‘To be honest, it’s an enormous relief not to have to write so many swear words,’ shares 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 humour in movies like Four Weddings and a Funeral (and its memorably liberal use of F-bombs in the opening scene), Love Actually and TV series Blackadder.
But when working with co-writer Peter Souter to adapt his own series of Christmas books for Netflix and the big screen, there’s a different set of priorities and challenges for the Bafta and Emmy winner.
At one point, it looks like I might end up interviewing 68-year-old Curtis for Metro in a hotel bathroom after a mix-up with room access.
However, while we’re waiting to officially continue the interview started earlier alongside That Christmas’s director Simon Otto, Curtis is keen to get my take on everything I’ve seen during the London Film Festival – we’re meeting in October when That Christmas premiered there – with an undimmed enthusiasm for the industry.
Once we’re settled properly away from the toilet, we have to abandon talk of Blitz, Conclave and Emilia Pérez to go back to what daunted him about That Christmas – which was thinking visually.
‘When I write, I genuinely see sort of stick figures and different fonts talking to each other. I’ve never been particularly visual and one of the great joys of this is to say, well, okay, someone’s going to be in a barn with lots of turkeys, what are the five funniest things?’
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For him, this was a challenge but one that he relished, especially as he saw that as ‘part of the family nature of it’.
Here we come to his example of copious swearing in the past, including for 2013’s poignant magical realism comedy About Time.
‘They said to me if you can get it down to 16 swear words, it can be a – whatever it was – a PG or something. And I remember saying to the editor, “Well, that’s great, because there are only like 20!” 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 ended up rated a 12 for ‘infrequent strong language’ and an entertainingly imaginative litany of more mild swearing, so it’s safe to say that the editor probably lost that round with Curtis.
With That Christmas another festive offering in Curtis’s canon – which already includes Love Actually, Robbie the Reindeer and his beloved TV specials for The Vicar of Dibley and Blackadder – I wonder if it puts extra pressure on him and the movie to deliver?
‘I don’t feel it and I hope other people don’t,’ Curtis replies, making the point that ‘Christmas comes once a year, and every year adds new Christmas things’.
‘Something I love about doing Comic Relief [which he co-founded in 1985 with Sir Lenny Henry] is every time we return to it, there are new comedians and pop stars we can use, and I feel that a little bit about Christmas – that there’s always something new that happens each year.
‘So I think Christmas is, pretty well, the gift that goes on giving!’
That Christmas boasts a star-studded cast with Brian Cox, Bill Nighy, Jodie Whittaker, Fiona Shaw, Rhys Darby and Lolly Adefope, who voice characters in entwined tales about love and loneliness, family and friends, Santa making a big mistake – and many turkeys.
It’s the interconnected plotlines that excited director Otto the most, who makes his feature film 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 that all are dealing with the same kind of problem over Christmas made it extremely interesting for animation, because that doesn’t tend to happen,’ he explains. ‘We tend to tell stories of single heroes in a fantastical world and a fantastical journey.’
Otto finds great satisfaction in having helped create a large cast of characters ‘that has an idea behind each of them that makes them unique’ – as well as in pulling a Love Actually-themed prank on Curtis. At one point in the film, some of the kids complain about not wanting to watch ‘the boring Christmas movie’.
‘I assumed it was going to be a sort of posh 1950s British film,’ recalls Curtis. ‘I turn up one day, look at the edit, and they’ve inserted a bit of Love Actually without telling me. And I thought… quite right too. Love Actually is an old film now!’
‘But when it played, we all had such a big laugh, we said we’ve got to keep that,’ chuckles Otto.
The chance to change scenes like this ‘late into the process’ is something that Curtis also relished.
‘When you’re editing a live-action movie, you’ve got what the actors gave you, whereas in this you could be three-quarters of the way through the process and say, I want a new scene here.’
My favourite film of Curtis’s catalogue is the aforementioned About Time, which failed to reach the dizzying heights of his earlier movies as an instant hit. Curtis is very fond of it too as ‘the most personal of my films’.
‘It’s the one that I identify most closely with now because it’s about how to spend your time, and about family and parents and kids. I did watch it the other day – and I don’t normally watch my films – and I found it a bit odder than I remembered, but that made me like it more,’ he shares.
As for why it might not have had the instant impact, Curtis has a related theory.
‘I think it’s not as traditional in shape. It’s sort of two movies, isn’t it? There’s a rom-com in the first half, and then there’s a family story in the second, so I think it is an odder movie, which might explain why it’s not as sort of pervasive.’
Funnily enough, I am far from alone in my championing of About Time as it’s that movie fans will most often stop Curtis in the street to talk about ‘as they think I won’t expect it’.
‘People would probably think that if they came up and said I like Notting Hill or Love Actually, that I might know that. I think people think About Time wasn’t very successful, so I should tell him!’ he laughs. ‘And then men in their 50s consistently talk to me about Blackadder.’
About Time also happens to play into Curtis’s answer about what he thinks is the biggest misconception about himself and his film work.
‘I think friendship has been a bigger theme, or used to be a bigger theme, than people will remember. When I wrote Four Weddings, it was as much about friendship,’ he points out, the same as About Time tackles friendship, family and love.
He pauses before continuing his answer, warning that his next thought is ‘going to be a bit deep’ with a faintly apologetic tone, before adding: ‘My life is about the fusion between my films and my work with Comic Relief. And I sometimes think the people who watch my films think I don’t know how hard life is. And I do because the job at Comic Relief is to observe and record how tricky and complicated life is, and I’m very aware that the purpose of many of my films has been to provide a lovely thing in what I know to be often a very tough world.’
Moving onto lighter territory, I ask Curtis if he could ever see Four Weddings and a Funeral getting the reboot or sequel treatment, following the 2019 reunion sketch for Red Nose Day (and since he’s recently revealed the Notting Hill sequel that Julia Roberts turned down).
‘My wife Emma [Freud] keeps saying to me I should make a film called Four Funerals and a Wedding. I’m nervous it wouldn’t have many jokes in it! So I think it’s very unlikely that it will be remade.’
He also can’t pick the movie of his which 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 also taken it that a full Blackadder revival wouldn’t ever happen, given what Curtis has said over the years, but he doesn’t give me as definite a shutdown as before.
‘Rowan and I have a plan for something we might do which would just be a bit of fun sometime in the next few years. I’d love to work with Rowan one more time on something,’ he says.
But not Blackadder necessarily? ‘I don’t know,’ is Curtis’s casual response.
Before we part, I can’t resist asking Curtis about the wave Hugh Grant is currently riding with his villainous part in Heretic after he recently claimed that he’d initially built both his career and off-screen persona around the ‘stutter-y, blink-y’ character he portrayed in Four Weddings. (Grant will later present Curtis with an Honorary Oscar for his Comic Relief work, fondly calling his collaborator and friend an ‘a***hole’ in a delightfully savage speech.)
‘A very interesting question! So is the psychotic lunatic in Heretic more like Hugh than the nice guy in glasses in my films?’ Curtis grins, before championing the change of direction in his career.
‘I’m loving what’s happening with Hugh because I think for 15 years a mixture between him not taking risks, but I think – more importantly – other people not taking risks for him, was a shame.’
He calls it ‘such a joy’ to see Grant being acclaimed for parts like Jeremy Thorpe, for which he was Bafta-nominated, in A Very English Scandal.
‘I really love his performances now – and I particularly love that whenever I ask him what he’s doing, he always describes it as the worst performance in the history in cinema. And then I’m always pleasantly surprised that, in fact, he’s marvellous.’
That Christmas is in select cinemas and streaming exclusively on Netflix now.
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