Richard Curtis, the writer and director behind some of Britain’s best-loved romantic comedies, has said he wished he had spent more time writing about the later years of love.
Curtis, whose films include Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love, Actually, was reflecting on some of the things he had not done in a busy career that also included co-founding Comic Relief.
He told the Cheltenham literature festival he wished he had written more about the later years of love, about getting married and staying together and all the related problems.
“Things go up and down and they are very complicated. I wish I’d done more of that. We all wish we’d had more time,” he said. “I was going to write a play about my parents. I didn’t write that.”
One of Curtis’s biggest television hits was Blackadder, which he created with Rowan Atkinson and co-wrote, from series two onwards, with Ben Elton.
The prospects of a fifth Blackadder series are zero, he suggested. “Blackadder is a very complicated group of people. So if you’re fond enough of the series to wish that the people involved in it should live to a ripe old age then I think it’s best that we don’t work together,” he said.
Curtis will be 64 in two years’ time and he told an audience at the Cheltenham literature festival: “I’m retiring on my birthday in 2020.” He added, presumably joking: “And I’m hoping to take up drugs.”
He was being interviewed on stage by his daughter Scarlett Curtis, the feminist activist and editor of the book Feminists Don’t Wear Pink (and other Lies). “I’ve been trying to get Scarlett to take up drugs and drink for so long, but she said she’d only do it if she followed my example.”
The event was unusual in that Curtis had no new book to plug. Instead he reflected on his life and dual career in entertainment and charity. He was also unashamed about making feel-good entertainment. That had been a conscious choice, he said.
“I did feel that in order to deal with the harsh things that had happened to me, and the things that I see around me, I would do the Comic Relief work for that. There is a job to be done making people joyful, happy and reminding people of the amazing wonder of our world.”
He said Love, Actually had been criticised as unrealistic. If he had made a movie about a man kidnapping a woman and chaining her to a radiator for five years it would be judged “searingly realistic”. But more people are in love, not chaining people to radiators, Curtis said.
“We are lucky we live in a country and a world where there is enormous amounts of love and happiness and it’s worth writing that.”
He said it was interesting to speculate about which fictional romantic couples would stay together. He recalled once reviewing movies to work it out and decided it would be the couple in Brief Encounter, “who were already very unhappy. They would stay unhappy.”
Curtis also advised people wanting a career in writing not to give up too early. “The difference between me and a writer who doesn’t go on writing is that I write 1% good a day and I think that has been a fantastic day … many people give up writing because they write for a day and they have got 99% rubbish,” he said.
“I did once work out that I had written 3,000 pages to reach Notting Hill, which was a 120-page script.”
The editing of a movie could also save it, he said, recalling his experience with Bridget Jones’s Diary, which did “not work at all” until they moved the penultimate scene to the beginning, the scene with Bridget in her red pyjamas in despair drinking and crying. It became the title scene so you felt for the character from the start. “There are miraculous things which can happen in the edit,” he said.
