Richard Curtis Says ‘Love Actually’ Was a ‘Catastrophe’

The below was part of a previously published interview with “Love Actually” writer/director Richard Curtis.

“Love Actually” may be all around, but according to filmmaker Richard Curtis, the beloved holiday rom-com staple was a “catastrophe” to make.

Curtis told IndieWire while promoting his animated film debut “That Christmas” that “Love Actually” was a pain to edit due to the anthology stories intersecting. The 2003 film starred Keira Knightley, Andrew Lincoln, Laura Linney, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, and more.

“The strange thing about ‘Love Actually’ is, when we finished the movie, it was a catastrophe,” Curtis said. “It took six months to re-edit it and learn all these lessons about how to do a multi-thread story.”

Curtis continued, “When I wrote ‘Love Actually,’ and we had the read-through, and it sounded great, I thought you would probably do A, B, C, D, E, F, G. But actually when you’re doing multi-story, the danger is you don’t commit to any of the stories and the audience never feels engaged, so you kind of end up doing A, B, C, C, A, so you get into the story and then you introduce a surprise and then you end one story earlier than the others. So I learned a lot about the complexity of multi-story construction in trying to save ‘Love Actually’ in how bad it was in the assembly.”

Curtis has voiced his own criticisms of the holiday film for years, telling The Independent UK that the now-infamous scene with Andrew Lincoln’s character professing his love to his best friend’s new wife (Keira Knightley) was “stalker”-y.

“He actually turns up, to his best friend’s house, to say to his best friend’s wife, on the off chance that she answers the door, ‘I love you,’” Curtis said. “I think it’s a bit weird. I mean, I remember being taken by surprise about seven years ago, I was going to be interviewed by somebody and they said, ‘Of course, we’re mainly interested in the stalker scene,’ and I said, ‘What scene is that?’ And then I was, like, educated in it. All I can say is that a lot of intelligent people were involved in the film at the time, and we didn’t think it was a stalker scene. But if it’s interesting or funny for different reasons [now] then, you know, God bless our progressive world.”

The “Notting Hill” director also said during ABC’s 20th-anniversary special “The Laughter & Secrets of ‘Love Actually’: 20 Years Later” that he wish the making of “Love Actually” was part of a documentary.

“There is such extraordinary love that goes on every minute in so many ways [in life], all the way around the world, and makes me wish my film was better,” Curtis said, also citing the lack of diversity in casting. “It makes me wish I’d made a documentary just to kind of observe it…Films can act as a reminder of how lovely things can be and how there are all sorts of things which we might pass by, which are, in fact, the best moments in our lives.”