I've travelled a great deal and was
brought up in lots of different countries,
and I often thought to myself, "I'm gonna write a really interesting film
"about America or Sweden or the Philippines or the places I've been."
And in the end, I tend to write about W11.
The Curtisian world has a lot of familiarities,
but is always breaking new ground as well.
There are always characters who you recognize and gags that you recognize,
'cause like all good writers, a lot of it
is autobiographical, semi-autobiographical.
The film was originally set in Bervvick, up in Scotland,
where Richard had been as a 17-year-old
and that's where a lot of his recollections come from.
RICHARD (BURNS: I had Scotland in mind when I wrote the film.
It turns out there aren't as many houses by the sea of the kind that I wanted.
When you go north, the houses by the sea tend to be one not by the sea,
'cause they'd built them back 'cause it was too cold.
And two, if they are by the sea,
they tend to look like castles.
Cornwall turned out to have all the qualities, both socially and visually,
that I wanted from the house in the world, for real.
DOMHNALL GLEESON". Cornwall is down the south of England.
It feels a little bit sunnier, a little bit more relaxed than London,
more countryside, more beaches, and all that sort of stuff.
That's where we were filming and it was just a joy from start to finish.
It was very happy going to work every day.
The place does have a real magic, and this house that we're in has a magic to it
and a feeling that it's a place where you could be happy.
And I think that's infecting people a little bit.
And I think that everyone is happy
and is getting into a feeling that we're in a real place
where a family might live and have real experiences.
They live in this terribly beautiful house.
It's a little bit ramshackle on the inside,
but it's a little bit pink and it looks out over the sea.
It's got a grandeur about it but it's really only skin-deep.
We gave it a more rambling garden and grew
the grass longer and painted it a pink color
so it sat back into the landscape a little bit more.
Inside, it's actually quite a real and rambling world,
which is quite a nice image for the family, I think.
It's got such a great lived-in feeling,
which you could never get if you tried to recreate it, or build it on a stage.
You want them to be able to live in it and feel that it's theirs,
so they know where they're going. Rather than a set.
They can pick up things.
They've got books they like. There's records in their dad's study.
Mom knows where everything is. Kit Kat's got a few things to play with.
So you feel they've got a life in it.
BILL NIGHY: The fact that we're shooting a film on a lawn
overlooking a beach, overlooking the sea, in Cornwall,
and it turns out to be a record-breaking summer played into our hands.
People rub along incredibly well together,
and they treat each other with kindness and care.
I got a text from one of the actors saying it
had been perfect paradise and sheer hell,
because it was this strange thing we've had often here,
which is the situation you're in
and the things that you're portraying
are things you would dearly love
but unfortunately, you're making a film about it,
rather than actually experiencing them.
I love being on location, 'cause it really does bring you together,
and this has been idyllic.
It's allowed us to become close quite quickly
because we are just hanging on the beach together all day.
Couldn't have asked for a better place to be a family.
There's a big contrast, I suppose,
between the joy of Cornwall and then the reality of filming in London.
CURTIS: The scene in Dans Le Noir?, which is ironic, because it's in pitch darkness
and therefore should have been the easiest scene in the film to make
has turned out, because it's odd,
to be one of the trickiest scenes.
We found it very hard to work out how to film it
because I thought you should be able, in
the film, to just get a glimmer of the actors.
JAY: So, girls, be honest, who is more beautiful?
JOANNA: Oh, lam. MARY: Yeah. She is.
JAY: Excellent!
First time we tried to shoot it,
we shot it in very, very, very low light,
but the very low light completely ruined the scene
because the actors could see each other, so, consequently,
they spoke to each other and looked
as though they could see each other.
So, we then did it again, but without hope of the lines working properly,
and then we did a whole recording session in very low light
to try and get the atmosphere right,
and then we did a recording session
in no light once they knew their lines.
So we did it four times and it's turned out okay.
(LAUGHS)
GLEESON: it's utter blackness. You never really experience total darkness.
Generally, there's always something and
your eyes adjust, but your eyes don't adjust.
It's just... There's nothing there.
MARY: Oh!
Something just touched my elbow.
TIM: Okay, that wasn't me.
MARY: No. Well, that just makes it worse.
It's actually terrifying. I found it terrifying.
So I tried to bring some of that
into the scene for my character,
that she's a little thrown and not very comfortable
and not very secure about the whole scenario.
So he was like a rock, a beacon for her.
Tim and Mary meet a number of times 'cause of the time travel,
but one of their big meetings is at a Kate Moss exhibition.
Sorry.
Hi. Hi.
CURTIS: I love Kate Moss.
And any excuse to have very large photographs of her in a film of mine
is one I would leap on.
We're lucky to have all these fantastic Testino photos
that are, in fact, going around the world
at the moment, in an exhibition,
and we're just borrowing them for a couple of days.
On paper, that was a near-impossible task to create,
but again, we've been incredibly lucky
that Testino and his team of people who set up all his exhibitions...
And they joined forces with us
and supplied us with the artwork for the Kate Moss exhibition,
and then built a pretty sizeable exhibition,
'cause it needed to feel like
it was an international London exhibition on an international scale,
which, again, was a lovely, lovely opportunity
and great to have these beautifully
printed photographs on that scale in the film.
(BURNS: If I had to talk about my favorite works of art of the last 50 years,
Testino's pictures of Kate Moss would come very high.
Part of the challenge with the film is to set it
in a world which isn't totally a film world.
CURTIS: The movie's shot by a guy called John Guleserian.
Quite a funny-looking man. He's got a gorgeous, big orange beard.
I saw this movie Like Crazy, absolutely loved it, loved its atmosphere.
Very low-budget gorgeous American movie.
And when we were talking about who should shoot the movie, I kept saying,
"I'd like it to look like Like Crazy.
We should find someone who can do that."
And then, finally, someone, as they do, said,
"Well, you know, you could get the guy who actually shot Like Crazy."
It was lovely that John was seeing Cornwall for the first time,
that he loved London but had never been allowed to shoot.
If you get an English cameraman,
they've shot Soho a lot of times,
whereas John was delighted by the stuff that he was doing for the first time.
It's got, I hope, a lovely, informal feel.
I don't think there's a single tracking shot.
I don't think there's a single shot where the camera's on stick,
so it's got a feeling, I hope, of life as it's lived.