Love Actually director Richard Curtis: I was just sort of stupid & wrong about diversity

Richard Curtis is the famous writer/director of Love, Actually and About Time, and writer of Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones’s Diary and more. While he wasn’t born in the UK, he is considered a conventionally successful “British screenwriter” and director of British rom-coms. Curtis has been criticized for years for the lack of diversity in his films. Specifically, I remember a big conversation about how badly he whitewashed Notting Hill, a London neighborhood which was then known for being racially diverse and multicultural. Similar complaints were made about Love Actually, and Curtis addressed those complaints last year, telling Diane Sawyer (in a special about the anniversary of the film) that the lack of diversity makes him feel uncomfortable and stupid. Well, Curtis is still apologizing for the films many people watch during the holiday season:

Looking back at Love Actually and Bridget Jones’s Diary, Richard Curtis regrets including negative commentary about women’s bodies in the films amid criticism in recent years.

While recently speaking at The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, via Today, the director-writer recalled “how shocked I was like five years ago when [my daughter] Scarlett said to me, ‘You can never use the word fat again.’”

In the 2003 Christmas movie, Martine McCutcheon’s character Natalie is teased a handful of times for her weight, including being called “plumpy” and someone saying she has “massive … tree trunk thighs.” At one point, Natalie’s love interest, the British Prime minister played by Hugh Grant, also says, “God, you weigh a lot,” when she jumps into his arms.

After noting that his daughter was “right” about not using the word “fat” anymore in his projects, he added, “I think I was behind, you know, behind the curve, and those jokes aren’t any longer funny, so I don’t feel I was malicious at the time, but I think I was unobservant and not as, you know, as clever as I should have been.”

Curtis also addressed criticism of his past films, including 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and 1999’s Notting Hill, for featuring predominantly all-white main casts and for how people of color were treated at the time.

“I think because I came from a very un-diverse school and a bunch of university friends,” the filmmaker said. “[With] Notting Hill, I think that I hung on to the diversity issue, to the feeling that I wouldn’t know how to write those parts. And I think I was just sort of stupid and wrong about that…. I feel as though me, my casting director, my producers just didn’t think about it. Just didn’t look outwards enough.”

[From THR]

Real talk: I have Love Actually on DVD and I’ve listened to the director/cast commentary, which features Curtis, Bill Nighy, Hugh Grant and Thomas Brodie-Sangster. It was recorded as Love Actually was in theaters in 2003, and twenty years ago, Curtis talked on the DVD commentary about the backlash he got for whitewashing Notting Hill, and he put one of the Black critics in Love Actually as a terrible DJ. He also basically pointed to Chiwetel Ejiofor’s small role (as the man who marries Keira Knightley’s character) as proof that he was trying to make his movies more diverse. All of which to say, it’s crazy that Curtis is trying to act like these are new conversations or that he’s only realizing this sh-t now. He’s known about his own racial blindspots for decades!

Now, there’s another conversation to be had – should a white writer/director shoehorn diverse characters into his stories just for the sake of racial representation? On one side, these are romantic comedies, it’s not like he’s whitewashing some big political story. On the other side, these are fictional people so why is it so damn difficult to imagine a world in which white British folks have diverse friend groups or marry a person of color?

As for the “fat” jokes – those have aged poorly, it’s true. They were cringe 20 years ago too.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

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