Richard Curtis: ‘After you’ve done weeks of auditions, you’ve got so many observations about characters that we went back and did an “audition draft” of the script. Then towards the end we did quite a lot of “money drafts” (can we lose 50 extras? Or some settings?)... I didn’t know for ages who Charles was going to be marrying. There are some drafts where he’s marrying Kristin Scott Thomas’s character. There are some where he’s marrying someone we’ve never met before… The first time I hand things in to Working Title, it’s always the same excellent note from Tim Bevan: "Can it be a little funnier?"’ Photograph: Katherine Rose for the Observer
Duncan Kenworthy: 'These are Michael Kuhn's [head of Polygram Filmed Entertainment] scribbled notes showing in advance how much they were going to risk spending on TV advertising in the US to build up demand to see Four Weddings. The circled numbers along the top are dates and the next line down shows the number of screens the film would be on each week. It was a huge gamble to spend $12.6m to take the film from five screens to 600 (the usual model in the US is to open films wide on 2000+ screens the first weekend) – but like most things with our little film, the gamble paid off.'
• This caption was amended on 27 April 2014. The photo was originally given the wrong caption. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer
Duncan Kenworthy: 'You don’t have these any more. This is how movies used to be scheduled, before computers. Every scene has a strip: characters, location. And the first AD, the production manager, the line producer work out the most efficient way of ordering them.'
Curtis: 'It’s one of the charms and delights of inexpensive film-making. The cast didn’t have trailers. We were out on location. I can’t remember a film when we spent more time just chatting and talking with the cast, and I think you can sense it, by the time of the final wedding, when they’re sitting on that bench outside the church... You really do get the sense that everybody knows one another' Photograph: Katherine Rose for the Observer
Curtis: 'I find WH Auden quite hard to understand sometimes. I get a bit lost in his poems on lines seven or eight. I just remember how relieved I was when I was studying him at university, to find these lines [‘Stop all the clocks’], and to understand them' Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer
Curtis: ‘I've always been obsessed by pop charts. And I was never going to get into them myself... But the song from Four Weddings [Wet Wet Wet's version of Love Is All Around] was No 1 for 15 weeks. What's peculiar is that the song hardly featured in the movie. It plays in the background of the first wedding. I had put together a list of possible songs for the scene, many of which had been recorded in the last 20 years. Which consequently meant nothing to [director] Mike Newell. I played him Robert Palmer, I played him Prince. Mike thought they were rubbish. Finally I got the Troggs' Love Is All Around from 1965. He said: "Ah now! There's a tune!"' Photograph: Katherine Rose for the Observer
Curtis: ‘There’s a habit of film-makers leaving premieres because they’ve seen it a few times. That annoying thing – they’re introduced and then they walk out. I tend not to do that because, for me, premieres are the last time I see the film. After this, I wouldn’t have seen the whole of Four Weddings for another 10 or 15 years’ Photograph: Katherine Rose for the Observer
Kenworthy: ‘This fax [from the US distributor] lists six reasons why the title doesn’t work.’
Curtis: 'The only thing we really knew about the movie, when we handed it in, was that it had a good title.’
Kenworthy: ‘Instead of saying: “Well, you’re wrong, it works”, Richard said: “You may be right. If you come up with a better title, we’ll go with it.”’
Curtis: ‘Though we did actually yield to this pressure. We looked into the title The Best Man, and nearly called it that, but it turned out to be a Henry Fonda movie from 1964. Thank heavens it wasn’t available’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer
Kenworthy: ‘A week before, I had lunch with Hugh and Liz in LA. She didn’t know what she was going to wear. I think this was a Versace sample they happened to have available...’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer
Kenworthy: ‘This was after a sex scene between Andie and Hugh. I’d jumped in the bed to lighten the mood.’
Curtis: ‘We shot this in a pub in Buckinghamshire. The honeymoon suite. They did extremely well, the pub – it was booked for years’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer
Kenworthy: 'There was a lot of debate about language. All of the "fucks", and so forth. In America they’re much more prudish than we are and it simply had to work in America. Because of TV and because of movies being shown on aeroplanes, you couldn’t swear. There were seven dirty words you couldn’t use. "Fuck", obviously, was one of them. But we discovered that "bugger" was not. That they didn’t actually understand what "bugger" meant. They thought it meant codger' Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer
Kenworthy: ‘He looks like he’s got consumption, at death’s door. Is he in a hospital gown?’
Curtis: ‘No, no, that’s a Byronic shirt...’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer
Curtis: 'The Oscar thing was fun. It was no surprise, in a way, that Hugh didn’t get a nomination. Comedy performances don’t tend to get nominated. And, indeed, on the whole, comedy films are hard done by.'
Kenworthy: 'We won the César award in France [in 1995], against all odds, as the best foreign-language film. The competition included Schindler’s List... Schindler’s List! And Spielberg was in the audience' Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer
Kenworthy: ‘We’d been on release for 40 days in America before we became the No 1 film. That never happens. It was all about word of mouth’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer
Producer Duncan Kenworthy and writer Richard Curtis reminisce over scrapbooks, in Kenworthy’s London home Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer
A publicity shot featuring, left to right, Andie MacDowell, James Fleet, Kristin Scott Thomas, Simon Callow, Charlotte Coleman, John Hannah and Hugh Grant Photograph: The Kobal collection
