‘Love Actually’ shoot was “a catastrophe” and required six months of editing, says Richard Curtis

The Love Actually shoot was “a catastrophe” and required six months of editing, director Richard Curtis has said in a new interview.

The plot of the film contains several interwoven narratives and the director admitted in a new interview with IndieWire that it was so complex, it nearly ended in disaster for the film.

“The strange thing about Love Actually is, when we finished the movie, it was a catastrophe,” he told the outlet, saying it took a further six months of editing to make the film work.

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,” he recalled.

Curtis’ latest film is an animated family comedy for Netflix called That Christmas, which tells a series of different festive stories that are all interwoven.

For the film, Ed Sheeran wrote and recorded a new song called ‘Under The Tree’.

Speaking about the song earlier this year, Sheeran said: “I’ve been mates with Richard Curtis for years, and we’ve done a load of fun work for charity, and then both were heavily involved in the movie Yesterday. He came to me two years ago to play me the rough of That Christmas. It was just sketches and voices, but it blew me away. So emotional, yet so heartwarmingly funny, like all Richard Curtis movies.

“I find since having kids, there’s a real lack of great animated children’s Christmas movies, so I thought this was such an amazing thing to make and put into the world. The scene that we wrote this song for is so heartbreaking, but so real for many people at Christmas spending it without the ones they love, for so many reasons.

“I got to work with my older brother [composer Matthew] on this which is such a rarity and a gift to work so closely with my only sibling, it felt so good to create something my children would watch, with their uncle, based in the country they live in. I find it mad that there isn’t more animated Christmas films for kids, but this is going to become a holiday staple, at least in our household. Hope everyone loves it, and enjoys the song, we had such a great time creating it.”

Sheeran played a version of himself in the 2019 movie Yesterday, written by Curtis, and revealed in 2021 that he was the third choice for the part after Chris Martin and Harry Styles. Sheeran’s character isn’t treated with the sort of respect a global megastar might expect, and Curtis joked to NME: “He must be teased because of the fact he’s had so much success and still hasn’t cut his hair.”

And now, Curtis said he’s “thrilled” to have a song by Sheeran in That Christmas, particularly as it’s set in the singer-songwriter’s home county of Suffolk. “We’ve been friends for many years and – especially now that he’s a husband and a father –  it’s really lovely to have him play such a key part in this film about love, children and family” he added.

That Christmas is streaming on Netflix now.

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