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