Secrets of the new Bridget

Daily Telegraph - 6 November 2004

How do you follow Bridget Jones's Diary? Producer Jonathan Cavendish - who gallantly piled on 16 pounds in sympathy with Renée Zellwegger - tells the inside story of the making of the second film.

There is always one defining moment in the life of a film when its producers know whether it will be a success or a failure. For Bridget Jones's Diary, it came one wintry evening in November 2000 in a New York cinema, where we were showing a work-in-progress version to an audience recruited by a market research company.

For months, we had been living like moles in dark editing rooms, cutting and shaping footage that had long since stopped seeming funny. What would everyone else think? I sat at the back and watched the audience as the film began.

The atmosphere was ominously muted. The opening jokes about turkey curry and lace doilies raised barely a laugh. My heart sank.

Then we came to the scene in which Bridget sees Mark Darcy for the first time and he turns around to reveal that he is wearing a hideous reindeer jumper. At this point, the audience erupted, shouting and clapping. The man behind me convulsively jerked up his knees as he laughed, catching me agonisingly on the back of the head.

Even through the pain, I realised that we had a hit. The film garnered enthusiastic reviews (even from the most cynical chick-crits) and went on to earn almost $300 million at the box office worldwide. There was even an Oscar nomination for the lead actress, whose selection had originally been met with bewilderment - not least on account of her slenderness and Texan vowels.

As soon as it became plain that the film was a success, Working Title Films - who had originated the first film and asked me to develop and produce it with them - started thinking about making a second.

Three of us began meeting regularly in the Working Title offices in Oxford Street, London: the company's co-chairman Eric Fellner (Britain's only true movie mogul alongside his partner Tim Bevan); his dynamic head of development, Deborah Hayward, and myself. For three months, we tossed around ideas and themes and possible storylines.

We had agreed among ourselves that the film would be made only if everyone, especially the actors, concurred that the story and script were good enough. Renee Zellweger, I knew, felt a strong responsibility to Bridget's literary and film followers. Colin Firth - teen pin-up, housewife's choice, and darling of the WI - would smell an un-Darcyish moment at 100 yards.

And Hugh Grant? He is undoubtedly one of the greatest technical and instinctive comic actors this country has produced - the only one I know who can hone and polish a line for hours and then spontaneously produce a better version for the cameras. But, as you might expect, that makes him a merciless critic of the less-than-perfect line.

These were tough nuts to crack, and not one of them needed the film to finance a new sun lounge.

Before we settled on the scriptwriters, we asked ourselves: what was it about the first film that communicated so effectively with its audience? We knew that a large part of the answer was the unique voice, insight and humour of Helen Fielding, the comic genius of Richard Curtis and the skill of the director Sharon Maguire and the actors. But even great talents and joke-laden scripts do not always produce a memorable movie.

There was much frenzied head-scratching and debate until it began to dawn on us that too much analysis kills comedy stone-dead. We just had to work out which story we wanted to tell.

One option we considered was to explore the inner life of Mark Darcy. What if he kept a diary, too? But, as we bounced the idea back and forth, we realised that Darcy simply wasn't the type to keep one - and if he did, it would probably consist of notes on share prices. In any case, we concluded, even if Darcy did have a mushy interior, the audience simply wouldn't want to know about it.

We moved on to Bridget. In the first film, we had seen her go from typical, slightly overweight girl looking for love to atypical, slightly overweight girl who has two extremely handsome men to choose from. The end of Stage One saw our heroine choosing the solid, respectable, handsome option over the unreliable, sexy candidate. Where could Bridget go from here?

As with the first film, most of the answers lay in Helen Fielding's second Bridget book - but not all. For any number of reasons, literal transpositions of book to screen are rarely successful. And this one was very long. I once asked Helen why Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason was a much fatter tome than the original; she explained that, in the rush to deliver the book, she had a misunderstanding with her computer about spacing and type size.

As Eric, Deborah and I re-read both books, we underlined jokes that might translate on to film and lines that might make effective voice-overs. Closer analysis revealed an interesting underlying theme that had not jumped out on first reading: an element of commitment-phobia within Bridget's character. Could this be the driving force behind Bridget 2?

Maybe not. When we looked at the potential dramatic shape - girl gets boy, girl's inability to commit leads to loss of boy, girl is lonely again - it seemed less than satisfactory for a romantic comedy.

We then started to explore the idea that Bridget's insecurity and lack of confidence might allow her to start doubting Darcy. Perhaps she would begin to feel that she did not fit in with Darcy's world of smart lawyers.

And there would be considerable comic evidence that she might be right, we decided. Darcy, too, would appear unconfident behind his mask of public-school disdain, while being hampered by his natural restraint from asking the questions that would end any uncertainty. Into this pool of mutual misunderstanding would swim Hugh Grant's shark-like Daniel Cleaver... and so the drama would begin.

It was then time to line up the services of a succession of talented writers. Andrew Davies, master of the classic adaptation (he wrote Colin Firth's original, wet-shirt-clinging-to-muscular-torso version of Mr Darcy for the BBC) got stuck into the main structural issues. Adam Brooks, technical virtuoso, added themes and story-lines to Fielding's original, and finessed the jokes.

Helen Fielding - now blissfully settled in Los Angeles with her partner Kevin and a beautiful baby - flew over for a few weeks and went through the script to add her own insights and dialogue. We spent many happy hours together at a club in Notting Hill, pinning pages of scene description on to a large board, and then moving them about. One of her most important contributions was to communicate how women really think, talk and joke behind the facade that allows men to believe that they understand half of what is going on in the female brain.

And Richard Curtis, the most powerful weapon any film can have to deal with an audience's high expectations, added his own explosive comedy set pieces and the kind of sly jokes that make you laugh twice over.

Once the final script started coming together, the meetings - now back at Working Title, with the addition of the director-designate Beeban Kidron - became more frequent. Every couple of hours, a fresh-faced girl would pop her head around the door to ask if we wanted anything - and my waist began to expand from the steady stream of chocolate-encrusted buns and Pret a Manger crayfish-and-rocket sandwiches.

It all felt very familiar: for the first film, I had gone to the London Lipid Clinic with Renee for advice on how to put on weight rapidly and safely. Afterwards, I'd vowed to match her pound for pound - a kind of sympathy weight-gain, if you like. Ice-cream and Guinness quickly piled on 16 pounds, but I lost it all when nerves and trauma kicked in at the start of the shoot.

All too suddenly, the light went from amber to green. Renee started eating in earnest again, and we arranged to revisit some fondly remembered locations.

One of these was the outside of Bridget's flat, at the top of a pub by a railway bridge in Borough Market, London. But when we returned, we were confronted by a street that had rocketed upmarket in the three years we had been away - and by some shop-owners who realised the strength of their position.

After a round of heavy bargaining, one man was still refusing to let us film the outside of his shop - opposite Bridget's flat - unless we paid him 20 times more than the going rate. If you watch extremely carefully, you can see that the shot of that side of the street stops on one side of his shop and then leaps to the shop next door.

It was now time to open a production office at Shepperton Studios. I watched as Beeban and her storyboard artist drew with painstaking care each individual shot of the film, providing a visual guide to the framing, location and action of each scene in script order. From this, we could tell what each scene would look like and what needed to be provided every day (eg: an elephant, a herd of pigs, herbal cigarettes, 400 extras to walk up and down Tower Bridge in man-made rain, etc.)

A huge variety of new locations were found. Sadly, all the original sets - some of which had taken 30-40 people five or six weeks to complete - had been destroyed as soon as we had finished making the first Bridget. At that stage, nobody had remotely imagined we would be making a second film. It is hard to describe how bizarre it was to see the same sets, where I had spent five weeks of my life, slowly rise up again nearly four years later.

In most respects, the interiors of Bridget's flat were exact copies - but there were a few subtle enlargements. Her original bathroom had been so small, for example, that we could only fit in Renee and the cameraman - which made the bathroom scenes very hard to film.

Preparations had to be made in Austria and Thailand for scenes that involved Bridget abroad. And, among other things, that meant careful negotiations with the Thai government to try to obtain permission to go inside one of its renowned penal institutions.

The Thais asked to see the script first - and then, amazingly, agreed. Previously, the only westerners who had been permitted to visit were prisoners or their representatives. By the time we flew out to Thailand, we were all determined to be on our best behaviour.

While filming out there, we had numerous visits from government officials. Their chief concern, it turned out, was to check that when Buddhist monks were in a shot, no woman should be seen walking too close to them.

On one extraordinary day, Hugh and Renee were filming in a Bangkok market with a Thai actress who had a small part in the film. Within minutes, she was mobbed; it emerged that she had once starred in a popular national soap. Hugh and Renee were able to do some shopping, without anyone paying a blind bit of notice.

In Austria, we filmed a very complicated skiing sequence in falling snow, only to have to film the whole thing again in bright sunlight. Inevitably, the actors who were playing characters who were supposed to be good skiers couldn't ski, while Renee - a good enough skier to do most of her own stunts - had to act as if she had never skied before.

It was a happy shoot, largely thanks to Beeban's unflagging energy and Renee's unrelenting good humour. (Renee really is one of those people who is as splendid, clever and decent as she is rumoured to be.)

One of my favourite memories is from the day we were filming Colin Firth and Hugh Grant in Kensington Gardens, surrounded by the usual swarm of paparrazzi with unfeasibly long lenses.

Both actors had to get very wet in the scene, so we had constructed a tent that contained a heated pool where they could rest in warm water between shots, away from the attentions of the press. They joked and laughed together, utterly unselfconscious as they lay, fully-clothed, side by side, in a child's paddling pool.

For me, the best moment came early, on the second day of filming. We had suspended Renee on a harness, high above an airfield, somewhere outside London. Her new curves were amply filling a bright orange jumpsuit, and she was screaming and giggling in turn. We all had the same thought at the same time - and we all threw back our heads and laughed with relief. Bridget was back.