Richard Curtis highlights the importance of movies about people falling in love
This clip of Richard Curtis talking about rom-coms will remind you that love, actually, is all around us.
The screenwriter of all your favourite classic romantic comedies — Notting Hill, Love Actually, Bridget Jones' Diary, and Four Weddings and a Funeral — talked about the need for films that reflect the good in the world.
In the viral interview — conducted by Krishnan Guru-Murthy for Channel 4 — Curtis said he was "suspicious" of the "romanticisation of bad things" and said he believes that humans' susceptibility to do good in the world far outweighs the bad.
He also talked about the way people view films which depict people falling in love.
"If you make a film about a soldier who goes AWOL and murders a pregnant nurse — something that's happened probably once in history — it's called searingly realistic analysis of society," says Curtis. "If I make a film like Love Actually, which is about people falling in love — and there are about a million people falling in love in Britain today — it's called a sentimental presentation of an unrealistic world."
Curtis says he doesn't "believe that at all."
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"My experience tells me that everywhere in the world, there are heroes and brave people, working to achieve extraordinary things," says Curtis.
"And, of course there's tremendous greed, tremendous corruption, tremendous violence, but the balance of that does not seem to me to balance up against all the goodness there is in families, and countries, and businesses around the world," he continued.
Hear, hear!
Rachel Thompson is the Features Editor at Mashable. Rachel's second non-fiction book The Love Fix: Reclaiming Intimacy in a Disconnected World is out now, published by Penguin Random House in Jan. 2025. The Love Fix explores why dating feels so hard right now, why we experience difficult emotions in the realm of love, and how we can change our dating culture for the better.
A leading sex and dating writer in the UK, Rachel has written for GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times Style, The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Stylist, ELLE, The i Paper, Refinery29, and many more.
Rachel's first book Rough: How Violence Has Found Its Way Into the Bedroom And What We Can Do About It, a non-fiction investigation into sexual violence was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.