BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY AT 20
Two decades on, the team behind the v v good and era-defining adaptation of BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY reopen the book on the film that changed the face of cinema romcoms.
The team behind an icon discuss a romcom that defined an era. V good.
Working Title had six words of advice for director Sharon Maguire when they hired her on Bridget Jones’s Diary: “Try not to screw it up.” Though it may be hard to believe, the 2001 film – which has just turned 20 years old – was described at the time as “a guerrilla indie project”. There was no certainty that it would go on to become a hit, though it was based on a hugely successful novel (and series of columns) by writer Helen Fielding. But this indie project, made for around £18million, raked in more than £280m worldwide. Now, two sequels and two decades on, our introduction to Bridget Jones – with its turkey curry, Christmas jumpers and fights in the street – has attained iconic status. How did it happen?
Maguire knew Fielding well, and was in fact the basis for Sally Phillips’ character Shazza, a feature of both the columns and the film. They were part of a group of friends in a similar position: single out-of-towners working in London among the literary and TV crowd, not conforming to the norm – which, Maguire tells Total Film, “was to be settling down and having babies.” They were running around the capital loving life, but, as self-described feminists, “doing a lot of questioning at the same time.”
ABOUT A GIRL
Patrick Barlow, who played Julian, the “tangerine-tinted buffoon”, says that years before the film was even made he remembers sitting opposite a smiley woman on a train to Manchester. The woman told him she had written something. “It’s a book about this girl who lives on her own,” she told him, “and she’s a bit neurotic and drinks too much.” He remembers her being delightful. She was Helen Fielding.
Working Title had been developing the film since 1997. Before Maguire, directors like Amy Heckerling and Stephen Frears were approached. “I can’t flatter myself into thinking I was first choice because I really wasn’t,” she admits. But, as someone who knew Fielding and her world intimately, she was duly appointed. “It was an incredibly big gamble,” she says.
James Faulkner, who played Bridget’s pervy ‘Uncle Geoffrey’, recalls the screenplay (written by Fielding, Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis) being exceptional. After he landed the role, he read the script seven times. “Each time I read it, it made me laugh,”
he says. “That is rare.” He thought the film would be a hit. “I will always be remembered as this clown,” he promised his wife.
After Toni Colette and Kate Winslet were considered, Renée Zellweger was cast as Bridget. “When Renee’s name came up as an idea,” Maguire says, “I just thought, ‘Hurray. She’s great. She is exactly what we need’ - because she’s very winning, she’s very empathetic.” Thinner and 100% more American than the character is described in the novel, Zellwegger generated a good number of tabloid pages. “I was naïve to it at the time,” she told Total Film when promoting Bridget Jones’s Baby. “I was not aware of that conversation – which is nice, by the way, because you never want to enter into things considering millions of opinions.”
“She was Texan,” says Maguire. “So that was a big problem. It was a gamble.” To get into character, Zellweger did work experience at Picador and honed her English accent with dialogue coach Barbara Berkery. At the table read at Cecil Sharp House in Primrose Hill, with Zellweger eating from a large plate of sandwiches, around 50 people waited to hear how her English accent would hold up. “You could have heard a pin drop when her first line was to be spoken,” says Maguire. Faulkner remembers the moment: “Bugger me, she had a perfect Notting Hill drawl,” he says.
As everybody attests, Zellweger never spoke in an American accent on set until filming ended, when, according to director of photography Stuart Dryburgh, she said, “Oh my God, thank God I don’t have to do this any more.”
SET THE TONE
When it came to furnishing Bridget’s life, Maguire and production designer Gemma Jackson looked all over London for something unusual. Jackson wanted to convey that Bridget had “an innate sense of style” and built, in Shepperton Studios, a flat above a Borough pub, complete with now-iconic red sofa. “I love when I see her sitting on her sofa, singing,” Jackson says. “We knew at the time that it was very special.” Costume designer Rachael Fleming says that while Grant wore tailor-made suits, “the penguin pyjamas Bridget wears were bought in an Oxfam shop in Dalston for a quid.”
The mood on set was tremendous. Jackson says the cast were all delightful, and not “star-fuckers”. Gemma Jones, who played Bridget’s mum Pamela, remembers “a very happy shoot”. She particularly enjoyed Grant’s presence: “Hugh is wildly wicked, naughty, saucy, flirtatious and non-PC, which I love.” At one point, Barlow spotted Jim Carrey, Zellweger’s then-boyfriend, watching the filming in a baseball cap. Carrey came up to him and said, admiringly, “You’re a really horrible person.” Barlow was thrilled: “I said, ‘That’s very nice of you, thank you so much.’”
Nevertheless, it was an exhausting 10 weeks. Maguire says that it was difficult to know what the film was going to be. Some producers felt that it should be more like the gross-out comedy There’s Something About Mary. Maguire resisted the pull in that direction. “There was an awful lot of pressure on us,” she recalls. “It was a huge learning curve.” Zellweger said that her fear never went away. “You go home, you go to bed and ruminate, thinking certainly you’ll be fired when you go to work in the morning.”
As well as memorable songs that played at key moments – Bridget miming to Jamie O’Neal’s ‘All By Myself’, for example – the film had an original score composed by Patrick Doyle. The main theme appears in its fullest form when Bridget walks through the market after discovering a naked woman in Daniel Cleaver’s bathroom. “I wanted a simple tune,” Doyle says, playing it on the piano for Total Film over Zoom. “Your job is to be able to take a theme and bend it and throw it everywhere.” Variations on this theme appear throughout, including when Bridget and Daniel drive off to the country and when Bridget’s parents
reconcile after Pamela’s fling with the tangerine-tinted buffoon has ended.
FIGHTING TALK
At this point in Grant’s career, the paparazzi were hounding him 24/7. “It made it hard for him to get to set,” says Dryburgh. Filming one night in Borough, Maguire remembers the photographers escaping the area to which they had been confined. “I looked up and there was this blinding mass of flash lights,” she says. “There must have been 100 of them. As an outsider in that world, I was shocked.” Grant’s stunt double, Dean Forster, remembers his car being tailed because the paparazzi thought he was Grant. His driver told him to get out of the car and wave at them. “You could just see the disgust on their faces,” he says.
The photographers would have been particularly interested in Daniel and Mark’s climactic fight scene, which sprawled over Bridget’s street in Borough. Fight choreography had been planned, but this was jettisoned when Firth and Grant decided in rehearsal they ought to fight as they would in real life - “spitting, hissing and slapping”.
“What I like to do with action sequences like that is shoot them very quickly,” says Dryburgh. “For a lot of that I took the camera hand-held and I’m right in the middle of it.” Forster remembers that for the moment when Daniel bundles Mark through the window of the planning office that was standing in for a Greek restaurant, he and stunt performer Joss Gower “absolutely flew” through the sugar glass, eight feet onto the kerb. Gower managed to elbow Forster in the face, breaking his nose – a shame, as Forster was getting married three days later.
Maguire remembers the first cut of the film being three-and-a-half-hours long. “We were very aware that this was a film about small things,” she says. “Would it translate onto a big screen? At three-and-a-half-hours, it didn’t.” But they hacked away at it and, in one crucial decision, moved Bridget singing ‘All By Myself’ from the middle of the film to the beginning, making it the film’s title sequence. “Once we got that bit right at the beginning, the rest of the film started working.” The scores from test audiences crept up and up.
BROUGHT TO BOOK
Doyle remembers the premiere clearly. Underlining how much has changed in 20 years, he says that a cigarette company was promoting the film with “mountains of cigarettes”. “I remember thinking, ‘This is not very tasteful,’” he says. Barlow remembers being rushed to a studio before the premiere to dub a line of his – “Careful, you ham-fisted cunt” - so that it was, “Careful, you ham-fisted cow”, because the producers were nervous about using the swear word.
Bridget Jones’s Diary was a triumph with audiences and critics alike. “For years afterwards,” Faulkner says, “I was told stories of groups of women in their thirties who would meet every month for supper at someone’s house and run the movie again.” Zellweger was nominated for an Oscar. “Glory be, they didn’t muck it up,” wrote Roger Ebert.
The film changed lives – Zellweger’s and Maguire’s in particular – and has become an enduring British cultural fixture. “It proved that funny stories about modern women sell,” says Maguire. “For the modern woman battling definitions of feminism and surviving modern life, it gave them representation on the big screen. I think that’s because the movie and the book took an ironic look at the society that demanded all these things of Bridget.”
Maguire had, to say the very least, managed not to screw it up. Her ambition at the outset was to endear Bridget Jones to the world: “I didn’t want anybody not to love her,” she says. She could not have predicted just how well she would succeed.
BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY IS CURRENTLY STREAMING ON NETFLIX AND IS AVAILABLE ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DIGITAL HD.
“IT PROVED THAT FUNNY STORIES ABOUT MODERN WOMEN SELL. IT GAVE THEM REPRESENTATION ON THE BIG SCREEN” SHARON MAGUIRE