He’s a child, and like as child he has that tension within his personality between the desire to conform and to do what adults expect and the desire to do what the hell you like - somewhere between conforming and non-conforming. I find it very easy to play him, and I love his kind of oddity, his strange sort self-servingness. I do enjoy playing him and I find that I know him very well. It’s a very unusual problem to have to explain to your osteopath. I did it with such enthusiasm in the rehearsal room that I ripped my shoulder and gave myself a nasty frozen shoulder for many, many months and it’s only really now recovered. The only rather amusing injury I got was because at one point I wanted to practise doing a Nazi solute for a particular point so there was an awful lot of (he raises his arm in a swift Nazi salute). Well, it wasn’t too bad, I was able to do everything I wanted to do but I just found it quite a strain sometimes. In that sense it all came as a bit of shock to me. I don’t do that sort of Mick Jagger thing spending three months on an electrical trainer before he saunters off on a Stones tour, but that’s really what I should do and can never be bothered to. Of course, what I really should do is if I’m going to do bicycling extravaganzas - lots of stunts and silliness - is really get myself more fit than I ever can be bothered to do. It was fine, I mean I was able to do everything. I certainly find it more taxing now than I did ten years ago. Well, it’s taxing and, of course, it gets more taxing the older you get. What are the sheer physical demands of pulling off these scenes over what must be numerous takes? He’s been hovering, I would say, on the outskirts but he’s been hands off with occasional helpful advice. But apart from that he hasn’t really written any of it. It was his idea to get Simon McBurney involved at a very early stage and that was a very good idea because this is roughly Simon’s idea. How much involvement has writer Richard Curtis had this time round? I act as a kind of guide for the script rather than a writer of the script and I suppose. That helps to guide all those who are involved with the writing. Quite a lot, I mean I’m not really a writer but I’ve got a fairly clear visual sense when it comes to Mr Bean and the situations in which I think it would be fruitful to put him. Is it a case of creating physical situations for Mr Bean? How much control do you have when formulating the scenarios? Tell me little bit about the construction of the script. There’s a huge geographical variety you can get into the narrative and that pays dividends because it means that the film not only has many different locations, and locals, but a variety of situations, and a great number of jokes. You know, you can be stationary, you can be moving, you can be in a plane, on a train, you can be in a car, you can have bicycle, you can be on foot, you can be in the middle of nowhere, you can be in the middle of a city. Some journeys are always fun because it’s nice to think of yourself on the journey, there is also the possibility of a great variety of situations. ![]() The idea of France appealed for that reason because we thought there was greater excuse within the bounds of reality to present a visual film rather than a verbal one and, secondly, we liked the sense of an ever changing scenery. Then it means he won’t speak and we like the idea of him not speaking. What is it about the holiday and road trip that offers more comedy?įrance was a good idea because we liked the idea of putting him in a world in which he could not speak the language. Simon McBurney got involved and came with the idea of a road trip through France, and Mr Bean’s dream of a beach in the South of France, with the film following his journey. We fancied something just a bit simpler but at the same time a slightly more sophisticated idea. But we finally felt it was a bit too cheap and cheerful. It started off with the title Mr and Mrs Bean, the idea of almost a kind of quasi-romantic comedy. How many concepts did you go through before you got to the holiday? There was always a desire for a sequel that we never satisfied because I couldn’t… I wanted to do something different because by the time we made the movie in 1997 I’d been doing Mr Bean fairly solidly for about eight years and I thought it was about time I did something else. ![]() Well, we certainly never planned a sequel. It’s been a decade since the success of the original Mr Bean movie, why has taken quite so long for you to make a sequel?
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