Love Actually Director Richard Curtis Has Big Regrets

«Love Actually» isn’t the only movie that Richard Curtis re-examined during his chat with his daughter. Aside from the «Bridget Jones» movies, which make a habit of obsessing over the weight of Renee Zellweger’s title character — which Curtis also recognized isn’t a great look — he also took another look at his 1999 rom-com «Notting Hill,» which stars Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts as a bookseller and American movie star who strike up an unlikely romance in the London neighborhood.

As Today.com notes, the neighborhood of Notting Hill is incredibly diverse; not only was it the site of several vital British civil rights movements in the 1950s, but it’s also home to a large number of Caribbean immigrants (who actually started living in the neighborhood long before it saw the gentrification that drew people like Curtis and Grant’s fictional bookseller).

«Because I came from a very un-diverse school and a bunch of university friends, [with] ‘Notting Hill,’ I think that I hung on to the diversity issue, to the feeling that I wouldn’t know how to write those parts,» Curtis explained. «And I think I was just sort of stupid and wrong about that.» Curtis continued, «I feel as though me, my casting director, my producers just didn’t think about it. Just didn’t look outwards enough.»