Working Title Films

www.workingtitlefilms.com

ABOUT WORKING TITLE FILMS

• British Film Production Company, London, England.



• Founded in 1982 - Sarah Radclyffe and Tim Bevan



• Co-owners of Working Title - Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner
  
  

WHAT FILMS HAVE BEEN PRODUCED BY THE WORKING TITLE COMPANY?

• Atonement
• 
  
• Hot Fuzz

  

• Smoking Aces


• Bridget Jones's Diary


• Mr Bean's Holiday


• About A Boy


• Love Actually


• Shaun Of The Dead


• Nanny McPhee


• Billy Elliot


• Pride And Prejudice


• Thunderbirds


• Notting Hill
  
  

The Boat That Rocked

Production year: 2009

Country: UK

Certificate: 15

Runtime: 135 mins

Genre: Comedy/ Drama/ Musical/ Period/ Romance

Making of the Film

The film was released in Britain's cinemas on 1st April 2009 and became available on DVD from the 7th September of the same year. It was directed and written by Richard Curtis, and made for Universal Studios, by Working Title Films.

The 'Timor Challenger', the former Dutch hospital ship in Portland Harbour, Dorset, was used for some of the filming for 'The Boat That Rocked'. Portland Bill and a warehouse in Osprey Quay, Isle of Portland, were sets for other scenes of the film.

Some of the props for the film, including studio equipment from the 1960's, was from Radio Caroline.

Background Of The Film

The film takes place in 1966, a time when you could only listen to a few hours a week of pop and rock music on British radio stations. At this time, controversially, some people went out to sea, and broadcasted the popular sounds of the 1960's all day and night, from boats outside the legal boarders of Britain. Similarly, the film is based on a fictional pirate radio from the 60's named 'Radio Rock', which is listened to by millions. With a band of DJ's played by recognizable actors from today, the audience is drawn in. These actors made the film comical and fun, helping it achieve its success as a feel-good movie. The film included all the big songs from the decade, giving another to reason to watch it.

Cast Of The Film Include...

Bill Nighy

Philip Seymour Hoffman

Nick Frost

Rhys Ifans

Chris O'Dowd

Rhys Darby

Tom Sturridge

Tom Wisdom

Katherine Parkinson

Emma Thompson

Tom Brooke

Ralph Brown

Kenneth Branagh

January Jones

Talulah Riley

Age		Gender		Class
4-6	0%	Male	36%	AB	40%
7-11	0%	Female	64%	C1	29%
12-14	0%			C2	16%
15-24	28%			DE	15%
25-34	28%
35-44	16%
45+	28%

 

THE BOAT THAT ROCKED FILM REVIEWS:

Here below is The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw's review of the film, written Friday 3rd April 2009. It gives examples as to why perhaps the film did not meet the requirements to make to it a successful film...

“The new film from Richard Curtis is a fond tribute to the heroes of his childhood: the 1960s radio pirates who exploited a legal loophole to broadcast rockandpoptastic sounds from a leaky boat in the North Sea while the BBC's stuffy monopolists were still cranking out Mantovani and Jess Conrad. The movie is boisterous, sentimental and worryingly deficient in laughs for a worryingly large amount of the time.

And the attitude to women? Well, I guess it could be a pastiche of that era's seedy chauvinism. One shot alludes to the raunchy album cover for Hendrix's Electric Ladyland. But there are nonetheless some softcore-topless depictions of comely young women that seem specifically intended to encourage the home secretary's husband to show up for the first matinee.

Bill Nighy plays Quentin, the elegantly louche proprietor of the good ship Radio Rock: a dandyish mantis of a man who begins the story by welcoming his godson Carl (Tom Sturridge) on board. The poor lad - whose anonymous, caddish father evidently got his mum pregnant and scarpered - has been expelled from school for smoking the laughably weak pre-skunk dope of those times. So Quentin is giving the lad some sort of vague job as a favour to his mother, for whom he appears to have a tendresse. Young Carl is jovially welcomed into this all-male world by the DJs under Quentin's command, who include a raunchy Emperor Rosko-type American, the Count, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman; the libidinous Dr Dave (Nick Frost); supercool Gavin (Rhys Ifans); uptight romanticist Simon (Chris O'Dowd); and the terminally uncool Angus, played by Rhys Darby. There is also the very out-of-it and radically bearded classic blues and proto-prog enthusiast Bob, played by Ralph Brown, and a comedy lesbian cook, played by Katherine Parkinson. The fascistic government forces who want to abolish Radio Rock are the thin-lipped minister, played by Kenneth Branagh, and his oleaginous underling (Jack Davenport), who is called Twatt, a name that is as funny on the page as it is on the screen.

It's a great cast, and the aggregate wattage of their collective screen presence maintains a certain level of watchability. But they are almost never given any honest-to-goodness funny lines, just warm-hearted, decaffeinated dialogue and opportunities to laugh uproariously with and not at each other - not responding to jokes as such, but affirming to themselves and to us what great guys they all are. Their professional record-playing activities are presented in montage and we are regularly shown vignettes of ordinary Brits adoringly gathered round their radios - nurses, schoolgirls and couples in parks.

Women are admitted on to the ship in the form of girlfriends and screaming fans, but they are all just a bunch of dolly-birds, and duplicitous dolly-birds, what's more; minxes who break the hearts of more than one of our dopey male heroes. I couldn't help but wonder that Curtis should have given us such a naff gallery of Britfilm babes, as if he is trying to emulate St Trinian's or Lesbian Vampire Killers. After all, his scripts have featured strong women in the past: Julia Roberts and Gina McKee in Notting Hill, Laura Linney in Love, Actually, Emma Thompson in Love, Actually and The Tall Guy. (Thompson has a cameo here as Carl's tippling mother.) Some of those films were more successful than others, but there was always a really smart woman in there who was intended to get laughs on her own account. Not here, though: they're Nuts mag centrefolds.

Weird things happen in the plot, too. There's the question of who Carl's true father is, a mystery that is perfunctorily raised and anti-climactically resolved. I wonder ... did Curtis flirt with a "Darth Vader" outcome to this plotline? More bafflingly, Branagh's nasty minister humiliates his underling Twatt by saying he's useless "just like his father". What? Twatt's father? At this point, I suspected that there would be a subplot where Twatt would thoughtfully go and visit Twatt Sr in his retirement home: a likable old cove into jazz and skiffle, perhaps, and so Twatt would leave the dark side and support the good guys. But no: Twatt's dad is never mentioned again, perhaps languishing in a deleted scene.

Richard Curtis has always been a class act: a powerhouse talent who turned his style of romcom into a global brand. In the line of professional duty, I am always tripping over films that are, in effect, ripping him off - in which category I am tempted to put Woody Allen's Match Point. Curtis has also created an institution in the form of the admirable Comic Relief, which is occasionally looked down on by pundits for whom charitable giving is not an instinctive priority.

‘The Boat That Rocked’ certainly has one or two funny moments: Rhys Darby gets some laughs as he daringly plays Seekers records back-to-back, and there is an engagingly oddball character called Thick Kevin (Tom Brooke). But please, Mr Curtis, enough with the warm-heartedness. We need some gags.” 

Exhibition

Production Issues

The making and distribution of 'The Boat That Rocked' cost fifty million pounds, but only made thirty million pounds worldwide. There is a lot to think about when releasing a film, the time of which it comes out in the cinema is a main consideration. The film was released on the 1st April, the weekend before Easter. Such things, along with the weather conditions at the time, have a huge effect on the number on the people who visit the cinema, to go and see the film. Also, the film's competition, i.e. other 'big' films released at the same time, effect how well a film does in the cinema too.