NOTTING HILL [Behind-the-Scenes]

When choosing the setting for this new romantic comedy, writer Richard Curtis looked no further than his own doorstep. As a resident of Notting Hill, he thought this vibrant West London suburb an ideal backdrop to his story set against London of the nineties.

"Notting Hill," Curtis says, "is an extraordinary mixture of cultures. It is rich and poor and Portuguese and Jamaican and English, and it seemed like a proper and realistic place where two people from different worlds could actually meet and co-exist. That Anna would be shopping there, that William would live there and that Spike might think it was a groovy place to dwell. Notting Hill is a melting pot and the perfect place to set a film."

Dominating Notting Hill is Portobello Road, one of London’s most famous streets and a unique tourist attraction. Essentially a Victorian Street, Portobello Road is shown on a map of 1841 as Porto Bello Lane. The road grew piecemeal between the big estates of Notting Hill and Paddington in London’s great period of residential expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its shops and markets served the large houses on the estates providing goods and services for the working people who lived in the surrounding terraces.

Like Portobello Road, Notting Hill has a past as fascinating as its present. A growing immigrant population, the race riots of the 1950's, the early market traders, the antique and flea markets, and most of all the annual Notting Hill Carnival which began in 1965 as a street party with a small procession through the streets of Notting Hill, and has now grown into an international event with over two million people attending the three day celebration, give Notting Hill a unique profile.

Although excited by the locale of the film, the producers were presented with the challenge of filming in such a heavily populated area.

"Early on," recalls Kenworthy, "we toyed with the idea of building a huge exterior set. That way we would have more control, because we were worried about having Roberts and Grant on public streets where we could get thousands of onlookers—and obviously the police would have something to say about that. But in the end we decided to take the risk and go for the real thing. You can’t create that sort of reality on a studio back lot. To film in the real streets gives a fantastic tone to the film."

Heading the creative design team with a brief to exaggerate the contrasts of Notting Hill, was three-time Academy Award®-winning production designer Stuart Craig.

Says Craig, "I’ve spent most of my film career in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so to do a contemporary film was very appealing. I have always made it a rule to choose not the design challenge but the quality of the script. This was a particularly good script and a very attractive proposition. I think you are presented with more problems working on this kind of location. So many films I have done take place at stately homes where we deal with one person or one management and it’s comparatively straightforward. In this case we’re dealing with streets with thousands of people, market traders, shop owners and residents which makes it really complex."

The challenge of filming on the streets of Notting Hill was echoed by Michell; "My big anxiety was that Hugh and Julia were going to turn up on the first day of shooting on Portobello Road, and there would be gridlock and we would be surrounded by thousands of people and paparazzi photographers who would prevent us from shooting. Fortunately that didn’t happen. It was very well planned by our location team and our security and our presence on the street was as user-friendly as possible for the people who live and work there. I think they were genuinely excited about having us filming in their neighborhood, so they were terrific in their response."

Key to the location shoot was Sue Quinn, the location manager, who with her team worked alongside the producers, the director and production designer, in finding suitable locations and getting the necessary permissions to film there and generally to make it all happen on the day.

"It was a mammoth task," Quinn admits. "It is unbelievable how many people live in the Notting Hill area, how diverse and different they are and how many different sections of the community you have to contact. The major problem we encountered was the size of our film unit. We couldn’t just go in and shoot and come out. We were everywhere. Filming on the London streets has to be done in such a way that it comes up to health and safety standards. There is no such thing as a road closure. We were very lucky in the fact that we had 100% cooperation from the police and the Council. They looked favorably on what we were trying to do and how it would promote the area."

In order to secure maximum co-operation from local residents and business people in the area, Quinn and her team wrote thousands of letters pledging goodwill payments to favorite charities. This resulted in over 200 different charities receiving donations.

Receiving such full cooperation provided Quinn with the go-ahead to secure permission to film in a diverse number of locations in and around Notting Hill.

"We wanted to capture the real flavor of Notting Hill, which meant filming in the most densely-populated areas, the main area being Portobello Road where William’s bookshop was situated," she says.

In addition to Portobello Road, other Notting Hill locations included Westbourne Park Road, Golborne Road, Landsdowne Road and the Coronet Cinema. With the six week shoot in Notting Hill completed, the unit moved on to other major locations. These included the Ritz Hotel where filming in public areas had to take place at night; the Savoy Hotel, the backdrop to Anna Scott’s press conference; the Nobu Restaurant in the Metropolitan Hotel; and the Zen Garden of London’s fashionable Hempel Hotel, where scenes for the wedding reception were filmed.

Another major location was Kenwood House in North London for the film-within-the-film sequence where William visits Anna on a film location.

The most spectacular movie-movie sequence in Notting Hill was the creation of a West End film premiere. This location presented the production with their biggest headache.

The place to hold a premiere in London is Leicester Square, the heart of the West End. This was where Michell really wanted to film, to capture the spirit of the real thing. Unfortunately when the producers applied for the essential permissions, they were declined. It seems that the previous month there had been a huge premiere attended by Leonardo DiCaprio where thousands of fans had caused enormous problems for the police. So they were not willing to take actual responsibility for us staging a "fake" premiere. However, it was eventually accomplished through a health and safety act.

The production finally got the green light with twenty-four hours’ notice to create a stunning spectacle of excited crowds and hordes of photographers and television crews to capture the arrival of Roberts and Grant’s characters attending a glittering premiere at the Empire Leicester Square.

On completion of the exterior locations, the crew moved on to Shepperton Studios where they filmed interior scenes for William’s House, the travel bookshop and Tony’s Restaurant. Principal photography was completed on July lst, 1998.