Richard Curtis is a legend in the United Kingdom, the man who made one of the country’s most popular shows of all time (Black Adder) and helped turn Hugh Grant into a household name. He wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Tall Guy¸ Notting Hill, the adaptation of Bridget Jones’ Diary, and many of the adventures of Mr. Bean before moving into the director’s chair for the beloved Love Actually and, now, Pirate Radio (known as The Boat That Rocked overseas before a stateside title change).


Curtis’ latest film tells the true story of the introduction of rock and roll to the UK. In the 1960s, it was illegal to play rock music on government-run radio, so a group of DJs (played in the film by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans, Nick Frost, and many more) set up their radio station off the coast. Reportedly, more than half the population of the UK would listen every day, even though it was essentially illegal. Curtis recently sat down with us for a small roundtable with Matt Fagerholm of Film Monthly and Locke Peterseim of RedBlog.

MovieRetriever: How did you choose the music that would be in the film?

RICHARD CURTIS: Well, you know, it’s so interesting now because you write on computers which are also a jukebox. So the moment I started [writing] it, the first thing I did was download about sixty songs that I was tempted by, and that got up to about 300. I always use pop music to cheer me up during very long days of writing and about 15 of the songs were actually written in to the script. January Jones is called Eleanor so that we could play “Eleanor” [by The Turtles] and the guy was always going to say at the beginning, “We’re going to broadcast all day and all of the night” [making The Kinks song a natural fit]. And then I did an iPod with thirty songs per DJ to give them all a sense of it, and when we edited the movie, all of those were on a computer. We had a music editor, and he and I would meet at the end of each day and do a new section. I wanted music all the way through the film, apart from the Ken Branagh bits. We ended up being self-selecting. You think you want one song for a scene, and then you play it next to the scene and it doesn’t work. It’s a song that only becomes interesting after thirty seconds, and it’s only a twenty second cue. So you find your way, as if by magic, to the songs.

MovieRetriever: And how do you afford those songs? It must have the most music licenses of major artists in film history.  

CURTIS: Yes it does. Well, one, we paid for them. Two, it’s a weirdly free market. There’s no price, and one of the things is on inexpensive movies, sometimes they give them great songs for almost nothing. So in the end of the negotiation, you get to the point where you simply say to a person, “Either we give you 50,000 dollars, or we give you nothing and we pick another song.” That’s the moment where they decide whether or not they care enough about precedent issues. I think The Doors wanted 1.6 million for one song, so we didn’t get that. In the same way, when Hugh Grant danced in Love Actually, I wanted “Beat It,” the Jackson song.

RedBlog: And the Stones don’t let you put songs on soundtracks, do they?

CURTIS: They allowed it in the film, but not on the soundtrack.

Film Monthly: Considering the films you’ve directed, have you ever thought of doing a musical?

CURTIS: It’s my never-to-be-achieved dream. When I was young I did a TV show called Not the Nine O’Clock News, which had a lot of songs in it, and I did all the words for those songs. But my life’s taken me down another route, and I don’t think I’ll do it now. I think this is my big musical marriage.

Film Monthly: What attracts you to telling stories on big sprawling canvases in your directorial efforts?

CURTIS: I think it’s coincidence in a weird way. Since I did Love Actually, I did a movie called The Girl in the Cafe, which is a tiny story, and I did The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, which is, in a way, about a small group. So it just so happened that the two movies are the big ones. But also there’s an element that I’m very interested in: friendship and group dynamics, and in this movie, [while] the historical passion idea was pirate radio and pop music, the comic idea was eight megalomaniacs in a small house. I sort of thought whatever the American equivalent would be David Letterman and Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien not only working in the same space, but actually living with each other 365 days a year. So that was the comedy idea; therefore that required eight big characters.

Film Monthly: You’ve cited M*A*S*H as an influence for this film. Has Altman influenced your directorial choices?

CURTIS: It’s weird, because obviously both films are directly related to Altman films. For Love Actually, I watched Nashville, [which has] always been one of my favorite films, and Short Cuts as well. That’s sort of a benign coincidence. He’s clearly made many of the films I love the most.

MovieRetriever: Love Actually, The Girl in the Cafe, and this film – Black Adder even – all have a political background or meaning to them. Why is that of interest?

CURTIS: It does and it doesn’t. The Girl in the Cafe was clearly a political film. Black Adder is a series about how stupid older people are, so it’s a young man’s show. The political point here, in a way, is just that I always feel that governments are solving problems of the generation before. Young men of 28 join politics, and by the time they’re 45, they still seem to be dealing with old stuff. That’s why the environment issue still isn’t being taken seriously, because it’s a bunch of people who still think that oil is more important. I think it’s political by chance, but it’s a political story I’m quite interested in. I was one of the producers of “Live Aid,” and there again it’s the same story of pop musicians trying to budge people in the direction of change. In England, it was hilarious in the sixties. I went to a boarding school, and it really was like 1949. All the hair was unbelievably short, you couldn’t run in the corridors, you couldn’t talk after lights out, you sung endless hymns with the wet pilgrim in them. That’s why it was so fantastic to listen to rock ‘n’ roll undisciplined.

MovieRetriever: Do you remember the first time you did that?  

CURTIS: Yeah, very soon after I arrived in my horrible boarding school. I had a tiny little [radio]. You were like a safe-cracker, because the stations were hard to get. They had very small frequencies, and it was the thing about volume level. If it was too quiet you couldn’t hear it, but if it was too loud, the matron who stalked along the corridors could hear it, so you had to get that perfect level.

RedBlog: Did you have a first favorite song?

CURTIS: This is late, but I have very passionate memories about “Reach Out I’ll Be There” by the Four Tops. It was the first single I bought, and I remember … you know the way you can remember weird moments from your youth? I remember Chapel was on, which was compulsory, and a guy called Richard Griffiths and I were hiding in the music rehearsal room. I remember the DJ saying that “Reach Out I’ll Be There” had gone from number 16 to number 2. I was unbelievably excited, because these days all records enter in number one, but in those days they went from thirty, although the great thing about Pirate Radio is they made up the charts. They really were piratical. They didn’t pay PRS, they made up the charts. In the research I did after I had written the movie, there’s a story about a man in an expensive yacht that came onboard [a pirate radio ship]. One disc jockey showed the man all around the boat for a very long time, while two of the other disc jockeys were having sex with his girlfriend. It’s the detail of two that so disgusts me. Why did two of them have to do it?

RedBlog: You were pretty young at the time when the film is set. So was it kind of like looking forward to what the older kids were listening to?

CURTIS: I think one, it’s that I was locked in a boarding school, and sensed this amazing world of freedom. Also, when I now think back to this film, I think it’s a film partly about being 24 – for everybody. I think most people end up in a flat with too many people, one of whom has had sex with everybody, one of whom has never had sex, dreadful food, bad hygiene, and listening to music all the time. For me, that was Camden Town, 1979 – The Specials, Madness, Blondie, The Pretenders. In a way, it’s a movie about the freedom of your twenties when money doesn’t matter. You do the job you want to do, you don’t have any children. The weird thing is you often end up living with people you don’t like, because it’s a bit random. It’s the one person who can afford it, or it’s the guy who owns the place, or some girl who’s a friend of his mother’s who has to move in. I hated the four people I moved in with, and yet we were happy.  

RedBlog: And things get more boring later when you actually start to choose ...

CURTIS: They do! And then you can’t fight with them or ignore them. And then there’s only them! Then there’s only one of them.

Film Monthly: Why did you change the title to The Boat That Rocked to Pirate Radio for the American release?

CURTIS: When they were releasing it, I said, “Do you like the title?” And they said, “We’ll have fun and come up with any other ones.” And the moment they suggested that, I thought we couldn’t have called it that in the UK. It would’ve been like calling it The Post Office or The Hotel. But, it’s a great name, it’s what it’s about, I love the word Pirate being in it, so I was happy. In France it was called Good Morning England, in English! I remember Notting Hill was called – which I always preferred because I never wanted Notting Hill to be called Notting Hill – it was called Coup de foudre a Notting Hill, which means, “A Mad Moment of Love in Notting Hill.” So I’m never that fussy about titles.

MovieRetriever: How much of the cast did you write for?

CURTIS: Only Bill [Nighy], actually. That is the magic of handing a script to a casting director, because on the whole, I don’t do that. When I wrote Girl in the Cafe, I also had Bill in mind, but definitely not Bill in Love Actually. And then, you get your list of the best American [actors], which had Phil at the top. I said, “Well, he’s not going to do it.” And they said, “Well, we got time on our hands, let’s ask him.” And then, miraculously, he did want to do it, which was great for us. Similarly, the list came with Nick Frost, who I’ve always loved but just assumed that he would never be in one of my films. He makes the films with Edgar [Wright] and Simon [Pegg], and then when I saw him on the list, I thought, “Fantastic, send it to him. That would be perfect.”

MovieRetriever: Why was Phil at the top?

CURTIS: My brief to them was that The Count was meant to be both funny – which I hope everyone is, he tries to say “f--k” first on the radio--but he was meant to be the soul of the film. I loved the idea of having a really good actor deliver that speech about, “These are the best days of our lives.” The first thing I ever wrote in the film, oddly enough, was the speech he delivers as the boat sinks. I was listening to “Don’t Dream it’s Over” by the Crowded House, and he actually says, “I want to say to all you politicians, don’t dream it’s over.” My intention when I first made the film was that at the end of the movie, we were going to have a compilation of all the great rock songs from the moment the boat went down to now. But it was very confusing when we hoped to get the final cut. So I wanted the best actor to play that part, not necessarily a comedian.

RedBlog: Your earlier work, such as Black Adder, had a dark, cynical edge, and in your recent work, there’s an unrelenting optimism. Why is that?

CURTIS: It’s odd, isn’t it? I was held back in Black Adder, we weren’t allowed to do anything emotional at all. We tried to once, but we didn’t until the very end.

MovieRetriever: But you wanted to do it before that?

CURTIS: I used to argue that they should fall in love, and then for a decade I was really interested in love. I’ve got a real problem with that. I had ten unhappy years when it was the thing that obsessed me, and so I wrote films about that. But I think that the truth of the matter is now that I spend half of my life dealing with serious things – I run a charity – and so when I get back to my job, because I’m a happy person, I actually think it’s a great thing to try and make the happiest [picture]. And in a way, I am picking a fight with my critics. I was aware of that when I did Love Actually, because I thought, “Wow, it’s bad enough writing romantic comedies to write ten of them and write them all in the same film.” And I feel the same way about this. I kept on saying I wanted to do an ecstatic film [and] there’s fifty songs in it. I think that people who make serious films find ways of making them more violent, more shocking, more traumatic, and I think as somebody who tries to make funny joyful films, I might as well try and go the whole hog. But also, in a way, it will be interesting to see what I do next, because I do have to sort of write about fatherhood and settling down and all that stuff.

Film Monthly: This is also the first time in a long time that you’ve had a true villain in a film.  

CURTIS: I know, and I often get criticized for not having bad people in my movies, that’s why everyone is nice. But that was one of the fun things about it. I mean there are things in this movie I haven’t done before, like the whole last half hour having a real action-packed ending. And it’s great to do new things.  

Red Blog: Was there a particular politician or a group of politicians that wanted to represent in the Branagh character?  

CURTIS: Not really. What was awkward was that the government who banned it were in fact a labour government. I tried to write that, but it didn’t make any sense, because they were northern guys and I couldn’t write the room. So I tried to make him neutral, obviously tipping towards conservative. It was actually banned by a guy called Tony Benn, who was this complicated figure because he was originally Lord Benn and he gave up his title. He claims he banned it because he thought that young people should be concentrating on serious social issues rather that frittering away their revolutionary instincts by listening to rock ‘n’ roll. It sounds like a lie to me.

MovieRetriever: Every few years there’s a rumor of a fifth Black Adder. Do you want to fuel the fire?

CURTIS: No, I don’t think so. Oddly enough, I love the fact that The Police got back together again, and Cream got back together again while they’re still alive. And when we were young, we always said that we’ll do another Black Adder when we’re old and hate young people. Because it was young people pretending to be old people and show what idiots they were. But Tony Robinson is in his mid-90s now, so I’m not hopeful.

RedBlog: It seems like you let your actors breathe, allowing their natural quirks to come through onscreen. Was that a conscious effort?

CURTIS: Much more so in this film actually. I had a few bad experiences on films where we’d be doing dinner table sequences, and there would be five takes of him, five takes of her, and I said I can’t have that with 12 people in the room. So we decided that we put the cameras on the shoulders, and just shoot the scenes whole without close ups, and make the guys cover it. It led to things going much faster, and me feeling much more relaxed about improvising, so in fact the actors got a lot more freedom. We did this sort of boat camp where we all gathered together for three days beforehand. A lot of the stuff I liked most in the film was made up by other people. There’s a little scene where Tom’s very depressed, and they come and give him tea and biscuits. That was just there and I said, “How would you behave? The camera’s rolling ... action.” And there’s a great moment in the January Jones scene where Chris O’Dowd comes in and says, “You look like a unicorn in a dress.” I didn’t write that, and there’s another line later on where he says, “I want to have lots of children. You’ll be in bits by the time I’m finished with you.” I didn’t write that line, so it was part and parcel of the freedom of the shoot.