Love Actually turns 20 this year, which means it’s spent two decades as a Yuletide staple, offering alternately sappy and self-deprecating British vibes. It’s also, like all films from the time, from a very different era. There’s even a reference to 9/11 in the first minute. And there’s one thing its writer-director wishes he could surgically remove: dumb weight jokes.
As per Today, Richard Curtis, who directed the film after a run writing witty Hugh Grant rom-coms like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones’s Diary made an appearance at the Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival. He was interviewed by his daughter Scarlett, who asked him about those films. Curtis also recalled how five years ago she told him he could never use the word “fat” again.
She could have been referring to Bridget Jones’s Diary, in which its heroine’s weight is a relentless figure of fun. The same goes for Love Actually, in which Martine McCutcheon’s Natalie, a junior member of Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister’s cabinet, is ribbed for her “massive” “tree trunk thighs,” called “plumpy” by her dad, and told that she “weighs a lot” after she jumps into Grant’s arms. Those jokes don’t play now like they did in 2003.
“And wow, you were right,” Richard Curtis told his daughter in front of the crowd. “I think I was behind, you know, behind the curve, and those jokes aren’t any longer funny, so I don’t feel I was malicious at the time, but I think I was unobservant and not as, you know, as clever as I should have been.”
He also reflected on how, well, white the films are, with characters of color usually relegated to the sidelines or small supporting roles, if they’re present at all.
“I came from a very un-diverse school and a bunch of university friends,” Curtis admitted. “[With] Notting Hill, I think that I hung on to the diversity issue, to the feeling that I wouldn’t know how to write those parts. And I think I was just sort of stupid and wrong about that.”
Love Actually’s random weight jokes aren’t the only aspect that’s come under fire. On a far lighter note, Hugh Grant has admitted that he didn’t like shooting that dance scene one bit.
As for Curtis, he hasn’t made one of those Hugh Grant comedies in a while. In fact, his last screen credit was for the Beatles what-if? movie Yesterday, which is a whole other controversy unto itself.
(Via Today)
