For the good or ill of British cinema, Richard Curtis holds the keys to the kingdom. He's the man with the Midas touch, the magic man, the force is strong with this one. Considering he's carved out his reputation as a writer - normally the lowest form of pond-life in the film industry - the 42-year-old Curtis commands unprecedented respect and power.
Two of the top three money-makers in British cinema history bear his marque - Four Weddings And A Funeral and Bean, together accounting for $482 million at the global box-office - both as a scriptwriter and executive producer.
More significantly, his influence as a creative force in British film and television is strong, and getting stronger. Straight from university, Curtis joined the gag-writing team for Not The Nine O'Clock News, specialising in writing now-legendary songs such as I Like Trucking and Nice Video (Shame About The Song). He created Blackadder, which is shortly to be turned into a feature film for display at the Millennium Dome. His first movie, The Tall Guy, transformed Emma Thompson from a minor sketch-show performer into one of Britain's leading actresses. Four Weddings delivered Hugh Grant as another bona-fide movie star, as well as setting off an avalanche of British film-making in the middle of the 1990s. As the decade closes, he is waiting to find out if his new movie, Notting Hill, starring Hugh Grant, can emulate its predecessor.
"I've just been the luckiest person in films," confesses Curtis, ensconced in his studio/office in London's Portobello Road. If nothing else, his ability to turn his private geography into successful, easy-access comedy is unmatched. The antiques store used as the location for Hugh Grant's travel-book shop is literally downstairs; 50 yards away, on Westbourne Park Road, is the former Curtis residence, whose blue front door will shortly find cinematic immortality when Notting Hill is released.
"If you want to write a movie that's realistic and grounded," he explains, "it's much easier if you can imagine the place - for someone who's not a very pictorial writer like me, at least it gives me confidence if I can visualise the setting." He points out of the window at the Portobello Road view: "The film was written up the street, but it's a coincidence that it was filmed here. Our designer, Stuart Craig, said this stretch of coloured houses was the prettiest aspect of the street - that's why we did it here. It wasn't that I insisted we shoot outside the front door."
Notting Hill stands as a love letter to an area of London to which Curtis clearly feels very attached. And, while critics will inevitably point out its sociological shortcomings - anybody with a passing knowledge of Notting Hill might notice that one or two black people live there - Notting Hill: The Movie is further evidence of the manner in which Curtis can absorb and assimilate workaday facets of his own experience into his elegantly-structured romantic comedies.
The Tall Guy, for example, was set in another area where Curtis has lived - the north London district of Camden Town (its original title, says Curtis, was Camden Town Boy); Four Weddings, as Curtis readily acknowledges, was loosely inspired by his own frequent attendance at nuptial ceremonies, and the less-than-conventional nature of his relationship with Emma Freud, with whom he has a child but - like Hugh Grant's character - he has no reported plans to marry.
Indeed, along with Notting Hill, Curtis has constructed a trilogy of movies on a near-identical template that have proved enormously influential on the direction that British film-making has taken in the 1990s. "I didn't realise they were the same until I finished each of them," he reflects.
"But I suppose they were all about the subject of finding true love - and that's something I'm not going to write about again. Because I've now been happily married, as it were, for eight years, and I'm finding it quite hard to remember what it's like looking for a girlfriend.
"Four Weddings was a very lucky construction. What I'd always found frustrating in films is that you often saw a really interesting scene between two lovers. Then it cuts to two weeks later and you don't know what they've been doing. So I tried to construct something where you see pretty well every minute they spent together; and because it was so broken up by the weddings, it was easy for me to use my sketch-writing and sitcom skills."
It's those keyboard skills - honed through Not The Nine O'Clock News, Blackadder and currently The Vicar Of Dibley - that form the bedrock of Curtis's career. "Writing has always been just a slow, private process; Notting Hill was different to my previous scripts in that it took me a lot longer to get it right-ish. Four Wed- dings was originally called Four Weddings And A Honeymoon and, in my imagination, was going to finish off with a very silly sequence - a bit like 10 - it was going to be her honeymoon, and him following her on her honeymoon. My friend, Helen Fielding (author of Bridget Jones' Diary), told me it was time I grew up and got some profundity in my work, so we put in a funeral instead.
"Notting Hill, by contrast, was a completely different film after I'd worked on it for a year. Originally it was about a guy choosing whether to go out with the most famous girl in the world or with the girl who worked in the record store opposite. But, as I wrote it, I realised I didn't have the heart to write two characters I really cared about and then dismiss one of them and say, that person's not worth marrying. I couldn't bear it.
"So I turned the girl in the record store into the character who is Hugh Grant's sister. That would have been an interesting competition, as you can imagine, between Emma Chambers and Julia Roberts. I spent six months perfecting that film, before I scrapped it."
Curtis's basic notion, though, of a love story based around the fantasy of bringing the world's biggest star to a humdrum dinner party, has remained. Moreover, Notting Hill clearly reflects the aftermath of Four Weddings's enormous success - an appreciation of the nature and workings of celebrity.
"The fame thing that Notting Hill is about is, in a way, to do with the long-term observation of my friends in comedy and the extra pressure that's been on them. It's not in a dramatic movie star way, but a lot of the people I knew before they were famous are now famous. It slightly changes the way they think about things."
This, incidentally, is an issue that Curtis is unlikely to face personally; he's kept himself determinedly anonymous all the way along the line. "Julia (Roberts) thought that, generally, the movie made a bit too much of a fuss about fame," he admits. "But that's why she felt comfortable playing it - she didn't feel the movie was autobiographical; for her, fame is less of a burden than the movie portrays. She actually pointed out that while in a couple of scenes I wanted her to be wearing dark glasses, she wouldn't wear them in reality."
Fortunately, Curtis's lynx-eyed observation of the media circus surrounding international movie stars meshes well with his more typical ordinary-joe approach to the way that Hollywood-inspired fantasy infects even the most everyday imaginations. "Again, Notting Hill used to start with a discussion of which movie stars the five people round the table would most like to sleep with. I was trying to show the sort of massive, intimate disrespect that we have for famous people."
What has remained in the movie is a scene where Roberts, playing movie star Anna Scott, gets to answer back to a restaurant table-full of business types who are loudly discussing what they'd like to do to her. As an act of cinematic wish-fulfilment in reverse, the delighted expression on Roberts's face tells its own story.
Three-quarters of Curtis's feature-film output, then, has demonstrated his ability at nudging those tender spots that make the national - even global - imagination go all dewy-eyed and sensitive. The other quarter, i.e. the Rowan Atkinson vehicle Bean, is a different story.
Although a hugely successful movie, it's one that's slipped by the kind of cinematic myth-making that's already put films like Shakespeare In Love, The English Patient and Trainspotting into the British cinema hall of fame. Curtis is circumspect: "All I'll say is that I was very glad to do Bean because I love silly films, and I could feel my capacity for writing that sort of film drifting away with middle age."
The hostile critical reaction to Bean shows that Curtis is far from inured to critical scorn - he permits himself a moan on the subject of the Dawn French sitcom, The Vicar Of Dibley, which he originally launched into as a vehicle for his views on the ordination of women clerics. "The thing is, over the years, you get a lot of bad reviews. Not The Nine O'Clock News got panned for two seasons before the tide turned - and a lot of people hated Blackadder. Even now reviewers regularly refer to The Vicar Of Dibley as `unfunny'. I don't really understand why, because I think it's perfectly good. If you don't get praise for something, that's about par for the course."
What emerges, though, is that underneath the urbanity, Curtis is a ferociously focused operator, aware of his limitations ("I'm not a pictorial writer") and perfectly attuned to the collaborative demands of film and TV production.
"I'm a very careful collaborator," he explains. "I think that, if you work with a person once and it works, it's slightly crazy not to work with them again. I felt that very strongly with Hugh. But there was a tiny question mark in our minds about casting him in the movie - you're claiming your movie is about a very famous girl and a total nonentity, so it's a bit tricky if she walks in and the total nonentity is Hugh Grant. There was an argument that we should try and find someone unknown, but in the end Hugh had done Four Weddings so perfectly, and people are willing to suspend their disbelief with him, we were in favour of repeating a really, really good working relationship.
"I think Hugh is particularly lovely in this film, because he's a bit bashed about; he's clearly older and sadder than he was last time." Curtis, by contrast, may be older, but he's proved himself considerably wiser. He is generous in his appraisal of Four Weddings's astonishing success - "You can't underestimate the effect of Hugh in that movie - a really new movie star is a gorgeous thing when it happens."
Notting Hill opens next Friday nation-wide