Rocking the Boat
“Here’s the simple situation: Already the authorities dislike us. If you do this, they will hate us and- by hook or by crook-they will find a way to close us down.” – Quentin
After the worldwide success of his directorial debut, Love Actually, Richard Curtis began to consider ideas for his next film. As he imagined new stories, Curtis reflected on memories from his childhood of late nights listening to rogue rock-and-roll deejays who broadcast from ships and marine structures anchored just outside U.K. territorial waters in the late 1960s.
These radio stations introduced enormous and enthusiastic audiences to landmark acts such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Kinks, as well as legendary solo artists including Jimmy Hendrix, Dusty Springfield, Janis Joplin and Aretha Franklin. The piracy was much to the chagrin of the government, which did its very best to suppress illegal transmissions coming from the waters to the homes of millions of Brits who loved everything they heard.
Curtis’ passion for music from that era was evident throughout Love Actually-from songs by Joni Mitchell and Darlene Love to tunes written by Paul Anka and Lennon / McCartney. It seemed only fitting his next movie would fully embrace his love of music from the late ’60s. He would set his tale on a pirate radio ship and ensure his favourite songs made up the soundtrack.
“Every person in my generation has the same memory,” recalls Curtis. “You would go to bed at night and put your transistor radio underneath your pillow, switch it on and hear this fantastic music you could not hear elsewhere. And your parents would shout from downstairs,`Go to bed! Turn off the light; go to sleep!’ It was one of the things that made me love pop music most, that slight sense of it being illicit and illegal.”
Duly inspired by Robert Altman’s cult classic M*A*S*H and John Landis’ landmark Animal House, Curtis aimed to capture the essence of those comedies in his new project. M*A*S*H, with its informality and loose structure, and Animal House, with its maniacal and irreverent jokes, shared the male bonding and comedic situations Curtis guessed occurred on the offshore boats. He explains: “I started to write down a few scenes of things that could go wrong on a boat with a lot of guys on it. You immediately start to think: What is the relationship of the guys with girls? Do girls come over once a fortnight to have sex with the guys? What happens if someone wants a girlfriend? How do you get a girlfriend?”
Armed with many questions, sense memories and loads of time at the computer, Curtis crafted The Boat That Rocked as a coming-of-age tale that centers upon Carl, an 18-year-old who has been expelled from school and sent to live with his godfather, Quentin, on a lawless boat in the North Sea. The virgin is looking for answers to life’s questions, and his free-spirited mother feels he’ll find many of them on the vessel. His journey would take him to, as Curtis puts it, “ramshackle boats in the middle of the sea, with disc jockeys with massive egos-living and breathing and doing their shows 24 hours a day.”
Screenplay in hand, Curtis took the project to longtime collaborators, Working Title’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner. “The music, the period, the story and everything about the project was of huge interest to us,” recalls Fellner. “Tim and I, and all of us at Working Title, have been very lucky to have an ongoing relationship with Richard going back about 15 years. It’s always exciting making a film with him. He is a wonderfully charismatic, creative individual.”
Producer Hilary Bevan Jones had previously worked with Curtis on the award-winning television drama The Girl in the Café, starring Bill Nighy and Kelly Macdonald, and was a natural choice to join the team of The Boat That Rocked. “I read the script and fell in love with it immediately,” recalls Bevan Jones. “There were lots of ingredients that made it irresistible. It was funny, touching, and the music was fantastic. Richard’s films have such a huge heart. You can’t but feel warmth when you watch his work.”
With the film greenlit, Working Title would now search for a cast and crew to restore the world of ’60s rock and roll to its glory days. They would look to a stable of longtime company players and a recent Oscar winner to join the production.
Casting the Comedy
“The drug takers and lawbreakers and bottom-bashing fornicators of our once great country. Well, here’s your little task, Twatt. I want Rock off the air in 12 months, and I want you to be my private assassin.” – Minister Dormandy
With dual duties as writer and director, Curtis would find taking The Boat That Rocked from page to screen quite a challenge. While he had the luxury of continuously editing his script to make flush with his actors’ skills, he admits it was as intricate for the director as it was for the writer.
“The casting process is where you discover what you have written and what kind of film you are going to make,” Curtis says. “When casting, I look for a particular texture, an informality and willingness of an actor to stretch something to its comic limits-without it becoming unreal. For instance, in a search for the person to play Carl, we saw 60 people. Tom Sturridge was the only one who had that slightly casual manner that I was looking for.”
The 23-year-old Londoner found his experience filming the comedy similar to his character’s journey aboard Radio Rock. “When Carl arrives on the boat, he is in awe of the deejays,” offers Sturridge. “I arrived on set to work with people like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans and Nick Frost, and I felt the same awe, excitement, fear and pleasure from being in their company as Carl does in the company of their characters.”
When casting The Count, a brash deejay whose enormous knowledge of rock is only dwarfed by his smugness, the production team was looking for an American. “The most famous disc jockey of this era was an American guy called Emperor Rosko,” says Curtis. “So it was an exciting treat that we cast an American for the part. We were more than lucky to get the best actor in the world to play The Count.”
As he read the script, Hoffman was impressed by how committed Curtis was at allowing The Count to embody the era’s spirit of rebellion. He found his character to be “one of those guys whose home is where he can do what he wants, which is to be a DJ. He could be anywhere.” Hoffman saw The Count as a man who allowed millions of Brits to hear the same songs that spoke to him. “He is this conduit of music for people to listen to,” he continues, “and he believes that rock and roll is the medicine.”
“Philip is arguably the greatest actor currently working on the planet,” says co-star Bill Nighy. “He was adorable to work with and made us all feel comfortable. He is one of those actors who flicks a switch and metamorphosises into his character.”
Nighy, who had previously worked with Curtis on Love Actually and The Girl in the Café, was cast as Quentin, the laissez-faire captain of the pirate ship Radio Rock. The actor agreed to take the role before he read the script. He notes, “I admire Richard tremendously, and I adore his writing, so I knew it was going to be OK. I was not mistaken; the script was cracking.” Of his director, he adds, “Richard can do that rare thing, which is making hundreds and thousands of people all laugh at the same time in the dark of a movie theatre.”
Curtis admits that when he wrote the script, he hoped Nighy would be available to play Quentin. “In every film, there are a couple of people who I have in mind, and Bill is one of them,” he says. “On the whole, it’s surprising how separate you can keep the casting from the writing process…and then how much fun it is realising you’ve written the part for someone you already love.”
To play the part of Gavin, the deejay who returns to Radio Rock to reclaim his rightful throne as the top jock of the European airways, the Working Title team cast another favorite player, Rhys Ifans. Ifans had worked with the filmmakers when he played Spike, Hugh Grant’s character’s scene-stealing flatmate, in Notting Hill. “We needed somebody to play Gavin, who would rival whoever was playing The Count,” says Bevan Jones. “Rhys was perfect for the role. His magnetism comes out in spades.”
“It was brave of Richard to cast me in such a completely different role to Spike,” offers Ifans. “He really handed me something very special. Richard’s loving character shines through in this film. He genuinely comes from a place of love-and that’s what the film is about.”
To play the charismatic deejay Dave, the casting team selected comic actor Nick Frost, best known for his comic turns in director Edgar Wright’s buddy-cop thriller Hot Fuzz and rom-zom-com Shaun of the Dead. “When you get a phone call saying Richard Curtis wants to offer you a part in his new film, you would be mad to turn it down,” laughs Frost. “I don’t think there is anyone around today that can do what he does. He makes films that are great yarns about friendship…without a hint of cynicism.”
Rounding out key crew and guests aboard Radio Rock were Katherine Parkinson-also known for appearing in Channel 4’s comedy The IT Crowd-cast as the boat’s lovelorn lesbian cook, Felicity. Tom Brooke and Ike Hamilton, respectively, play the aptly named Thick Kevin and shy-but-soulful sound engineer Harold. American actress January Jones, lauded for her work in AMC’s Mad Men, was tasked to play the love of Simon’s life, Elenore. Pride & Prejudice’s Talulah Riley came on as Quentin’s coquettish niece (and the object of Carl’s affection), Marianne.
Curtis’ story not only introduces audiences to the colourful characters of Radio Rock, but also the government zealots who were out to shut them down. Quentin’s landside counterpart is Sir Alexander Dormandy, the cabinet official whose objective in life is to destroy pirate radio stations and ban them from polluting the airwaves.
For the part of the smug Dormandy, a character AP Emma Freud dubs a “three-dimensional, smiling villain,” the filmmakers turned to celebrated actor Kenneth Branagh. “We were lucky enough to get Kenneth for our Minister,” says producer Bevan Jones. “He is incredible and so funny in the part. I defy anyone to say the word `sewer’ the way he does.”
Over the years, Branagh and Curtis had crossed paths on numerous occasions, but the two had never worked with one another. “I remember Emma and Richard coming to see Much Ado About Nothing and Peter’s Friends and they were both immensely encouraging, so it’s a joy to finally be doing something together,” says Branagh.
Branagh was impressed with both the ensemble comedy and strong narrative he found in Curtis’ script. He continues, “The forces of darkness feature strongly in the story, and there is a lot of subtle, nonintrusive social observation about a crucial moment of change in our society during that period. Richard has a way of looking at it comically and entertainingly through the impact of pirate radio. He has caught the spirit of a really delicious comic anarchy in this picture and, to me, that simply jumped off the page.”
Just as Quentin comes to develop a paternal relationship with Carl, Dormandy has his own mentee. To complete the cast, Jack Davenport, best known for his role as Norrington in another maritime adventure, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, was cast as Dormandy’s well-meaning sidekick, Twatt. Sinead Matthews, last seen in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, was selected as Dormandy’s long-suffering secretary, Miss C.
Cast set, the production began to imagine life on a questionably seaworthy ship in the frigid waters of the placeNorth Sea and to choose the songs that would help the cast and crew rock as they worked.
All Those Waves: Shooting on Water
“My aim is not to offend. It is to entertain and also, perhaps, to educate a little. Because if you shoot a bullet, someone dies. When you drop a bomb, many die. If you hit a woman, love dies. But-and this is my profound and political point- if you say the `f’ word, nothing actually happens.” – The Count
As he transitioned from one role to another, Curtis considered the enormity of the task in front of him. He notes, “When you write, you worry about making the film. It was a fantastic moment when we finished the script to think, `Oh my God. Now if this is the film we’re going to make, we’ve actually got to find a great, big hulking boat, all the actors have to learn how to be disc jockeys…and something quite exciting happens at the end of the film.
“That’s where you get an amusing disconnect between writer and director,” he continues. “The writer writes what he likes, and then the poor director takes receipt of it. But it was an extraordinarily fun film to make because we did have to get a real boat and go out on that boat and film in real weather. We put a village onto it-140 people: makeup, catering, costume, actors and crew-and sailed out from a harbour every day for five weeks. No matter what the weather, we shot whatever we could on this rusty old boat rented from placecountry-regionScotland.”
To prepare the actors for life on Radio Rock, Curtis sent much of the cast to a “boat camp,” which involved living and rehearsing on the boat on which they would be filming. Cast and crew slept in small cabins on the boat and rehearsed throughout the day. In the evening they would eat, drink and play darts or table football. “It really worked as a bonding exercise,” notes Rhys Ifans. “We discovered very early on we had quite a special cast, and we got very close.”
To ready the team for the type of movie they would be making, Curtis screened Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H during rehearsals. That film has stayed in my mind all the way through shooting,” says deejay Bob, aka Ralph Brown. “There’s a feeling of community between the characters in M*A*S*H similar to what we were trying to achieve-an added texture of overheard conversations and moments of interaction. There’s a sense that the camera is watching something happening in front of it, rather than it being staged. That’s very much what Richard wanted to do with this film.”
To assist the actors in their transition into credible disc jockeys, Emma Freud and deejay technical advisor John Revell worked with the cast in a mock radio studio in London. They met with ex-pirate radio deejay Johnny Walker, as well as deejay Chris Evans, in a working studio to study various styles of broadcasting. By the end of their training, the actors had to record an hour-long show that was to be used in the film.
“This was brilliant,” remembers Curtis. “Not only because we ended up filming the hour of their show, but also because it made them understand the relationship between who they were as a public person and who they were in private. If they had not practiced their show, they would not realize how powerful you feel when you are a disc jockey broadcasting entirely on your own to 25 million people for two hours a day.”
“It’s hard learning how to deejay,” adds Freud, who regularly works on the radio.“You have to find a voice that is true and honest, but also interesting and funny and worth listening to. It made it doubly hard for the actors because they weren’t deejaying as themselves, but as their characters in the film. So we taught them the technical side first, queuing up records and working the cart machines. Then during the rehearsals, they found their voice.”
Because of scheduling commitments, Philip Seymour Hoffman started on the production several weeks after the shoot began. This didn’t allow him the luxury of long rehearsals and radio training the other cast enjoyed. “He arrived on set and had one hour in which to learn how to be a deejay,” recalls Freud. “He was so wonderful at the mic that he looked like he had been doing it all his life. We worked out that his character would stand up during a show, and he held the mic in such a gorgeous way when he broadcasted. It set his character apart from the other deejay’s styles.”
Principal photography began on March 3, 2008, and The Boat That Rocked filmed for a total of 14 weeks. Five of those weeks took place in Portland Harbour, Dorset, shooting on a boat called the Timor Challenger.
Of the search to find the Timor Challengers, production designer Mark Tildesley recalls: “It was quite difficult to find a suitable boat to film on. We were looking for a craft that was seaworthy, one that could accommodate a certain number of crew and had the right look for the period. A lot of the boats we liked didn’t have working engines.”
The search ended in Scotland when the filmmakers found the placeTimor, which began life as a deep-sea fishing trawler, then became a hospital boat and was finally adapted to serve as a rescue boat for the oil rigs. To make the placeTimor look as if it was a functioning pirate radio station ship, two huge aerial masts were erected on the deck.
“Having masts did cause a few problems,” admits Tildesley. “We could only film in calm conditions, because if it was really rough, we could not leave the harbour.” Luckily, during the five-week shoot the weather was kind, and only three days were disrupted by bad weather. Two sets were built in a warehouse next door to the dock, and during these three inclement days, filming continued on shore.
“There is a saying in the film industry: `Don’t work with children, animals or on water,’” laughs Bevan Jones. “When there is water around you, it can essentially be a disruptive character. It would take us 45 minutes to get out to sea-and even longer to return to harbour-so our days were really long. The current and the wind would constantly move the boat, and we had to have tugboats keeping the Timor Challenger in position…so that the land did not get in shot.”
The choppy waters weren’t only a distraction to the plans mapped out by Curtis and cinematographer Danny Cohen. Bevan Jones explains that a queasiness factor inserted itself into every step of the production: “We also had to make sure cast and crew had been armed with seasickness pills, as it could be quite rough at times.”
Filming some interiors of the boat took place on sets built at Shepperton and Pinewood Studios outside of London. To re-create the movement of the sea, the sets built were built on a hydraulic gimble that could provide just the rocking motions the filmmakers required. Curtis, DP Cohen and designer Tildesley believed re-creating and shooting in close corridors and little rooms would prove a challenge, but that much comedy could come from big egos trapped in tiny spaces.
As an example, Dave and Carl have a hurried conversation in the WC about Carl’s pathetic love life (before Dave’s girlfriend walks in). The scene was, naturally, shot in the smallest space Tildesley could build. Curtis recalls, “I said to Mark that it’s got to be a real cabin bathroom. It’ll be absolutely tiny; it should be difficult to fit the three people in. So Mark made the tiniest room possible. Sure enough, when we shot the scene, it was difficult to fit the three people in, particularly if one of them’s Nick Frost. Then, we thought, `Where are you going to put the cameraman and the soundman?’ So we took away a little wall, but it was still fantastically crowded.”
Curtis knew the traditional style of shooting wouldn’t work well on a boat with narrow passageways. He and DP Cohen agreed that they should “have two guys with cameras on their shoulders wandering around, picking different positions so that anyone who sees the film will see Radio Rock is intended to be very informal, very chaotic. There is no question of holding the line that people are looking down, no wide shot or close shot. The camera just moves around wherever it can.”
For the cast, it was (despite occasional tight quarters) quite refreshing to leave sound stages and closed sets to film out on the open seas. Curtis ensured rock and roll permeated the production, and sounds of the ’60s were played on the journeys to and from the port. For some members of the cast and crew, there was even a bit of time for fishing during breaks in the day.
The Kinks to The Who: Music of the Film
Longtime Working Title Films and Richard Curtis collaborator, music supervisor Nick Angel worked hand in hand with Curtis to bring some of the best sounds from the 1960s to the big screen in The Boat That Rocked. “Richard has worn his heart on his sleeve for this film, and the music is an integral part of it” says Angel. “Quite simply, it’s music that Richard loves, and my job was to make sure that we got the songs he wanted in the film.”
The process started some two years ago when Curtis first mentioned to Angel that he was writing a film based around the world of pirate radio set in 1966 and 1967. Angel, who had worked closely with the director before on Notting Hill and Love Actually, began to gather songs he felt might be used in creating the film.
He recounts, “I made Richard some CDs featuring tracks I liked and ones I thought were interesting from that period-things that he could listen to while he was writing. Richard loves music, so he obviously had his own ideas. But with some tracks, I wanted to jog his memory.”
At this stage, the two men began to collect a catalogue of some 200 songs that were potential contenders to make it into the film. To help his castmembers brush up on their Chris Farlowe, Troggs, Supremes and Turtles, Curtis gave the burgeoning deejays iPods crammed with his and Angel’s choice selection of tracks from the ’60s.
“We wanted to give the actors a flavor of the music that their characters would have been into,” Angel relates. “We can’t assume that a 23-year-old is going to be that familiar with 1966 and 1967. And even if they were, everybody has gaps in their music knowledge.
As the start of principal photography approached, the song list was whittled down to around 70 that were still in contention. After the footage was shot and the editing process began, Curtis and music editor Steve Price put together the musical jigsaw and married select songs to fit specific scenes and moods. In all, 54 songs feature in the finished film.
“That’s quite a lot,” states the music supervisor. “But then, the story is set on board a pirate radio station, so there is music virtually all of the time. We’ve got a great blend. There are tracks that are very well known and loved, and there are others that are less well known.”
The result is a feast of vintage ’60s music featuring The Rolling Stones (“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Let’s Spend The Night Together”), The Kinks (“All Day and All of the Night”), The Who (“My Generation,” “I Can See For Miles,” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”), Small Faces (“Lazy Sunday Afternoon”), Jimi Hendrix (“The Wind Cries Mary”), Leonard Cohen (“So Long, Marianne”), The Supremes (“The Happening”), Otis Redding (“These Arms of Mine”), The Hollies (“I’m Alive”), Smokey Robinson and The Miracles (“Ooo Baby Baby”), as well as Sandie Shaw (“Girl Don’t Come”) and many more.
The soundtrack album is slated to feature 40 of the songs used in The Boat That Rocked. Triple Brit award-winning singer Duffy has recorded a version of “Stay With Me Baby” for the film. Additionally, Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer scored original music for a key section of the comedy.
“We got almost everything we wanted for the film,” Angel proudly states. “There were one or two tracks that, for various reasons, we couldn’t have, but there were always alternatives. We’re delighted with the result.”
****
Production wrapped, cast finally dry and Curtis and editor Emma Hickox hard at work in the editing bay, the team reflected on working on The Boat That Rocked and why Richard Curtis films seem to inspire a dose of levity.
“Richard has this gift of attracting people who don’t regularly go to the movies,” sums producer Fellner. “What that is, I’m not quite sure, but there seems to be a magical element to his movies that persuades people it would be good to go to the cinema-as they know that they’re going to enjoy the two hours that they spend under his spell.”
Of making a film that combines his love of music, comedy and romance, Curtis concludes: “This was a fantastic era of music, and it’s exciting to make a movie where you’ve got an excuse to put music over every single scene. I hope it’s going to be one of those films where, when you watch it, you immediately feel how lovely it would be to be amongst that bunch of people on that boat. One of the charms of Four Weddings was that you really felt you were amongst that group of friends. I hope this film will be like going for a very pleasant weekend with all the people in the world you most love when they are on really good form.”
Production notes provided by Universal Pictures.
The Boat That Rocked
Starring: Tom Sturridge, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Nick Frost, Kenneth Branagh, Rhys Ifans, January Jones, Jack Davenport
Directed by: Richard Curtis
Screenplay by: Richard Curtis
Release Date: August 28, 2009
MPAA Rating: None.
Studio: Universal Pictures
Box Office Totals
Domestic: —
Foreign: $2,678,163 (100.0%)
Total: $2,678,163 (Worldwide)