Originally known as The Boat That Rocked when it was released last spring in Britain, Pirate Radio tells a fictional story based on the real-life outlaw disc jockeys who quasi-legally broadcast rock and roll radio to England in the late 1960s from ships anchored in the North Sea. The rag-tag DJ crew is led by Curtis regular Bill Nighy as the owner and ship’s captain; Phillip Seymour Hoffman as The Count, the station’s sole American voice and most passionate believer in the power of rock; and Rhys Ifans as the preening Jagger-esque hedonist Gavin.
Other familiar comic faces in Pirate Radio include Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) as a “chunky” (and gloriously hairy) ladies man, and Rhys Darby, best known as the Flight of the Conchord’s manager Murray. Kenneth Branagh plays a British government official trying to shut the pirate radio stations down, and Mad Men's January Jones shows up as a dazzling love interest. Introduced into all this floating summer of love madness is Young Carl, played by Tom Sturridge. (A Q&A with Sturridge will be published tomorrow.)
The following are some of the highlights from our chat with Curtis:
On Youth and Music, and the Freedom to Live with People You Hate
Curtis: England was hilarious in the ‘60s. I went to a boarding school and it really was like 1949. All the hair was unbelievably short, you couldn’t run in the corridors, you couldn’t talk after lights out, you sung endless hymns with the word “pilgrim” in them. And that’s why it was so fantastic to listen to rock ‘n’ roll—it was undisciplined.
I had a tiny little radio, and you were like a safe cracker, turning the dial—they were hard to get, these stations because they only had very small frequencies. And it was the thing about volume level as you listened. It was too quiet you couldn’t hear it, but if it was too loud the matron who would stalk along the corridors could hear it, so you had to get that perfect level.
I’ve got very passionate memories of “Reach Out I’ll Be There” by the Four Tops. It was the first single I bought, and you know the way you can remember weird moments from your youth? I remember chapel was compulsory and a guy and I were hiding in the music rehearsal room and remember the DJ saying that "I’ll be There" had gone from 16 to number two, and how unbelievably excited I was. I was locked in a boarding school and sort of sensed this amazing world of freedom.
Also I think Pirate Radio is actually a film partly about being 24. At that age, most people end up in a flat with too many people, one of whom has had sex with everybody, one of whom has never had sex…with dreadful food, bad hygiene, and listening to music all the time. For me that was Camden Town, 1979: The Specials, Madness, Blondie, The Pretenders. And in a way it’s a movie about that nostalgic thing, about the freedom of our 20s when money doesn’t matter, you do the job you want to do, you don’t have any children. The weird thing is you often end up living with people you don’t like, ‘cause it’s a bit random. It’s the one person who can afford to live there, or the guy who owns the place, it’s some girl who’s a friend of his mother’s who has to move in. I hated the four people I lived with, but we were happy.
On Finding the Right Sounds
Curtis: The moment I started writing Pirate Radio, the first thing I did was download about 60 songs from the era, and that list got up to about 300. I always use pop music to cheer me up during very long days of writing. In the case of Pirate Radio, about 50 of the songs were actually written into the script—January Jones's character was called Elenore so we could use The Turtles’ "Elenore," and the guy was always going to say “we’re gonna broadcast all day and all of the night” at the beginning so we could open with The Kinks. Then I filled an iPod with 30 songs for each actor playing a DJ in the film, in order to give them a sense of it.
I wanted music all the way through the film. It sort of becomes self-selecting—you think you want one song for a scene and you play it next to the scene and it doesn’t work. You find your way as if by magic to the songs. My intention when I first made the film was that at the end of the movie we were going to have a sort of compilation all the great rock songs from 1967 until now. But it was very confusing when we looked at it in final cut.
On Writing Characters, Finding Actors, and Why His Films Often Have Ensemble Casts
Curtis: I’m very interested in friendship and group dynamics. In this movie the historical, passionate idea was pirate radio and pop music, but the comic idea was eight megalomaniac DJs in a small house. The American equivalent would be David Letterman and Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien not only working in the same space, but actually living with each other 365 days a year. So that required eight big characters.
The only character I wrote with an actor in mind was Quentin for Bill Nighy. On the whole, I don’t write for specific actors. The Girl in the Café was written with Bill in mind, but Love Actually's Billy Mack was definitely not written for Bill. That is the magic of handing a script to a casting director. And then you get a list from the casting director. One list came in with Nick Frost, who I’ve always loved but kind of just assumed he would never want to be in one of my films—he tends to make films with Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg.
And the American list had Philip Seymour Hoffman on the top and I said, “Well, he’s not going to do it.” And then miraculously he did want to do it. Phil’s character The Count was meant to both funny and the sort of soul of the film. I loved the idea of having a really good actor deliver that speech about “these are the best days of our lives.” So I wanted the best actor to play that part, not necessarily a comedian.
Curtis: I had a few bad experiences on films where we’d be doing dinner table sequences and you’d have five takes of one actor, five takes of another, and I said we can’t have that in a movie with 12 people in room. So we decided we’d put the cameras on the shoulders and just shoot the scenes whole all the time, without close ups.
We also did this sort of Boat Camp where we all gathered together for three days before the shoot. And it led to things going faster and me feeling much more relaxed about improvising. So in fact the actors got a lot more freedom. A lot of the stuff I like most in the film being made up by other people.
There’s a scene where Tom is very depressed and they come and give him tea and biscuits. That was just the actors. I just said, “how would you behave, the camera’s rolling, action.” And in the January Jones scene when Chris O'Dowd comes in and says “You look like a unicorn in a dress,” I didn’t write that druggy line. It was part and parcel of the freedom of the shoot. There are also things in this movie I have not done before, like the whole last half hour, a real-action-packed ending. It’s great to do new things.
On Politics in His Films
Curtis: The Girl in the Café was clearly a political film about the G8 and global poverty. The political point in Pirate Radio in a way is I always feel that governments are solving problems of the generation before. Young men of 28 join politics and by the time they’re 45 they still seem to be dealing with old stuff.
I often get criticized for not having bad people in my movies—everybody’s nice. That was one of the fun things about Pirate Radio and having Kenneth Branagh play the government villain. What was awkward was that the government that banned pirate radio were in fact a Labour government. So I tried to make it neutral, but obviously tipping toward conservative. British pirate radio was actually banned by a guy called Tony Benn who was this complicated figure who claims he banned it because he felt young people should be concentrating on serious social issues rather than frittering away their revolutionary instincts by listening to rock and roll.
On His Films' Unrelenting Optimism
Curtis: I was held back in Blackadder—we weren’t’ allowed to do anything emotional at all, until the very final episode. When we were young we always said we’ll do another Blackadder series when we’re old and hate young people. Because it was originally young people pretending to be old to show what idiots old people were.
Then for a decade I was really interested in love. I’ve got a real problem with that; I had 10 unhappy years where it was the thing that obsessed me, so I wrote films about that. But I think the truth of the matter is that now I spend half my life dealing with rather serious things--I run a charity, and so when I get back to my job, because I’m a happy person, I actually think it’s a great thing to try to make the happiest movie possible. And in a way I am picking a fight with my critics, I was aware of that with Love Actually. I thought it’s bad enough to write romantic comedies, but to write 10 of them all in the same film? And I feel the same way about Pirate Radio. I kept on saying I wanted to do an ecstatic film—there’s 50 songs in it.
I think that people who make serious films find ways to make them more violent, more shocking, more traumatic. So I think as somebody who tries to make funny, joyful films, I might as well go the whole hog in that direction. But it will be interesting to see what I try to do next, because I think I do now have to try to write about fatherhood and settling down and all that.
On Maybe Someday Creating an Actual Film Musical
Curtis: It’s my never-to-be-achieved dream. Life’s taken me down another route and I don’t think I’ll do it now. I think this is my big musical marriage.
Check back tomorrow and this weekend for more redblog coverage of Pirate Radio, including James' review of the film, my Q&A with star Tom Sturridge, and my own alternate-take review of the film.
I wanted to see Love Actually and I will be waiting for rent anyway because I didn't see that movie.
I would love to meet a director in person, the two directors that I really want to meet is Nora Ephron, director\writer for Julie & Julia and Robert Schwentke, director for The Time Traveler's Wife.
When will Love Actually be for rent at the Redbox kiosk? Just wondering because a $1.05 for that movie for rent at the Redbox, great-that's including tax!
Posted by: moviegoer123 | November 12, 2009 at 05:19 PM