LOVE ACTUALLY
Q&A with Colin Firth		 Search all of phase9.tv






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Have you seen any of LOVE ACTUALLY?

Yes. I think it works fantastically well. As far as I’m aware Richard as something like a 100 per cent strike rate with everything he has done and you just can’t believe he has pulled it off again with such an ambitious project.

Although with LOVE ACTUALLY he had to step up a gear, directing for the first time?

Yes, he did. I was first in on the schedule - it started with three weeks of my stuff. And just before we left for France I had a panic attack on his behalf and woke up in the middle of the night. I actually thought, ‘how is he going to do this? How will he cope?’ He’s got ten or fifteen stories, some very famous actors and he is going to jump in for the first time in his life and orchestrate all of that. It seemed to be an absolutely overwhelming task and the read through seemed like a
premiere or a night at the Groucho Club or something - limos, I was expecting bodyguards with earpieces (laughs). He could have taken any one of these stories and developed them into a feature film on their own. In fact, I’m led to believe that they were all stories that he had been toying with as full-length stories. And it’s as if he has put them all into one and left himself with a clean slate.

When did you first hear about it?

There were rumours about it before it became definite. I remember by January (2002) hearing about this thing because there was a reading of the script which I had been invited to participate in but I wasn’t able to be there. There was quite a buzz about the existence of this thing for a long time and you know a lot of talk about it, who may or may not be in it, and who may or may not play which part. I think there were quite a lot of musical chairs in casting as there often is. I knew they were umming and aahing about me and whether I was right for this or right for that. And I think it was ‘well if Hugh is going to be the prime minister then perhaps I’m not right for the Prime Minister’s brother-in-law or something. And it wasn’t until the summer sometime that they offered it to me.

Did you talk it through with Richard at that point?

No, not very much I think it spoke for itself. I think quite often if you see something that needs a bit of work then you go into a period of debate. I just felt that it’s very hard to question Richard really, when he has got it right so often. You can’t really bet against him.

Why does he get it right so often?

I think he has done something which is very hard to do in film and would have been deemed impossible had he not proved otherwise, which is to write about middle class people.

As the title suggests it’s a story about love, and the English are often a little wary of that emotion too…

Yes. The story reflects different kinds of love. The dark side of it is addressed, it’s not really a film about the real guts of dysfunctional love and torture, it’s not that sort of story. It’s an
optimistic film aimed around Christmas time and it has that sort of leaning but it doesn’t ignore the fact that love is painful. There is a scene between Liam Neeson and his little boy where the child has been locking himself in his room and behaving strangely and Liam’s character is afraid that the boy is sick or on drugs or something. And it turns out that the boy says “no; I’m in love...” And the father says “I thought it was something much worse than that.” And the boy says “worse? What could be worse than the total misery and agony of being in love?” And you can’t really argue with that actually.

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