It’s safe to say Richard Curtis wasn’t a huge fan of Love Actually post-production.
The writer-director of the beloved 2003 holiday rom-com recently told IndieWire that it was a “catastrophe” editing the film starring Hugh Grant, Keira Knightley, Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Bill Nighy, Martine McCutcheon, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman and Rowan Atkinson.
“The strange thing about Love Actually is, when we finished the movie, it was a catastrophe,” Curtis said of putting together multiple storylines and character arcs. “It took six months to re-edit it and learn all these lessons about how to do a multi-thread story.”
The film follows the lives of eight very different couples in dealing with their love lives in various loosely interrelated tales all set during December, leading up to Christmas in London, England.
“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,” the Four Weddings and a Funeral writer explained. “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.”
Curtis continued, “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. I did have a bit of wisdom when we were doing [That Christmas] to say, ‘Just when you start getting interested in [character] Danny, you leave him. Don’t do that. Stay with him for a little bit longer, and then when we go to the twins, stay on them.’ All of that, I think I had learned a few lessons.”
All those lessons learned also helped him create his animated film debut, That Christmas, which combines his trilogy of children’s books, That Christmas, Snow Day and The Empty Stocking, into one film, which is currently streaming on Netflix.