Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
I can't think of a project that Richard Curtis has been involved in that I haven't loved to some degree. Curtis made a name for himself as a comedy writer, helping to create such classic television comedies as "The Black Adder" and "Mr. Bean" with Rowan Atkinson, and penning the films FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL, BEAN, NOTTING HILL, both BRIDGET JONES films; and THE GIRL IN THE CAFE. With what is arguably Curtis' finest work as a writer, LOVE ACTUALLY, he stepped behind the camera for the first time as director. In recent years, he has been busy writing an episode of the truly wonderful "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency," which aired on HBO this year, and directing his most recent screenplay, PIRATE RADIO, which opens this Friday in the states. The film actually opened under the title THE BOAT THAT ROCKED back in April in the UK and many other nations on the other side of the Atlantic. The fact that it's just now opening up in the U.S. is slightly aggravating, but being the impatient bastard, I just bought the UK DVD of THE BOAT THAT ROCKED and have enjoyed its many splendors for quite a while now, including about 45 minutes of priceless deleted scenes.
PIRATE RADIO stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans, Nick Frost, Emma Thompson, Kenneth Branagh, and relative newcomer Tom Sturridge (who I also interviewed on the same day I did Curtis; I'll have that for you soon), most of whom play DJs on a floating radio station off the coast of England in the 1960s, playing music that the BBC wouldn't allow, namely pop and rock. The film does not pretend to be either 100 percent historically accurate or to have any kind of deep message or even a clever plot. It's a glorious excuse to play dozens of great tunes at full volume and live among these men's men on the tight confines of this vessel. In other words, it's like hanging out with your friends and spinning tunes until you can't stay awake. The film gave me an AMERICAN GRAFFITI / ALMOST FAMOUS vibe. It's an episodic adventure, and it's hilarious having all of these great comic talents vying for screen time with a never-ending barrage of insults among the ranks. The film is great fun, and Richard Curtis is one of the nicest, most knowledgeable individuals I've ever had the pleasure to interview. He has a dry wit that kept me smiling the whole time, and because (as you'll see) he's a fan on Ain't It Cool, we slipped easily into conversation like old friends, even through we've never met.
[The publicist introduces me and mentions that I write as Capone for Ain't It Cool News]
Richard Curtis: You're kidding!
Capone: What's that?
RC: I'm a great fan of Ain't It Cool News. It’s one of the few websites I visit most days.
Capone: That makes me very happy to hear.
RC: How funny that is. I was just looking at it the other day. I can’t remember what Harry had just reviewed or you reviewed… That’s so exciting.
Capone: Well good, I’m glad that you have at least heard of us! [Laughs]
RC: I have. I’ve got very few sites I visit regularly, you know. I go onto iTunes. I go to Box Office Guru to see those predictions… I don’t know if there’s a better one. I used to enjoy looking for Oscar predictions, but they are so flakey and I can’t find the right site… I go to Ain’t It Cool News. I go to BBC News and BBC Entertainment. Those are my six websites.
Capone: Well thank you very much.
RC: Sometimes you go to Ain't It Cool, and there’s a really exciting thing, like a new trailer, and then when you go to watch it, it says, “This has been withdrawn.” You have got to get there within seconds sometimes.
Capone: Sure, if somebody has leaked it or something. You have been promoting this movie most of this year.
RC: [laughs] You know how films are. That is the thing about films. I still do a bit of television, you know. I did "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" and stuff like that, and the joy of television is it’s quick. The truth with movies is they do take a lot of your life and that’s why you have got to love them. If you vaguely like a film, it’s not worth doing.
Capone: I actually, before seeing this version of the film, I bought the UK version on DVD and watched it. I’m not going to talk about differences, because to me there hardly are any.
RC: That's the weird thing, isn't it?
Capone: But what I do eventually want to talk about is how those deleted scenes are phenomenal. They are really, really wonderful.
RC: Thank you. It’s quite painful to me, and I remember even trying to find a deleted scene in FOUR WEDDINGS, but because we shot this movie in a very loose way with cameras on shoulders and everything like that, that we seemed to get more done and also, I did let the actors improvise more, so sometimes… I don’t know if you remember, but there’s a little scene where Tom Sturridge is heartbroken, and the guys offer him tea and biscuits and "So Long, Marianne" [by Leonard Cohen] is playing in the background, and that’s like a two-and-a-half-minute scene, which I didn’t write. So somewhere another two-and-a-half-minute scene has to go into the deleted scenes. I rather enjoy them.
Capone: Since we are talking about it, let’s just talk about… I’m still trying to figure out how the scene where they go to Abbey Road with that marvelous speech that Philip Seymour Hoffman gives about the Beatles and being a fan of music, it might be my favorite of anything I saw when I watched it originally, and knowing how you introduced that scene on the DVD, I can’t believe you cut it. Can you talk about why you did? It is probably one of the most quintessential discussions of the Beatles’ importance to the world of music I've ever seen in a movie. You look like you're going to cry.
RC: [laughs] I know. Do you know, in the end, I tell you what… The real reason is, because I was a very passionate Beatles' fan and then I just thought it odd in a film which is about everybody, which starts with how fantastic The Kinks are and then says how great The Stones are and then says how great The Who are… It’s kind of odd to say “But ignore all of that. The Beatles are better than everyone else!” I remember on my 21st birthday, I invited 21 people and I said, “It’s lovely here. You are all my best friends, but my best friend is Simon,” and everybody hated me. All of the 21 hated me and I thought in the end it was peculiar and at least I got it on film and that says what I think about the Beatles, but I think in a film which is about everyone, from The Turtles to Tommy James and The Shondells, it wasn’t quite right to pick out one.
Capone: I understand. The thing that really struck me about the whole phenomenon and whether your telling of it is historically accurate or not, doesn’t matter to me, because this feels like this is your fantasy version of these events based on what you remember from your teen years. That’s how it comes across. The stuff with Kenneth Branagh seems… You comedisized it--I doubt that’s a word, but…
RC: I didn’t want those bits to be boring. I didn’t want to keep cutting back and having some serious political discussion with that.
Capone: Okay. I don’t know if there was a guy named Twatt who worked in the government, but it doesn’t matter and to me, that’s why the film feels so personal.
RC: That’s a funny thing. I wrote a series called "Black Adder" when I was younger, and we never did any research with that and it turned out we knew it, weirdly. When we did the Elizabethan one, Ben [Elton], who I wrote it with, that Christmas gave me the little Ladybird Book of Elizabethan England, and when I went through the 12 chapters, we had covered 10 of them.
So I just kind of knew that I knew just from folk memory, quite a lot and I remembered the atmosphere and I certainly remember the words “Marine [Broadcasting] Offences Act,” and I knew there couldn’t be girls on the boat. So I wrote the film from my memories and imagination, and then I handed it over to the director who was also me and he checked how much of it was true and tried to make the boat accurate and try to smooth things out a bit, but I did want to do exactly that. I wanted to write the film I wanted to write, because I actually think sometimes research perverts your sense of what you actually want to do. If you take MASH--which was one of the films that was much on my mind--hat I love about MASH is they have all got '70s haircuts and they are all talking like people in the '70s. Robert Altman made no effort to make it like Korea, but the spirit was true.
Capone: What was your listening device of choice when you were younger?
RC: Well two, the tiny transistor radio, and I always think back and it was funny because we were all like people breaking into banks. It was so hard to get the stations with just that tiny little dial, the way they do in those movies where they are listening out for the clicks, so I had a tiny transistor under my radio and then we used to just listen to a big old Roberts Radio, I remember, and record players too. When I got into the '70s, I was always taping shows off the radio. I remember the first time we had Capitol Radio, and they did the top 200 records of all time, and I can never hear “It’s Over,” the Roy Orbison song, without hearing “That was Roy Orbison. Only the Beatles and Elvis have more.” You kind of remember the bit of DJing afterwards. But I moved with the times, so this movie was written entirely as I went off iTunes.
Capone: Did you have music going while you were writing?
RC: Yeah, I always do actually, except for when I get stuck. In this movie it was quite interesting because it really was the music I was going to use strangely. In some of my other films, I remember NOTTING HILL was written entirely listening to an album by Ron Sexsmith, which never appeared, two songs in particular “Secret Heart” and “Wasting Time,” and that was the atmosphere I wanted in that movie, but it never made it into the movie, whereas this time, when I thought of a song I really wanted, I could actually shove it in the screenplay.
Capone: There must have been songs that you were unable to get.
RC: There were a few. One of the things, weirdly, is that songs don’t end up fitting. There is a song called “Out of Time” by Chris Farlowe, which every time I talked about the movie I said we were going to use pop songs like school, and that the beginning of “Out of Time” was going to be there, and that when we used it, it had too melancholy a feeling or too classical a feeling. We couldn’t get a song by The Doors, because they wanted $1.5 million dollars. I think they are attempting to actually bring Jim Morrison back to life. They would use that money, and then they will make more.
Capone: And unfreeze his head, yeah. I was most struck by the range of music they played, as if genres didn’t exist on that station, because it goes from Dusty Springfield to Hendrix to Leonard Cohen to The Kinks.
RC: For one, they had a lot of time to fill and they were full of the joy of it. Black American music was just not on British radio at all, because on the whole they wanted people to be live, so there are a lot of recordings of The Beatles at the BBC and The Kinks at the BBC, but The Supremes and The Temptations weren’t there, so that was one of the big break through things and then they had all of the time in the world. Someone’s got to broadcast from two to five in the morning, and he is going to eventually put on Leonard Cohen at some point in the process. And then there were the really poppy perky ones playing Herman's Hermits. When we made the movie, we gave everybody an iPod, which had 30 songs for each DJ, so they had playlists, which gave you the atmosphere of what the DJ was going to play.
Capone: I would love to see the play list of…I've forgotten the character's name…the one who didn’t talk.
RC: Tom [Wisdom]! His name was Mark. That’s cool. That’s all full of the Aaron Neville and all of that sort of great stuff.
Capone: Did you listen to music while you were shooting, too?
RC: Yeah. It was a great shoot, and if you ask the actors about it, they can only remember being on the boat. We were actually 50 percent in the studio, but the boat was so odd and so memorable, because all 150 of us got on this great big old boat and sailed out to see every morning and we had big speakers on deck and we played the iPod. We played songs really loud for an hour, and then we stopped and we filmed and then at lunch we would break, and the catering was on the boat so we would all eat and we would play the music loud. We felt a bit like movie pirates while we were making the movie. We did try and reproduce to atmosphere, and we were on a proper boat, and the great thing about a boat as a set is it’s a real set. It’s 360 degrees all the way around with real wind and real water. Real vomit…
Capone: Was there a lot of that? I wasn’t even going to ask.
RC: Only Emma Thompson.
Capone: Really?
RC: Yeah, because it was all of the people who came on the little boat. January Jones also had quite a tough day in her wedding dress.
Capone: That’s all of the women! [Laughs]
RC: Yeah. Rhys Ifans had a bad day when he was arriving.
Capone: That’s right, his arrival. How did Philip Seymour Hoffman get involved with this?
RC: It was fantastic, as you can imagine. What happened is, the only person I actually wrote a part for was Bill Nighy. So what happens is you have that great day when you hand in the script, and the casting lady comes back to you and she’s like “Okay, I’ve done you a first list of 20 people” and you look at it and Phil is on the top of the list and you say, “That’s not going to happen. He’s not going to be in our film [Laughs],” but they say, “We will try. Let’s just send him the script. There’s no harm in it.” He read it and I think the first time he read it, our dates weren’t going to work and then we shifted and he shifted, so suddenly he became free, and it was tremendous for the film, because he’s funny and wants to be the first person to say “Fuck” on the radio and all of that sort of stuff, but he also is kind of the serious undertone of the movie. The fact is that he really believes in the rock and roll and he really believes young men and young women will always have dreams and turn those dreams into song. I remember the first thing I ever wrote of this movie was the speech that Phil makes at the end when I was lying by a pool in Spain, and I was listening to “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” that song by…um…
Capone: Crowded House.
RC: Yeah, and that’s the idea of the fact that when they shut down the rock and roll stations, it wasn’t over.
Capone: Were there a lot Americans working there?
RC: Yeah. What happened was there was no tradition of commercial broadcasting, so when they took these boats out, there was no one who knew how to do the job, so they had to hire some Americans and Australians and New Zealanders who had a tradition. I went to a lovely reunion of these people and there was a real… It was like the United Nations with “Emperor Rosko” [who worked on Radio Caroline, the primary model for Radio Rock in the movie] who came from somewhere in Wisconsin and other people from Sydney and Auckland, so it was a mixed bag.
Capone: I was also surprised that it wasn’t just kids listening to this music, but people of all ages and you show those little asides of people listening to the radio station.
RC: It was kind of like the most spectacular breakdown of supply and demand of all time. Here we were, the greatest pop music of all time, and none of it on the radio. And the moment that they actually gave access to it, 20 million people were listening within weeks. Remember how bad music had been before that? My dad had eight records. I can tell you what they were, “The Unforgettable Nat King Cole” “Mantovani in Theaterland,” “Hello Dolly,” two versions of "My Fair Lady," the stage and the movie, and then suddenly all of this wonderful stuff.
Capone: Show tunes, of course. So what happened to all of the DJs when they shut them down? Where did they land?
RC: One boat stayed on air and fought through the years and the poor DJs everyday, who were now illegal, had to get in small boats back to Holland, but a lot of them joined… What happened is the government set up an imitation station, a legal one, Radio 1 and a lot of them joined Radio 1.
Capone: Obviously you have a spectacular cast, but Nick Frost as this like sexual dynamo is beyond inspired. That's how I've always seen him.
[Both Laugh]
RC: But that’s what he’s like! He’s so confident. That was another great moment when I saw the list of people who could play Dave, and suddenly there was Nick Frost. I would have never dreamed he would be in one of my films, he’s in this sort of SHAUN OF THE DEAD and HOT FUZZ thing, and I think "He’s not my guy," and suddenly it’s like “Oh, I can have him!” He was great. We got all of the DJs to work out quite a complicated past--none of it appears in the film. But Nick played a guy who had been in the army and married by mistake in Malta and had a messy divorce and everything like that and now was trying to have as much sex as he can before he gets back to land.
Capone: I was telling Tom [Sturridge] before that the one thing he and I have in common is that we both have been in a bathroom with Nick, although we weren't naked. He was shoving a cake down a toilet…
RC: Nick said if we got desperate and wanted to publicize the movie more broadly than usual, he was happy to pose for a magazine called “Big Bear,” which I think he’s been asked to pose for before.
Capone: [Laughs] The scenes with Branagh are interesting because it’s like a separate movie. How did the actors on the boat react when they finally saw that footage and were like “Oh, that’s what’s going on!”?
RC: Ken was lovely actually and he was the first person we shot and he was so proud to have grown his own mustache. The truth of the matter is that Britain was absolutely a schizophrenic society. It really was a bunch of people who were thinking about the Second World War and a bunch of people who were heading towards Woodstock as it were, so it’s quit right that they were filmed at separate times in separate places and should never meet each over because in reality never the twain would meet. But I think everyone was delighted that Ken was so funny.
Capone: The moment that kind of shocked me was when the boat is sinking and Branagh gets the call and is told “They are going to die,” and he says “Happens to the best of us.” Wow, that’s taking it somewhere it hasn’t really gone before.
RC: One of the things I love about Ain’t It Cool News is the word “Spoiler.” Everything is spoiled, very spoiling! This will really spoil it! [Laughs] I wanted the movie to have a big boisterous ending, and in order to do that, we had to have a bit of ruthlessness.
Capone: That’s the second most ruthless thing. The first is the outtake where Nick is cracking eggs on Tom’s head, which borders on cruelty I think.
RC: Do you know what? Some of the actors were cross that day, because they thought if I had been more professional I should have found a way of doing it which didn’t require about 20 takes. But even if you look at him now, his hair has a lovely light freshness about it--a glisten--because it had been covered in so much yoke.
Capone: Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with Bill Nighy? If you read the site maybe you remember the interview I did with him when he was doing a play in New York. We really didn’t have a time limit. I think he was just in an apartment he was staying in killing time.
RC: I know he had a lot of time on his hands. Can I go back and look at it in the archives?
Capone: Sure, and I interviewed him once at Comic Con and it was much shorter, but that was in person, so I was glad to meet him. I feel as thought he’s probably the closest I will ever be to meeting royalty.
RC: The thing about Bill that is so great is he really is two people. He is the most polite, most respectable man wearing the most beautifully cut suits living in the poshest flat in London, and he’s a dirty rock and roll devil. Those two things are simultaneous and that’s what I hope you get in the movie. He couldn’t be more discreet, polite, hardworking, but he loves his rock and roll more than anything else, so I love him because we can go and see concerts together. We have seen Leonard Cohen. We went to see U2. And he’s a beautiful actor as well and has that thing, which seems to be crucial for my movies, of proper acting but also proper comic timing.
Capone: Yeah, he’s always got this little look and a lot of times it’s tagged onto the end and he’s done speaking and he just has this little look that makes you laugh.
RC: [laughs] The weird thing about him is that in LOVE ACTUALLY, I had two very famous actors in mind to play the part that Bill played, and we were having a read through and I couldn’t decide who I wanted to play it and so I said to the casting lady “Find me someone I will never cast.” She said, “You should try Bill. He’s wonderful.” I said, “Well, I don’t particularly care for him, so bring him in, because at least then I wont hurt anyone’s feelings. I don’t care about him.” He came in and he was so brilliant that we never auditioned anybody for the part and he got it.
Capone: I remember the first thing I ever saw him in was when he plays the old rock star in the band that reunites, STILL CRAZY.
RC: Good movie. That’s a lovely movie, a sweet movie. With Bruce Robinson, the fantastic writer, playing the sort of enigmatic Syd Barrett kind of character. We invented a great big backstory for Bill, where he was like the oldest son of the Duke of Wellington, and he got such a serious drug habit by the age of 25 that he started selling off the Van Dycks and the Gainsboroughs and had to flee to the continent. We worked out this huge backstory of decadence and shame.
Capone: They just poked their head in like they want me to wrap it up.
RC: Well it’s a great pleasure to meet you. So how does the site work? Do you meet each other or do you just communicate…?
Capone: Every once in a while. The operation is based Austin, obviously, but we’ve got a guy in L.A. and me here. I go down to Austin about three or four times a year.
RC: To re-plot?
Capone: Not really. We work fairly independently for the most part.
RC: And send in your stuff, follow your enthusiasm. That’s what’s great about it that it’s a site of enthusiasts and I’m very, as you can see from my movies… I’ve got a motto, which is “Whoever likes something most is right.” In other words, if I see a film and I don’t particularly like it and I meet someone who loves it, they're right aren’t they? The person who made it, made it to be liked for the people who would like it and you get that. Although when you all are tough on films, then I feel really worried about the film. I think, “It must be no good at all.” And the funny little cartoons in the corner. It’s all very funny. Meeting you is like meeting a fictional character.
Capone: I'm sorry I don't look more like my cartoon avatar, it's true. It was great to meet you Richard. Thank you so much!
RC: Great meeting you.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com
Follow Me On Twitter
