," he likes to say. That comment is key to Curtis's philosophy. Even those who find his films fanciful and cloying would concede he is utterly lacking in cynicism. As a filmmaker, he stands in opposition to those who trade in edginess, darkness or violence. Instead, his characters are vulnerable, modest, bumbling, funny, and - dare one say it - nice. His work for television confirms this pattern. Curtis was the main writer for the remarkable comedy series Blackadder, with a cast of characters who became national treasures in Britain. He is the man who created the phenomenal Mr Bean, recognised and loved by children. And tens of millions of adults in hundreds of countries. The Vicar Of Dibley, starring Dawn French as a female cleric in an Oxfordshire village is cosy, unthreatening and generous in spirit. So while he labours to improve the world with his humanitarian work, Curtis also portrays it through the prism of an optimistic, cheerful view of life. He sees nothing contradictory about this. "To put it extremely, if someone writes a play about a soldier who goes AWOL, breaks into a flat and murders a single mother, it's called a work of searing realism," he reflects. "Yet that's only happened twice in the history of Britain. If someone writes a sitcom about a family, it's called cheesy and sentimental, but Britain is full of families who laugh at each other. "I'd say The Sound Of Music is a moderately realistic piece of work. Almost everyone hates the Nazis, and it's about two people falling in love and being quite nice to children. And that happens everywhere. I was raised in a family full of love and joy, and I'm now living in a new family full of love and joy. It would be bizarre for that not to be reflected in my work." His father, an executive for the multi-national firm Unilever, had varied postings, so Curtis was born in New Zealand and grew up in an unlikely series of places: the Philippines, Sweden, and two very different English towns, Folkestone and Warrington. He went to Harrow public school, which had a weekly magazine, and had to conjure up articles out of nothing. This was the genesis of his sketch-writing career. He had acted at school, but when he went up to Oxford, he says he suffered "tremendous defeat and humiliation. I thought I was going to be a good actor, but I turned out to be the absolute king of bland. I could not get cast. So I started performing things I'd written because I liked appearing on stage. "I then had the lucky break of bumping into Rowan [Atkinson], who was so blazingly good I started writing more for him and performing less." He hoped to turn writing comedy into a career after leaving university, but his conscientious father was sceptical: "So I made a deal with my dad. If I'd shown I could earn a living within a year, then I'd go on writing. If not, I'd get a 'proper' job. "Just before the year was up, we got commissioned to write Not The Nine O'Clock News, so that became my career, along with writing Rowan's stage shows." Blackadder, and a spell writing for Spitting Image, the British satirical puppet series, followed before Curtis wrote his first produced screenplay, for the 1989 film The Tall Guy, starring Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson. "I was really writing about what I thought I knew about," he says. "It was about a guy who was the stooge for a comedian, which was a job I'd done, and who had fallen in love with a nurse while having injections for hay fever, which I'd also done. "It started a pattern of me writing things I'd never had the nerve to say in real life. I never had the nerve to say anything to the nurse, so nothing came of it." The Tall Guy felt like a romantic comedy, but Curtis is wary of the term. "I always thought I was writing semi-autobiographical films, of which love was at the centre - interesting, incidental films about people in relationships."Ssemi-autobiographical is the key word here. Four Weddings And A Funeral has its roots in the early days of his relationship with his partner, the broadcaster Emma Freud; they kept on bumping into each other at other people's weddings. Notting Hill, about the romance of a struggling bookshop owner with a world-famous film star, came about one Thursday evening when Curtis was driving to the house of some friends for their weekly dinner. "I had this fantasy. How would it be if I arrived with, say, Madonna? The joke would be how different people reacted to her: one would be an insane fan, one wouldn't recognise her, another would be rude." These days, Curtis lives a short walk from his Notting Hill office with Freud and their four children - a daughter and three sons, aged five to 14. She functions as his script editor and, he says, can be a tough critic. "I depend on her taste and our mutual taste. As you discuss it, it becomes clear what's right, what's wrong, what's repetitive." Freud makes coded notes in the script margins: NBG beside a scene means "no bloody good"; CDB is "could do better". It sounds a rich, idyllic life, and when Curtis is writing scripts he even keeps regular hours. After dropping the children off at school, he arrives at his office punctually at 9.45am, and works through till six, when he walks home and starts preparing the family dinner. But though his writing for films has a light, airy, almost effortless feel, it is the result of extremely hard, solitary work. To him, stamina, graft and a dogged desire to improve his scripts are more important than blinding inspirational flashes. Curtis astounded the British film industry when he casually admitted that he wrote 16 drafts of the Four Weddings And A Funeral script before it was ready to shoot. Back then, many British screenwriters, some of them also playwrights, were used to their first or second drafts going straight into production. "It's something I learned from [Four Weddings And A Funeral director] Mike Newell," Curtis says now. "He had this obsessive detail for casting. An actor would come in to play Second Vicar, and Mike would say, 'Why did he join the church?' And I'd say, 'Oh, I don't know.' But he wouldn't let that depth thing lie. So I rewrote every character, no matter how small, to give them some sort of story. It was a good partnership." That attention to detail is evident in The Boat That Rocked. The actor-comedian Rhys Darby plays Angus, an irritating disc jockey with the on-air nickname "the nut from Knutsford". He makes awful jokes, and is the butt of his colleagues' cruel humour. But near the film's end, Curtis gives him a speech in which he thanks them for the closest friendships he has ever known. He finally becomes sympathetic. Plugging away at refining scripts like this is a lonely business, and solitude is not ideal for Curtis's brand of comedy and romance. "I listen to pop music a lot," he says. "It artificially cheers me up, and creates an atmosphere of relaxation and high spirits which is absolutely necessary to write the sort of thing I do." It helps that he is a pop music obsessive; it's no accident that he wrote a story about pirate radio. Like millions of other British music fans of his age - he is 52 - he listened to Radio Luxembourg and the pirate station Radio Caroline in his bunk bed at home after lights out, with a tiny transistor radio clamped to his ear. "It was on very quietly, so my parents wouldn't hear it," he recalls. "There was a tremendous compromise: how far did you turn the volume up, and how hard did you press the radio against your ear?" Later, he was fascinated by the seven-inch singles that his teenage babysitters brought round to his home when his family lived in Sweden. And at Harrow, he would duck out of chapel on Sunday evenings to go and listen to Pick Of The Pops on BBC Radio 1. Looking back at his films, it's clear music is as important to them as the subject of romance. Consider Grant's character's jokey reference to David Cassidy in Four Weddings, Nighy's bravura turn as a washed-up rocker in Love, Actually - and the prominence given to Charles Aznavour's She in Notting Hill. "I counted the number of 1960s songs there are on the soundtrack of The Boat That Rocked - and there are 62," Curtis says, looking faintly embarrassed. "And yes, I chose them all." His next two film projects will show him changing direction once again. "One of them is about time travel," he confides. "There won't be any special effects. It'll be really simple. A character will walk into a cupboard, then he walks out again, and it's a different time." The second project, like his 2005 TV drama The Girl In The Cafe - which was set against the background of the G8 summit in Reykjavik and touched on the subject of Third World debt - reflects his humanitarian concerns. "I'm writing a film about malaria," he says, nodding gravely. "Tough subject." Indeed. It's hard to imagine a theme further removed from comedy and romance. Though knowing Curtis, there may be room for music to touch audiences' emotions.
The Boat That Rocked opens in cinemas this week.