In the ’60s, long before the Internet, big music labels ruled the airwaves.  Those who craved original rock sometimes listened to underground radio stations or broadcast from boats to avoid legal harassment.  New Zealand director Richard Curtis has just written and directed a great ensemble comedy about a band of rogue DJs that captivated Britain and defined a generation.  Buzzine’s Izumi Hasegawa gets the behind-the-scenes story:

By: Izumi Hasegawa

Richard Curtis (Getty Images)

Izumi Hasegawa: Did you shoot the whole film inside the ship? Because the interior scenes were slightly….

Richard Curtis: Yeah I know. Half the film was shot on the boat, and we sailed out to sea every day for an hour, and then sailed back. But then the big interiors were shot in the studio on giant rockers. It was like a great big metal machine, and we would set the rock level every scene so we could say…not rock music to the level of the music, but it actually meant to the extent to which it was going out. And actually, for the actors, the hardest things were the interior scenes in studio, when the rock level was very high right at the end, when the boat is sinking. We didn’t do that on the boat, and it was very violent and hard to do when the room is at that angle.

IH: Did anyone get seasick?

RC: Only the people coming over on the little boat. Emma Thompson really did most of the vomiting on this film [laughs], but that’s usual for her.

IH: One of the great things about this movie is the music — putting a lot of research into it with yourself and the music director. Are there any tracks in particular that struck up a memory from your youth?

RC: About a third of the music was written into the film. The strange thing is sometimes you get tracks that you’re sure are completely right. When the film is finished, they’re not right. When Gavin comes on board – the Rhys Ifans character — I always knew it was going to be a song called “I’m Going To Make You Love Me” by The Supremes and The Temptations. Every time I got to that bit of the script, I would push my button and listen to it and say, “This is going to be so great.” Then, when I saw the edit of the film, it needed to go up a gear, and you needed something like a Rolling Stones guitar lick to kind of lift you into a new level. But all the songs have some kind of an emotional thing, but often very vague — A Whiter Shade of Pale is a very mysterious record for everybody — it was so unusual when it came out for everybody, and has a kind of atmosphere of something in the youth, and that’s why we put that, for instance, in the sort of sexual moment when everything changes and goes wrong.

IH: With the music, how easy was it to get rights to all of those, because that might have eaten up a large portion of your budget?

RC: It ate up some money. There were one or two things we couldn’t get. We couldn’t get a Doors song we wanted it. I think they’re charging so much, they want to actually bring Jim Morrison back to life. They’re going to invent resuscitation with that money. But it’s quite fun because it is a real marketplace. In other words, if you say to somebody, “Here’s $50,000 for this song,” and they say, “No, we want $70K,” then you say, “I’ll pick another song.” So then they have to choose — do they want $50,000, or do they want nothing? So proper bargaining goes on. That was one of the fun things in that. A lot of the songs that I was most pleased to have in the film were songs I haven’t heard in awhile — “Yesterday Man” by Chris Andrews, or “Friday on my Mind” by the Easybeats, or “Crimson and Clover” by Tommy James & the Shondells. In fact, when we got a “no” on a more famous song, or we really didn’t want to pay that much, the queue was suddenly very short. That was often a pleasure because we thought, “Oh great, I can put in “Bad, Bad Boy” by Paul Jones,” which I’ve always loved but nobody else knows.

IH: Why did you decide to make this movie right now? Did any DJ approach you, like, “Could you make a movie for us?”

RC: No, I think I’m between making films about falling in love and making films about my children, so I thought about making a film about my first love, which has always been pop music, and I’ve always loved it. I like it more weirdly as a writer now, because your music system is now your computer. I’m almost more passionate about music than I’ve ever been because I start everyday when I start writing always depressed. It’s pushing your iTunes playlist which lifts your spirits, and I thought, “Well, I’ll make a happy movie.”

IH: When you look at the state of radio, maybe the Internet is our new pirate radio. Do you still tune in to music on the airwaves?

RC: That’s an interesting question for music, because I do still tune in to music for disc jockeys, but not really to the music that they’re playing because the Internet does such a good job of introducing you to new music. Particularly with Genius, you end up following things around. But I listen to the radio for the fun of the people now, because particularly one morning DJ in the UK — it’s good companionship, and that was always the other side. My mum always said she was married to man called Terry Wogan, not to my dad, because he paid so much more attention to her than my dad did.

IH: Speaking of DJs, all the actors that play DJs in the film got to test out in the booth. Were they naturals at doing this? Did they struggle a little bit?

Richard Curtis on the set

RC: What was interesting is they suddenly became students again. You saw the ones that had done a lot of homework — Chris O’Dowd did a lot of homework, and Rhys Ifans did none, and that’s easy to believe. He just turned up and hoped it would turn out okay. In a funny way, I think Nick Frost might have been the best DJ, ’cause I quite like DJs who take their music a bit seriously, and he did lots of research and found out that The Kinks had played at the Hammersmith Odeon on the 25th of July, 1960, and I quite like that — change of line-up and this person on drums, so I think maybe he had the most natural flair.

IH:  There was a woman that’s naked in the scene, and the director takes a lot of care to make sure she’s comfortable. Is it different when you have a couple of guys?

RC: What an interesting question. They were tiny sets. The one where the two boys are stark naked in the bathroom was one of the weirdest. If I photographed, I wish I had a photograph of that, ’cause you have the sound guy on the little top bunk and the other guy hiding behind the toilet. Oddly enough, I think it could be said that it is a kind of reverse sexism — that you assume the guy is going to be fine with it, whereas actually it’s going to be just as worrying for them as it is for girls to take their clothes off. So I think maybe now, on reflection, I feel bad that I wasn’t emotionally attentive to them.

IH: Something you said before about the Internet and the computer being a musical tool now, where a lot of people get their music, and the element of nostalgia of when radio was important when radio with DJs and their tastes helped determine the listeners’ taste — is that part of why you wanted to tell the story — because now everybody is their own DJ?

RC: They really did it, by the way. They used to make up the charts. They could go in with the bullet at number 16: “I’m bored of playing that one. That’s going to go right down from number 3 to 11 this week.” They would make up the charts.  I think the great thing about pop music is it changes, and kids will do with it as they want. The changes are so profound. I notice now that my daughter and her friends never listen to music together. They wouldn’t dream of listening to a record or a CD together. What they do is watch films a hundred times. She’s seen Mean Girls a hundred times and they just pause it, eat and talk and gossip, so I think we just have to go with the flow with what’s going to happen to pop music. The movie is more about the fact that music is great and that it brings joy to your lives than it is that the way of delivering it was special.