If you’ve ever wondered how Love Actually director Richard Curtis managed to make all those intersecting stories align in the hit festive rom-com, the man himself has admitted it was no easy task.
Like Love Actually, Richard’s new animated family comedy That Christmas tells a series of different stories set at the festive stories that are all interwoven.
And in a new interview with IndieWire, the Bafta winner admitted that the headaches brought about by his directorial debut helped him when putting together his new film.
“The strange thing about ‘Love Actually’ is, when we finished the movie, it was a catastrophe,” he explained, revealing it took six months’ worth of editing to make the film work.
Richard 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,” he recalled.
In the two decades since Love Actually, Richard – who was primarily a screenwriter before he helmed the likes of About Time and The Boat That Rocked – has been open about the struggles of filmmaking, and things about the festive favourite that he would change in hindsight (not least the movie’s lack of diversity).
That Christmas arrives on Netflix on Wednesday 4 December, while Love Actually is available to watch on Now.