Richard Curtis CBE

Richard Curtis CBE, is one of our most successful screenwriters, he is also a producer and film director known for his romantic comedy, he has worked on a wide range of films including: Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Bean (1997), Notting Hill (1999), Bridget Jones' Diary (2001), Love Actually (2003), The Boat That Rocked (2009), War Horse (2011) and Yesterday (2019).

Curtis has also written and co-written a number of highly successful and much loved tv series including Black Adder, The Vicar of Dibley and Mr Bean.

I do have a bit of a habit of when I get two characters together, I just try and write a lot of conversation between them. Have dinner with the characters, spend the night with them, so I discover how they talk. Then I try and extract the essence of their relationship from that. I write a lot, and fast, and then sometimes I have to really focus and say, “This is exactly what the scene is about.

I did once work out that I had written 3,000 pages to reach Notting Hill, which was a 120-page script.

His early career saw him write material for the BBC’s Not the Nine O'Clock News and ITV’s Spitting Image.

My first experience of writing was writing stuff for Rowan Atkinson, and he was an astonishing genius when he was 18. So that was the context of my career: I was always second best, and I got used to that very early. It doesn’t worry me too much. Nowadays I love people doing better work than me because it means I can enjoy something I love in two hours, rather than having to spend two years making something I have quibbles with. 

He co-founded Comic Relief and Red Nose Day with Sir Lenny Henry (which has raised in excess of £1 billion) and has been involved in many other successful charity campaigns such as Live 8 and Make Poverty History.

In 2007, Curtis received the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award, the highest award given to a filmmaker by the British Film Academy (BAFTA).

There is a job to be done making people joyful, happy and reminding people of the amazing wonder of our world. 

It is complicated sometimes to be on set with another director because I will have a feeling of how things should be. It’s hilarious, because the director’s got to be allowed to do three takes before you jump in, so for me, the most terrifying words in the English language are “Moving on.” What? Sometimes they’re just completely happy with the first three, whereas I thought, I’m sure he’s going to do a more melancholy take. Or, We’re gonna nail that text slightly better. I’m on a fishing line, being tugged in, and there’s that awful moment when I have to leap in and say “Actually, could we do this?”

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