Andie MacDowell, actor

I was in London doing publicity for Groundhog Day when I read the script. It was just brilliant – one of the best I’d ever come across. Richard Curtis is a very quick-witted writer, with a great sense of humour and a beautifully romantic heart. I was always a huge fan of Blackadder – intelligent humour is something I really enjoy doing.

Working with Hugh Grant was easy. He was just so adorable and funny. When I met him, I told the director Mike Newell: “Well, this is going to be easy.” And it was. It was as if the character had been written as an instrument for Hugh’s charm and self-deprecation. The film was the first time people had seen him in such a big production and he did a beautiful job.

We had a small budget but it didn’t look cheap. Things actually felt luxurious and the locations were beautiful. I had my two kids with me so I wasn’t hanging out all the time, but everyone got along really well. We didn’t do a lot of takes because we didn’t have much time: the entire film was shot in just 36 days.

Honestly, I really don’t get why the rain scene is regarded as such a big deal. It’s beautiful and we were freezing filming it. But I imagine even Richard is surprised that that one line – “Is it raining? I hadn’t noticed” – has got so much attention. [It’s regularly voted one of the worst in movie history.] When the film came out there were absolutely no complaints, everybody loved it. The complaints and comments all happened years later.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We simply cast the actors who were best for the roles’ … from left, Kristin Scott Thomas, Hugh Grant, Simon Callow, Andie MacDowell, Charlotte Coleman, John Hannah and James Fleet. Photograph: Title/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

I don’t usually watch dailies because they can mess with your mind, but I do remember watching a scene with Rowan Atkinson that was so charming and funny, I thought: “Oh my God, this is going to be a huge hit.” And of course it was. People love the relationships between the group: everyone would love to have that set of friends. It’s the kind of movie you go to see and leave feeling buoyant. It will always mean such a lot to me.

Mike Newell, director

The script was lying on the desk of my agent’s secretary. I picked it up and was just looking at the front page when the secretary said: “That’s really funny.” I took it away and read it myself – and she was absolutely bang on.

It was a very modest production. We were lucky the script was so watertight. The casting people introduced me to lots of actors I didn’t know. Because it was a British production, you didn’t feel overwhelmed by the need for stars. There was no ducking and weaving around egos: we simply cast the actors who were best for the roles.

The low budget forced us to be innovative. In our tiny schedule, we had to have five big public occasions – four weddings and a funeral – involving hundreds of extras. Simply getting scenes done in any basic fashion was challenging. There was no time to discuss anything and yet the producer, writer and director seemed to need to do an awful lot of discussing, which I began to find frustrating. I kicked a lot of gravestones. They all seem to remember me being ill-tempered. I must say, I don’t remember it myself.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I don’t remember being ill-tempered’ … Mike Newell on set. Photograph: Stephen Morley/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

Richard Curtis is always very generous, saying that we put a degree of realism into the characters that had not necessarily been there on the page. We had to make these apparently gilded youths, three or four years out of Harrow and Oxford, feel acceptable to a general audience, and that required good casting.

Hugh Grant’s character Charles was a commitment-phobic young man: the film came at a time when lots of boys weren’t jumping in. The story is about somebody who won’t look beyond the end of his nose becoming somebody who finds commitment. Hugh was brilliant at doing that. He’s a marvellous actor, tremendously hard-working and respects the word on the page.

Opening in America first was absolutely the right thing to do. It stopped people thinking that this was just a small, worthless English film. We had a public preview in Santa Monica, the sort of thing people dread because the possibilities of humiliation are high. Usually, at the end of those occasions, you sit glumly over drinks, but this time we didn’t. When James Fleet, who played bumbling Tom, did that funny little trip on a staircase in the first 30 seconds, somebody in the audience laughed. It sent a message that it was OK to laugh at the dopey English – and they didn’t stop.