In love with love

Toronto

As the author of a series of wildly successful British film comedies and sitcoms, including “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Bean,” “Notting Hill” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” you’d imagine Richard Curtis might’ve conquered his fear of failure by now. But when the engaging, 46-year-old writer took the stage at the venerable Elgin Theater Sunday night at the Toronto Film Festival to introduce “Love Actually,” his much-anticipated debut film as a director, it was clear all he could think about was not glittering prizes but impending doom.

“This is only the second time I’ve been to a film festival,” he said hesitantly. “And I’m so hoping it’s going to go better than the first time.”

He recalled that when “Four Weddings” was shown in Salt Lake City during a Sundance Film Festival in the early ‘90s, a volley of obscenities that Hugh Grant sputtered at the very beginning of the film didn’t go over especially well with a large Mormon contingent in the audience. “Before the credits were over,” Curtis dryly recalled, “47 very large people walked out of the theater.”

History did not repeat itself Sunday night. Packed with an all-star ensemble of British comedic actors, as well as a couple of American imports, “Love Actually” earned a rousing reception from the packed house. Set largely in London at Christmas, it weaves together a dizzying array of romantic entanglements, some broadly funny, others bittersweet. As with Curtis’ other films, the humor is layered with authentic emotion -- the wry comedy of awkward situations and rude surprises, as well as the wincing humor of longing and heartbreak.

The jokes are stoked by Curtis’ abiding affection for pop culture, whether in a scene where a bereaved husband blasts the Bay City Rollers at his wife’s funeral or a vignette at 10 Downing Street, where the prime minister, played by Grant, looks for inspiration from a photograph of Margaret Thatcher, muttering under his breath, “Oh, you saucy minx.”

Due out in November from Universal Pictures, the film features the return of such Curtis regulars as Grant, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson and Rowan Atkinson, plus Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Keira Knightley and Bill Nighy, who plays an aging rock star trying to make a comeback with a holiday-season remake of the lowbrow pop standard “Love Is All Around.”

As in most Curtis films, love is the inspiration for both the story and the laughs, though the press-shy writer-director, who has only rarely given interviews until now, is loathe to analyze the reasons behind his preoccupation with the subject. When I ask for an explanation over lunch the day after his premiere, Curtis has quite the comeback. “I’m sure my girlfriend, Emma, could get to the bottom of it,” he says, “since she’s a real Freud -- Sigmund Freud’s great-granddaughter. But I haven’t asked.”

Curtis, who with his graying hair and spectacles has the studious air of an independent bookshop clerk, sighs and stares at his soup. “A lot of it has to do with my first real girlfriend leaving me. I suppose I’ve been trying to repair the damage ever since.” He cannily pauses for a moment before adding: “I guess I owe her a lot of money for sleeping with that other guy.”

Mainstream enters fray

As someone whose films are unabashedly commercial, Curtis is hardly the sort of edgy artiste you’d expect to see at a film festival like this. But in the last couple of years, the Toronto festival has undergone a major transformation, presenting mainstream Hollywood fare alongside obscure Korean dramas and Brazilian documentaries.

Roaming around the festival, I’ve bumped into more celebrities and industry top guns that you can see in a month at the Grill. Nearly every studio has a major fall release here, including such star-driven films as “Matchstick Men” (Warner Bros.), “Out of Time” (MGM), “School of Rock” (Paramount), “Veronica Guerin” (Disney) and “The Human Stain” (Miramax). Nicole Kidman, who’s here promoting two films (“Human Stain” and “Dogville”), made the front page of the Toronto Sun, with the headline: “FEAR FACTOR: Nicole Suffers Stage Fright in Every Role!”

Universal, which had great success launching its Eminem hit, “8 Mile,” at last year’s festival, had no qualms about debuting “Love Actually” this time around. The studio’s entire top brass was here, as well as its Working Title production team and film co-stars Firth, Linney and Rodrigo Santoro.

“If you have a film that delivers, there’s nothing like the galvanizing reaction you get in Toronto; it’s like lightning in a bottle,” Universal publicity chief Michael Moses says. “This is that rare opportunity to get national, regional and worldwide press together with an incredibly appreciative audience. If you have a satisfying film, the radiating coverage you get is crucial to starting any good word-of-mouth campaign.”

“Love Actually” is sure to cause a mini-stir in England for Grant’s depiction of a bachelor prime minister who not only takes potshots at Tony Blair but also falls for a quirky female staffer. (When she complains about her nasty ex-boyfriend, he says, “You know, being Prime Minister, I could just have him killed.”) It also offers a tart political exchange between Grant and Billy Bob Thornton, who plays a bellicose, philandering American president that Curtis views as a partial mix of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

But perhaps the most striking moments in the movie involve scenes of real-life people greeting their loved ones at Heathrow Airport, which are accompanied by a description of the touching phone calls to family and friends made by Sept. 11 victims -- a reference to that tragic day that has largely gone ignored in Hollywood films. Curtis says having a reference to 9/11 in a romantic comedy provoked lengthy discussions with Universal, but he credits the studio with eventually allowing him to leave the narration untouched.

“I got the idea for showing real people when I was stuck at an arrivals gate at LAX once and I saw this fantastic thing, as people who’d been sitting open-mouthed with boredom suddenly explode with affection the moment they saw their loved ones,” Curtis recalls. “Whenever I’ve watched it with our actors, they inevitably say, ‘My God, those people are so much better than anything we could do.’ ”

Writing from life

Curtis dreamed up the idea for the movie while in Bali on a six-month “life-experiment vacation” with his family, who include Freud, his longtime girlfriend, and three young children. Forced to take a long walk each day to cure an ailing back, he gave himself the job of recalling the various romances he and his friends had experienced.

Colin Firth, for example, plays a broken-hearted writer who escapes to the South of France, where he falls in love with his housekeeper; she speaks only Portuguese, he only English. The inspiration came from a vacation Curtis and Freud took in the south of France; Curtis drove their beautiful housekeeper home each day, though neither he nor she spoke the same language. No romance ensued.

“Still,” he says, “it gave me plenty of time to think of plot points.”

The relationship between the aging rock star and his manager echoes Curtis’ years of British sitcom work with Atkinson. “Until I was 35, no one spent more nights in more hotels, having more arguments than Rowan and myself, and, in a way, that was a kind of love too.” Music plays an integral role in “Love Always,” from a series of references to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” to “Jump” by the Pointer Sisters, which turns out to be a big hit in the corridors of 10 Downing Street.

Curtis always works listening to music. “My imagination doesn’t seem to operate very well outside of things I know well,” he says. “I’ve learned that the films I’ve truly loved -- anything by Woody Allen, Bill Forsyth’s ‘Local Hero’ and ‘Breaking Away’ -- have a real confidence in the way people speak and act. So the benchmark for me became writing about people I know.”

Curtis has also worked almost exclusively in recent years with the people he knows best, Working Title producers Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan. It was Bevan, before Working Title was founded, who produced “The Tall Guy,” Curtis’ first film. “You won’t find many people who’ve had an easier ride in movies than I,” he says. “And that’s almost entirely due to Tim and Eric.”

It’s a sign of the producers’ value for Curtis’ work that, starting with “Notting Hill,” the writer has had final cut on his films, picking the directors as well as most of the cast. “Richard has been in the cutting room for years. His sense of quality control is as refined as anybody I’ve known,” says Bevan. “The prime minister’s cabinet are only on screen for a moment in the film, and yet I guarantee Richard saw two or three actors for each part. Even last night, he wasn’t enjoying his finest hour. He was still making notes on every part of the picture.”

Finally on “Love Actually” Curtis put himself in the director’s chair. “I really got the urge in the editing room,” he says. “I found myself longing to see the things underneath a performance, for example, the vulnerability underneath a character’s ambition. I really was a monster. I’d have a particular delivery for a line in mind and I couldn’t understand why the director wouldn’t get it for me. So I’d bully them until we got it and then we’d look at the rushes and I couldn’t tell which version was mine after all.”

The best surprise of being on set each day was seeing how the actors constantly breathed fresh life into his script. After watching the footage of a brief sequence between Neeson and the boy playing his young stepson, Curtis says, “I cut a 10-minute explanation of their relationship out of the film, simply because after you saw Liam’s body language and heard the pitch of his voice, you didn’t need it. That’s a truth you get from the actor that’s deeper than anything you can write.”

All this talk about his craft is beginning to give Curtis a renewed sense of impending doom. He’d love for his movies to come and go with as little attention as possible paid to the gray-haired man at the keyboard. “I’m still trying to preserve my innocence when I sit down to write,” he says. “It’s always sad to see pop groups trying to repeat the same formula over and over. When I sit down to write, I try to be as unaware as possible of what I’ve done before.”

His eyes betray a mischievous glint. “Perhaps that’s why when I finished ‘Notting Hill’ my first reaction was, ‘Oh my God, it’s almost exactly the same movie as ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral!’ I’m hopeful people think this one is a little bit different, just as I’m optimistic that the next time out, the writer will give the director an easier film to make.”

“The Big Picture” runs each Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.