Love Actually Production Information General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed – but I don’t see that – seems to me that love is everywhere. Igniting laughter, wreaking havoc, breaking hearts, daring commitments, forcing choices, catapulting spirits, forging inroads, creating risks—ecstatic, exciting, unexpected, unwelcome, inconvenient, inexplicable, inelegant, unequalled. Love actually is all around. From the new bachelor Prime Minister (HUGH GRANT) instantly falling in love with a refreshingly real member of the staff (MARTINE McCUTCHEON) moments after entering 10 Downing Street… To a writer (COLIN FIRTH) escaping to the south of France to nurse his re- broken heart who finds love in a lake… From a comfortably married woman (EMMA THOMPSON) suspecting that her husband (ALAN RICKMAN) is slipping away… To a new bride (KEIRA KNIGHTLEY) mistaking the distance of her husband’s best friend for something it’s not… From a schoolboy seeking to win the attention of the most unattainable girl in school… To a widowed stepfather (LIAM NEESON) trying to connect with a son he suddenly barely knows… From a lovelorn junior manager (LAURA LINNEY) seizing a chance with her long-tended, unspoken office crush… To an aging “seen it all, remember very little of it” rock star (BILL NIGHY) jonesing for an end-of-career comeback in his own uncompromising way… Love, the equal-opportunity mischief-maker, is causing chaos for all. These London lives and loves collide, mingle and climax on Christmas Eve— again and again and again—with romantic, hilarious and bittersweet consequences for anyone lucky (or unlucky) enough to be under love’s spell. Love Actually – Production Information Acclaimed screenwriter RICHARD CURTIS (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary) now steps behind the camera for his directorial debut on his latest project, Love Actually—the ultimate romantic comedy that weaves together a spectacular number of love affairs into one amazing story. Curtis is re-teamed with producers DUNCAN KENWORTHY and Working Title’s TIM BEVAN and ERIC FELLNER—the filmmakers responsible for some of the most popular looks at modern love in all its guises, including Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary. The powerhouse cast brought together for this look at love and laughter also includes ROWAN ATKINSON, ANDREW LINCOLN, MARTIN FREEMAN, KRIS MARSHALL, THOMAS SANGSTER, JOANNA PAGE, LUCIA MONIZ, BILLY BOB THORNTON and many others. Joining Curtis and producers Kenworthy, Bevan and Fellner are an esteemed group of behind-the-camera talent, including director of photography MICHAEL COULTER, B.S.C. (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Sense and Sensibility), production designer JIM CLAY (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin), editor NICK MOORE (Notting Hill, The Full Monty, About a Boy), costumer JOANNA JOHNSTON (The Sixth Sense, Contact), composer CRAIG ARMSTRONG (William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge!, The Quiet American) and casting director MARY SELWAY, C.D.G. (Notting Hill, Gosford Park). About the Production DANIEL Hey. Great show. Classic drumming. SAM Yeah, thanks. Plan didn’t work though. DANIEL Tell her then. SAM Tell her what? DANIEL 2 Love Actually – Production Information Tell her that you love her. SAM No way! Anyway, they fly tonight. DANIEL Even better—you’ve got nothing to lose—and you’ll always regret it if you don’t. I never told your Mum enough—I should have told her every day—because she was perfect every day. You’ve seen the films, kiddo—it ain’t over till it’s over. SAM Okay—let’s do it, Dad. Let us go get the shit kicked out of us by love… 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 3 Love Actually – Production Information 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. 4 Love Actually – Production Information 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.