Richard Curtis

Creative Decisions

Richard Curtis is a writer, producer and director of many successful films and TV series specialising mainly in comedy. He has worked on films such as Bridget Jones’ Diary, Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill as well as TV series such as Vicar of Dibley, Mr Bean and Blackadder. Curtis was also a founder of both Comic Relief and Make Poverty History, organising the Live 8 concerts with Bob Geldof.

Watching a DVD with one of the bonus features being an interview with Richard Curtis, he said something that I found quite thought provoking. He was talking about deleted scenes in films that he has worked on and said that “the deleted scenes that I have written are most often my favourite”.

Doing a course in Graphic Design, we are often advised to discard certain ideas that we have but often find it hard to part with those ideas completely thus we try to develop and change them so that they fit the criteria. We think this is a tough process, yet people who write for films have to often completely part with their favoured ideas and forget about them completely in order to make the film work. The amount of time and effort that goes into writing, directing and acting out a scene in a movie often has to be deleted.

The process of deciding what scenes must be cut from films and TV shows must be a tough and arduous task, especially when you have developed a bond with certain scenes, so it just made me think about how tough we have to be in making creative decisions.