Exclusive: Pirate Radio Director Richard Curtis Talks Rebellious Rockers and Illegal Oc...

Having written such films as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones's Diary, Richard Curtis finally took the leap to directing with the charming 2003 Brit hit Love Actually. His followup, Pirate Radio, finally hits US shores this weekend, and it's of particular interest to us given the film's musical interest. Featuring a group of radio DJs serving up rebellious rock and roll on a pirate boat in the '60s, the film is about the changes that come with each generation, the impact music has on our lives, and the sheer power of rock and roll. To find out a little more, we sat down with Curtis to discuss the film, music, and the state of the record industry.

Kid Pretentious: There's a moment near the end of Pirate Radio where lets out a rallying cry during the station's final broadcast… the idea that rock and roll will never really die because the songs are going to keep being written, that no one can necessarily stop it. It seems fairly relevant today, given all this talk about the death of the music industry, that music itself won't die. Was that relevance intentional?

Richard Curtis: Well, I don't know, I mean I'm certainly aware of it all changing, but I'm a great optimist, you know? I think you're right, the music industry is going to reconfigure, but there I was yesterday in somebody's flat, you know they played me some CD they had of 11 bands I'd never heard of. One band called the XX that they tell me are the best band in England which are 19 year olds, a group of catatonic 19 year olds. What I think what is very interesting about rock and roll is that it has now lasted a really, genuinely long time and doesn't show signs that it's dying out, because it's fueled by young people's hope's and dreams… and annoyances.

KP: You've mentioned that you made a playlist of 30 songs for each actor for their DJ sets… maybe the movie didn't have the chance to truly explain the kind of music that each DJ performed, so I was curious if you could elaborate a little bit more on the kind of music each character concentrated on.

RC: I think that's true… there was a lot implicit, and we actually filmed an hour's worth of each DJ doing a show, but we couldn't use that because they were playing lots and lots of songs that we didn't have the rights to. But Philip Seymour Hoffman's character tended to play more American rock and roll, Buffalo Springfield, Tommy James and the Shondells, Sam the Sham and Pharaohs… there was a lot of good American stuff on there, like the McCoys. And then Nick Frost's character was very UK-based, so he had the Small Faces, the Spencer Davis Group, the Troggs, the Kinks. The character that Rhys Darby plays, the sort of comical DJ, he plays a lot of the Seekers and Herman's Hermits. The late night DJ -- the Bob character - was much more playing Cream and Hendrix and all those people. So we had the Incredible String Band, which is actually the album that he saves from underneath the water. And Philip's character also was playing a lot of… one of the great things about the pirate radios is they introduced the UK to black American music, so all the Supremes and the Temptations and all of that stuff, which we hadn't seen that much of because the bands weren't there.

KP: That hadn't even occurred to me…

RC: Right, because what had happened on the radio is they tended to want - because they were old-fashioned and they were thinking about big bands - bands that tended to play live, there's a lot of Beatles live at the BBC because the Supremes were in Detroit… they weren't in London.

KP: Music has always played a substantial role in your films, and now you finally made a film that was all about Solely about music. Do you feel like you've gotten the music out of your system after making Pirate Radio?

RC: Well, it has got pop music out of my system, and the next film I mean to do, which is quite a sort of complicated film about time travel and thinking about the meaning of life… I've started to compile a kind of sympathetic soundtrack. I've got a playlist, which has the name of the film, and then twelve songs that remind me of the mood. But I'm sure I won't make another film that's specifically about pop music, that's quite unlikely.

KP: Something that struck me watching the film last night was that you could see these young kids that were glued to the radio at night because it was the only time that they were going to hear this particular type of song or hear their favorite record. That's interesting to me since I'm so much younger and [Ed Note: God, I'm dating myself badly here] kind of had radio phased out of my life by the time I was 14 or so, so I never really got that experience, so I feel like - at least with my generation - we consume music differently or maybe even take music for granted.

RC: Yeah, things do change, and there probably is something lost there, that relationship with a DJ introducing you to music and that kind of stuff. But then I love the genius bar on iTunes, which guides you around from… you can almost be your own DJ in the comfort of your own home as you find your place from one way to another. I'm finding with a lot of friends that I'll meet somebody and we talk about pop music, and the next day they send me an email with twelve songs and I can own those songs, so I think we just do things in a slightly different way.

KP: Earlier you mentioned that you were making a playlist now for this time travel movie… is that the way you worked when you were writing your previous films?

RC: Yeah, and one of the strange things is they're often mood, not actually the songs. When I wrote Notting Hill I basically only listened to an album by Ron Sexsmith, and there wasn't going to be a Ron Sexsmith song in the movie, in fact, but that was the atmosphere I was going for. Love Actually was written about a song by a group called XTC, a rather odd English band, they wrote a song called "The Loving," and that was the mood of the movie I was aiming for, so I would always play that, but it didn't make its way into the film. The thing with pop music is it's a creative lubricant for me… it makes it easer to get in the right mood.

Pirate Radio opens in theaters across the country. Be sure to see it, and check out a trailer of the film below!