Why Richard Curtis chose to write romantic comedies is a question the screen-writer and director is still trying to answer. Surprisingly, the man who can be credited with defining the rom-com for the twentieth century included only one romance in his top ten films when he started writing. For Curtis, Close Encounters, The Godfather and The Adventures of Robin Hood were just as seminal to his film education as the classic romance films one might expect. ‘I’m really puzzled about this’, he tells me. ‘I love so many films in other genres – why did I write the films I wrote?’
When Curtis reflects on the extraordinary trajectory his life has taken, it seems his overwhelming response is one of bemusement. The one thing he is clear about, however, is that his aspirations to write and direct started in Oxford. ‘I have no idea what would have happened to me if I’d not gone to Oxford when I did – it was a chain of events starting there that lead to the life I’ve led.’
Studying English Literature at Christ Church, Curtis’ time at Oxford was the grounding for his career in film largely, it shocked me to hear, because he had so much free time. ‘I hear how hard people have to work at Oxford these days’, he tells me cheerfully. ‘Things were pretty easy in my time – we had a lot of time to pick up the craft we were eventually going to pursue.’
The catalyst for his success came in the form of Rowan Atkinson, who Curtis describes as ‘a real genius’. Meeting each-other at Oxford and both joining the Oxford Revue during their time there, Curtis and Atkinson have since enjoyed an extraordinarily fruitful working relationship. Together, they wrote and directed Blackadder and Mr Bean, both of which achieved national popularity and critical acclaim.
Later, Atkinson acted as a get-out-of-jail-free card for Curtis, allowing him to leave his conventional job upon graduation. ‘When I left University, my Dad gave me a year to foolishly try to make a living writing, before I accepted the inevitable and went to work in the Marketing department of Unilever. But I got lucky, and after I’d made about £360 writing for radio in the first year, I got a call from Rowan in the eleventh month saying he’d been asked to be in a show called Not the Nine O’clock News and would I write his stuff for that. So I hung on to his coat-tails and my life followed.’
The rest is history. After becoming the only screen-writer to have two sitcoms voted among the best in British history (Blackadder and The Vicar of Dibley), Curtis moved on to achieve enviable success in the notoriously impenetrable film world: beginning with the breakthrough hit Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994, the stream of popular romantic comedies continued with Notting Hill, Love Actually, and Bridget Jones’ Diary (the script of which Curtis helped adapt). These are films that, no matter what the critics made of them, have left an indelible impression on popular culture in Britain.
To my mind, it would seem there must be a distinct ‘Curtisian’ formula that ensures his films’ success, which would explain their apparently unfaltering popularity and the fact that you’re bound to find at least one of his titles on the DVD shelf of almost every house in the UK. Love Actually continues to be the go-to Christmas film, while popular culture still abounds with references to Notting Hill despite having been released over a decade ago.
I put it to Curtis that all of his films are very ‘English’, not just in their setting, but in their over-arching themes. Tom Shone, a journalist for The Guardian, has described Curtis’ romantic comedies as ‘fish-out-of-water movies’, revolving around the humour arises from the stereotypical Brit’s inability to be anything other than awkward when it comes to contemplating romance. Yet Curtis is quick to deny that writing films that could be marketed is distinctly ‘English’ was a conscious decision: ‘I certainly never meant to write quintessentially English films. I’ve just tried to write films about things I know about. My original inspiration were movies like Gregory’s Girl, Diner, Breaking Away, Annie Hall, Rita Sue and Bob Too – and I think of them as just being personal films, not Scottish, or American, or English.’ Fair enough, but what about the English sense of humour? Can one define ‘Englishness’ in relation to that? ‘There are self-evidently lots of different kinds of Englishness.. there’s precious little in common between the Monty Python films and mine – or between, let’s say, The Office and The Mighty Boosh.’
This is true, of course, but if Curtis is writing what he knows then he must be able to identify the strong correlation between his sphere of knowledge and upper-middle-class British experience. In most of the films the male protagonist is a charming, well-spoken, nerdy Englishman, usually played by Hugh Grant, who, incidentally, is himself an alumnus of Oxford University. I wonder how Oxford may have shaped Curtis’ experience of romance, itself a bastion of peculiar British traditions. I imagine that the university experience Curtis had, without the advent of the internet, was more amenable to the setting of a rom-com than our technology obsessed society is now, but Curtis quickly puts the lid on my rather rose-tinted conception of a Facebook-free culture.
‘I don’t feel things have changed. I don’t remember things being particularly romantic when I was young. I heard one story of a contemporary rowing his girlfriend along a river to a field with a table in the middle of it with a rose on it. And we all hated him. I think technology has probably just subtracted and added an equal amount to the pain of love. When I was at University, it was impossible to communicate. You had to hope to bump into people, you had to make dates and have your heart broken when the girl didn’t turn up. Now, I’m guessing being constantly in touch just makes heart-ache travel faster.’
There is a romance to what Curtis says even as he disavows its presence in his university years; the ‘will she or won’t she?’ suspense he describes is reminiscent of the plot-lines that underscore his romantic comedies. Curtis’ central protagonists are always men looking for the love of a woman: cue Hugh Grant trying to win Carrie’s (Andie McDowell) heart in Four Weddings; Hugh Grant the book-nerd gaining the affection of the film-star in Notting Hill ; various male characters (including Hugh Grant) looking for romance in Love Actually. The audience of these films are primarily women, yet the scripts are written by a man and are about love from a man’s point of view. I ask Curtis how realistic he thinks his portrayal of women is – does he write with women as his target audience in mind?
Clearly uncomfortable with the idea of targeting, Curtis nevertheless concedes that his films are marketed towards women: ‘When involved in the marketing I’ve always tried to reflect the movies as honestly as we can. That said – there do seem to have been quite a lot of launches of my DVDs on Mother’s Day… but I don’t think when working on a film that I’ve ever deliberately ‘targeted’ them at anyone – I don’t think the women have done much worse than the men on the realism scale.’ He admires Lena Dunham, writer of the HBO series Girls, ‘she is much more realistic and better than me’, but expresses regret that he has never written a romantic film of his own with a female lead.
It would be forgivable then, if Curtis wanted to escape the rom-com genre with which his name has been inextricably associated, and I wonder why he’s never tried his hand at anything markedly different from comedy or romance. Will we ever see Curtis attempt a crime thriller or a period drama? ‘I’ve left it a bit late, I fear… I have enjoyed, though, some of the different things I’ve done like War Horse, or Dr Who, or Mary & Martha.’
For Curtis, the next step may be a difficult one. Before the interview is confirmed, Curtis’ agent says he would prefer to talk about his time at Oxford than his most recent film, and I wonder if this reluctance is indicative of a crossroads he has arrived at in his career. The new film, About Time, received mixed reviews, with many critics voicing their concern that Curtis is ‘stuck in a rut’.
Having mastered the romantic-comedy, Curtis must decide if will he continue to revisit what is arguably a tired genre, diluted in quality by the abysmal flops Hollywood churns out regularly, or move on to uncharted territory. For now, though, his reflections on the future are suitably schmaltzy, and could easily be a voiceover to one of his films: ‘Ah – life. It rushes past you and you don’t know where you’re heading and why.’
