‘Love Truly’ Director Regrets Weight Jokes, Lack of Variety in Previous Movies: “I Was Unobservant”

Wanting again at Love Truly and Bridget Jones’s Diary, Richard Curtis regrets together with detrimental commentary about girls’s our bodies within the movies amid criticism in recent times.

Whereas not too long ago talking at The Instances and Sunday Instances Cheltenham Literature Competition, through Right now, the director-writer recalled “how shocked I used to be like 5 years in the past when [my daughter] Scarlett mentioned to me, ‘You possibly can by no means use the phrase fats once more.’”

Within the 2003 Christmas film, Martine McCutcheon’s character Natalie is teased a handful of instances for her weight, together with being known as “plumpy” and somebody saying she has “large … tree trunk thighs.” At one level, Natalie’s love curiosity, the British Prime minister performed by Hugh Grant, additionally says, “God, you weigh lots,” when she jumps into his arms.

After noting that his daughter was “proper” about not utilizing the phrase “fats” anymore in his tasks, he added, “I feel I used to be behind, you already know, behind the curve, and people jokes aren’t any longer humorous, so I don’t really feel I used to be malicious on the time, however I feel I used to be unobservant and never as, you already know, as intelligent as I ought to have been.”

Curtis additionally addressed criticism of his previous movies, together with 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and 1999’s Notting Hill, for that includes predominantly all-white important casts and for a way individuals of coloration have been handled on the time.

“I feel as a result of I got here from a really un-diverse faculty and a bunch of college mates,” the filmmaker mentioned. “[With] Notting Hill, I feel that I held on to the variety difficulty, to the sensation that I wouldn’t know the best way to write these elements. And I feel I used to be simply kind of silly and flawed about that.” 

He continued, “I really feel as if me, my casting director, my producers simply didn’t give it some thought. Simply didn’t look outwards sufficient.”