Pouring on the Charm

TIME: What was Richard like as a first-time director? If you read his screenplays, you would presume he was the kindest person on Earth.

EMMA: I want you to guess. Just look at that man in his little Marks & Spencer [sweater], and try and work out which part of that body could contain a mote of viciousness.

HUGH: Oddly enough ...

COLIN: Oh good!

HUGH: I agree, there's no nastiness, but there's some steel there in protecting his own material, rather like you on Sense and Sensibility [which Thompson wrote and Grant acted in].

EMMA: I was a Nazi, let's face it.

HUGH: You were determined to get what you wanted, and I think good directors do that. Cameron Crowe was telling me when he was directing Jerry Maguire that there was a line Renee [Zellweger] says, and he had Jim Brooks, who was producing, in the trailer watching a monitor, talking to him on a walkie-talkie between takes saying "It's such an important line — don't compromise!" And they went to Take 450 on this line just because it was so important. You had that steel.

COLIN: [to Curtis] You were also relentless when I was being crap as well. And that's helpful.

RICHARD: It was quite frightening, working with the people here. It was like going to bed with a girl, and the last four people she slept with were Brad Pitt, Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson and Colin Firth. I don't have any experience really. Talking to Liam, I would think, I wonder what Steven Spielberg does in this situation? I remember once saying to an actress at the end of the first take of a scene, "That was so brilliant. I didn't realize the scene was so serious. You brought a real profundity." And then she was a Belsen victim. She pulled in her cheeks and dropped her brow on every other take.

COLIN: There's the expression about actors playing their reviews. They get great reviews, and then the next night they act out the description of themselves. Feedback is very dodgy. And the presence of a monitor? I've watched inexperienced actors go up and watch themselves, and you can see tragic levels of despair cross their faces.

RICHARD: Like when Hugh watched his dancing scene and realized he would never dance in public again.

HUGH: All sorts of things came back to me. Like the night when I was at my very best dancing in a Latin club, and a girl came up to me and whispered, "Are you joking?"

RICHARD: There's more computer-graphic imagery in Hugh's dancing than there is in the whole of Jurassic Park.