Thirty years after its release, director Mike Newell remembers Four Weddings and a Funeral like a train that arrived at its destination perfectly on time, but not before nearly derailing at almost every station in between. The veteran director was especially mortified by the lack of money, those scrawny three million pounds that the production company had made available to him and that seemed completely insufficient to put together a “choral and very ambitious” romantic comedy, with dozens of characters and five different environments.
Having reached the thirtieth day of filming, Newell had already spent every penny and still had to resolve one of the four weddings and a romantic climax that he imagined to be grandiose, with the camera rising above Hugh Grant and Andy McDowell to give them an overhead shot. soaked in rain just at the moment when they finally open up to each other. That scene, like many others conceived by the director, is not in the film. It had to be replaced by a much cheaper and more conventional succession of shots and reverse shots between McDowell and Grant that today, despite everything, is studied in film schools as a prime example of a “classic” ending.
Success stories can be deceiving. Today we know that Four Weddings and a Funeral It was destined to multiply the rather modest initial investment by 50 and raise an impressive $245 million. It turned Hugh Grant into a big star and the intense, plaintive Andie McDowell into the new queen of the romantic comedy. It put that prodigious performer, Kristin Scott Thomas, into orbit once and for all. She introduced secondary actors of the caliber (and talent) of Simon Callow, Charlotte Coleman and John Hannah. He revitalized Mike Newell’s spastic career. He transformed his screenwriter, Richard Curtis, into one of the industry’s heavyweights. It swept the BAFTAs, was nominated for the Academy Awards, competed on an equal footing with the big releases of a splendid 1994 in terms of cinema, Pulp Fiction to Interview by the vampire going by Ed Wood, Life Sentence, Natural Born Killers, Clerks, The Lion King either Forrest Gump.
Furthermore, it demonstrated that popular British comedy could once again be a more than viable global export product and turned into ephemeral fashion qualities, in principle, as uncommendable as ostentation, snobbery or sarcasm, judiciously sweetened, that is, for a healthy dose of giddiness and social awkwardness. From a corporate point of view, she cemented the immense prestige of the production company Working Title and its continental partner, the Dutch distributor PolyGram, which would soon rub shoulders with the big Hollywood studios.
This is how history is written
Since all this happened (and, considering the virtues of the film, it seems logical that it happened), we tend to consider that it was little less than inevitable. But you only have to read what Newell, Curtis, Grant and the film’s producer, Duncan Kenworthy, have been saying these days, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the device, to see that the main promoters of this sardonic and unprejudiced comedy were not at all sure that they had a winning horse in the stable.
Kenworthy, for example, even considered shortly before the premiere that Richard Curtis’ original script would have deserved a director with a less conventional and more “contemporary” sensibility than Mike Newell, whose most striking credential was having directed Miranda Richardson in An enchanted April. He was also concerned that the cast did not include any major stars, beyond a very famous but not fully appreciated Andie McDowell, and that the role of Charles, the character who made the expression “serial monogamist” fashionable, had fallen into the hands of a then promising, no more, Hugh Grant, after options with much more lustre had been considered, such as Alan Rickman or Jim Broadbent.
Curtis was not entirely convinced by Grant (“I thought he was too handsome, too young, and too devoid of the veneer of exquisite cynicism that I imagined for Charles”) and was disheartened that McDowell, especially in light of the success of Caught in timehad been chosen as a last-minute replacement for the actress whom the scriptwriter considered optimal, Marisa Tomei. The New Yorker accepted the role and planned to move to England in the spring of 1993 to begin rehearsals, but an unexpected health problem of her maternal grandfather forced her to change her plans.
As for Newell, his main concern, as explained to media such as Evening Standard, was to complete the film in the planned six weeks “without any deaths or injuries.” It’s no joke, or at least not entirely: the London filmmaker assures that Hugh Grant and Charlotte Coleman risked their integrity during the filming of a high-risk scene that was not entirely well calibrated.
Specifically, the one in which their characters, Charles and Scarlett, are about to be late for the first of the ceremonies and decide to drive a few meters in reverse to take a detour despite the fact that a truck is advancing towards them at full speed: “For For some reason,” Newell said, “we decided that the scene would be shot as is, without visual tricks of any kind, and that Hugh would be the one to execute the maneuver. “It was very close to ending up stuck in the underside of the truck.” While Grant maneuvered, Newell had a moment of painful lucidity in which he saw himself accompanying the actors to the hospital in an ambulance, “with the shoot canceled and the dismissal letter under his arm.”
Grant himself recalled in A conversation with the SAG-AFTRA Foundation The first private screenings of the film, with a provisional montage that apparently convinced Newell, but not Curtis or Kenworthy, were a failure: “The comments were quite discouraging. We came to think that we had perpetrated one of the most embarrassing romantic comedies in history, that we were going to fail without palliatives and we would be forced to emigrate to Peru.” The New Zealand actor Sam Neill explains in his autobiography that his good friend Grant, in an informal meeting in the spring of 1994, told him that he had just shot a “horrible” film, a true abomination for which he predicted “ferocious criticism” and the unconditional hatred of “almost any viewer with a minimum of criteria.” “I’m afraid I’ll never recover from this,” the troubled performer concluded.
The moment of truth
Grant was wrong. Somehow, the film was rescued against all odds from the editing room and presented with all honours in January 1994, during the Sundance festival. The first reviews were enthusiastic. Sensing its potential, PolyGram and the international distributor, Rank Films, insisted on releasing it first in the United States, even if only in a limited way, like someone putting their foot in the sea to check the temperature of the water.
On March 11, it was released in five theaters in New York and Los Angeles and two weeks later, given the overwhelming success of that first contact, an ambitious marketing campaign was launched that cost more than 11 million dollars. The film ended up landing in its natural environment, the United Kingdom, in mid-May and would not arrive in Spain until the end of August. By then, it was already around 100 million at the box office and had become one of the popular phenomena of the season, even pulverizing comedies as high-profile as Ace Ventura either Priscilla, queen of the desert. Only The maskreleased shortly after, would come close to matching its figures, but it is fair to say that Jim Carrey’s film had cost a more than respectable $23 million.
It is often said that failure is an orphan and that success is attributed to multiple fathers. Paul O’Callaghan, film critic linked to the British Film Instituteconsiders that, in the case of Four Weddings and a FuneralCurtis’s terse script, Grant’s iconic performance, the exceptional gallery of supporting cast and the presence on the soundtrack of an unexpected hit (Love Is All Aroundby the Troggs, in a satin version by the Scottish band Wet Wet Wet) turned out to be key ingredients in the winning recipe.
Curtis, in particular, created a memorable ecosystem of characters and knew how to fill his script with brilliant retorts and biting observations about life, death, love and marriage. Furthermore, he had the good sense to turn to an old accomplice, Rowan Atkinson, for an irresistible scene, that of the trainee priest who officiates his first wedding and is not able to string together more than four meaningful words. Atkinson and Curtis had worked together on the scripts for series such as The black adder (Blackadder) and Mr Bean and the screenwriter considered the comedian the best insurance policy the film could aspire to: even if it turned out to be a disaster, they could always count on Atkinson’s fans going to see it.
For musician and cultural journalist Bob Stanley, the success of a popular comedy will always depend on contextual factors and its ability to tune in with the signs of the times. In the case of Four Weddings and a FuneralStanley highlights that it was released in that summer of 1994 when a young upstart, Tony Blair, assumed the leadership of the Labor party, a band from Manchester called Oasis released their first album, Definitely Maybeand a new aesthetic trend, the britart, burst into galleries and museums with the help of “vulgar and scandalous young talents” such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.
In this context of New Labour, Anglicity friendly, art of festive belligerence and British pop with international projection despite its arrogant insularity, Four Weddings and a Funeral It hit the mark because it was very timely and, in addition, it had substance, it had roots and it made perfect sense. Hence its success, which is also attributable to a tragic phrase, taken from a poem by WH Auden (“he was my North, my South, my East and my West”), and to dialogues as hilarious and accurate as this one:
—Nice to meet you. I’m Charles.
—Don’t be ridiculous, Charles died more than 20 years ago.
—Surely it was another Charles.
“Are you telling me that I don’t know my own brother?”
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