Director Richard Curtis’ About Time is his most personal project. Based on time-travel, the story is about enjoying life as it comes
If About Time is Richard Curtis’ last film as a director — and he has said that it will be — then he wants to take the movie’s simple yet powerful message to hearts.
“About Time will be the last film I direct. In a way, I am trying to pay attention to the message of the movie and it is to look at your life and to think ‘how can I enjoy it without stress and worryIJ’ And to take advantage of the things that you’ve got in life. And I do find making movies a long and stressful process. It’s a thousand tough days and at the moment I am taking my own advice and saying that the next time that I meet up with Bill (Nighy), may be it should be walking along a beach on holiday, not walking along a beach with two cameras and 50 crew,” he says.
Nighy is Curtis’ close friend and frequent collaborator and About Time is their fifth project together. It started with love Actually — Curtis’ first film as a director — and continued with The Girl In The Café, The Boat That Rocked and includes The Banker, a short film for the Robin Hood Tax campaign, which lobbies for a financial levy on banks to help fund development.
In About Time, Nighy plays the father of Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) and when his son reaches 21 he reveals an extraordinary family secret — that all the men in their family have the ability to travel back in time. Tim, at first understandably skeptical, discovers that he really can turn back the clock.
Tim can’t change history — so he can’t go back and prevent a war or stop a natural disaster — but he can revisit his own life and get the chance to do things differently. Which is exactly what he does when he meets the beautiful, but insecure, Mary — played by Rachel McAdams — after an unfortunate time travel escapade. Tim has to turn detective to find her again and engineer another meeting. The course of true love is often fought with pitfalls — when you can time travel — as Tim discovers.
The idea for the story first came to Curtis during a conversation with one of his close friends. “I was talking to my oldest friend about our lives and we were saying, ‘If you could have a perfect last day what would it beIJ How would you spend itIJ’ And we both agreed that it would not be going on a date with Kate Moss and winning an Oscar.
“It would be a non-special day. It would be having lunch with a friend and having dinner with your partner and making breakfast for your kids and walking them to school. We decided that those were the happy things in life and that’s where we felt most comfortable. And I felt that I would love to make a film about that very simple observation — that happiness is right under our noses and what’s stopping us enjoying itIJ And then I thought that the way to prove it would be to say if you could choose anything, if you actually had it in your power to have the other glamorous things, then you actually might end up not wanting them. And then I thought of the time-travel idea and I thought I could give a guy all the powers in the world and he could be able to change anything and do anything and still decide only to lead his normal life — but just with less worry and concern,” he says.
Tim’s ability to travel back in time is hilariously mundane — he slips into a wardrobe, closes his eyes and thinks of where he wants to go and then comes out of the wardrobe and is back in that place and time. “It’s not a Science fiction movie and it is not meant to be about all the technicalities of time travel so I just went for the simplest thing I could. I probably wandered around the house and thought ‘what would I doIJ’ And you probably would scrunch your eyes and think of the time you wanted to go back to. It was a pretty short process to think of the shortest possible kind of time travel.” About Time is Curtis’ most personal film to date. Curtis and his partner, script editor and broadcaster Emma Freud, have four children and his family is the most important part of his life.
“When I started writing Four Weddings and A Funeral I was already with Emma so I was even then looking back to a time when I was trying to find the perfect girl. And in this movie I wanted to catch up. I have lost three members of my family since I made love Actually and being a father is a big bit of my life, so I wanted to write something about the whole family experience, which I’d started working on with love Actually. This is a film about family and about how romantic love turns into weddings, which turns into children which turns back into family. So to that extent, it is about where I stand now rather than the dream of how things might have worked out before.”
His cast, including his two leads, were a delight to work with, he says. “It was a high risk strategy employing Domhnall because he was wearing the beard he needed for Anna Karenina and he looked like an extra from Deliverance,” he quips.
He’d wanted to work with Ms McAdams for some time and wasn’t disappointed. “I knew that Rachel could do comedy from watching Mean Girls but I’ve loved her in everything I have seen her in. I loved The Vow. I just think she is such an interesting actress and she did turn out to be a genius on About Time. I kept thinking that my lines weren’t necessary because she was embodying all the emotion I wanted in the first 10 seconds of the scene.” Music is an essential part of any Richard’s film and About Time is no exception.
If you ask him if he could travel back in time what would he do, Curtis doesn’t hesitate — he would have loved to have seen The Beatles play live at the height of their popularity back in 1964. “When I was eight I went and stood for three hours outside the Foresta Hotel in Stockholm and waited for The Beatles to come out on the balcony. They came out and they waved and then I went home and I think what I should have done was gone and queued for a ticket to their concert.”
After leaving Oxford Curtis began his career writing for the BBC’s hugely popular topical sketch show, Not the Nine O’clock News, working with Rowan Atkinson. He then created The Black Adder series. As a writer, his first film was The Tall Guy. As a writer, his other films include Notting Hill, Bean, Bridget Jones’ Diary.
About Time is his third feature as a writer/director following love Actually and The Boat That Rocked and sadly it may be his last. Although he stresses that he will continue to write and produce. “I am actually doing a movie with director Stephen Daldry (Trash). So that’s what I will maybe do in the future, work with good directors when I can.”