Production Information

For more than 20 years—throughout hours of television shorts, multiple comedy specials, an animated series and a film that grossed more than $260 million at the domestic and international box office—one misunderstood, hapless man has delighted children and adults worldwide with his comical pantomime and penchant for mischief: Mr. Bean.

Now, ROWAN ATKINSON (Bean, Love Actually, Johnny English) returns to his iconic role as Mr. Bean, the nearly wordless misfit who is followed by a trail of pratfalls and hijinks, in Mr. Bean’s Holiday. In his latest misadventure—the worldwide comedy hit that has already opened at number one in 38 countries and earned nearly $200 million to date—Bean goes on vacation to the French Riviera and becomes ensnared in a European adventure of cinematic proportions.

After winning a vacation and camcorder in a church raffle, Bean packs up his suitcase and heads to Cannes for some sun on the beach. Ah…vacation. But his trip doesn’t go as smoothly as he had hoped. The bumbling Bean falls face first into a series of mishaps and fortunate coincidences, far-fetched enough to ensure his own makeshift entry into the Cannes Film Festival.

Wrongly thought to be a kidnapper, he has some serious explaining to do after wreaking havoc across the French countryside and arriving at his vacation spot with a Russian filmmaker’s precocious son, Stepan (newcomer MAX BALDRY), and aspiring actress Sabine (EMMA DE CAUNES of Ma mère and Short Order) in tow.

As one misunderstanding after another prompts the trio to arrive at the Cannes Film Festival amidst a maelstrom, Bean is confronted by pompous director Carson Clay (WILLEM DAFOE of Spider-Man trilogy, Inside Man), who is prepared to berate the oaf for ruining his film. Now, in a curious twist, Bean will either be arrested by the gendarmes or finally have the vacation of his dreams. It’s all caught on camera as Atkinson again showcases his awkward athleticism in a comedy of errors: Mr. Bean’s Holiday.

STEVE BENDELACK (The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse, television’s Little Britain) directs Mr. Bean’s Holiday from a story by SIMON MCBURNEY and a screenplay by HAMISH MCCOLL and ROBIN DRISCOLL.

Joining director Bendelack behind the camera is the creative team including director of photography BAZ IRVINE (Six Shooter, The Lives of the Saints), production designer MICHAEL CARLIN (The Last King of Scotland, What a Girl Wants) and editor TONY CRANSTOUN (television’s Bradford Riots and The League of Gentlemen). They are joined on the comedy by costume designer PIERRE-YVES GAYRAUD (The Bourne Identity, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) and composer HOWARD GOODALL (Bean, television’s Blackadder Back & Forth).

Producers of Mr. Bean’s Holiday are PETER BENNETT-JONES (Bean, The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse), TIM BEVAN (Hot Fuzz, Nanny McPhee) and ERIC FELLNER (Love Actually, Nanny McPhee). The original character is created by Rowan Atkinson and RICHARD CURTIS (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually). Executive producers of the film are Curtis and McBurney.

With production wrapped, the cast and crew reflect on the latest misadventures of the internationally beloved character. For the co-creator and title character, there is simply one desire for the man he has known for more than two decades. Atkinson concludes, “I hope that the film is as true—if not more true to the character and what people have enjoyed about him—than anything we’ve done before. I hope it’s going to be a more pure representation of Bean than we’ve seen, and that the audience will be with Bean and rooting for him and sympathizing with him more than you ever have before.”

Universal Pictures Presents—In Association With StudioCanal—A Working Title Production—In Association With Tiger Aspect Pictures: Rowan Atkinson in Mr. Bean’s Holiday, starring Emma de Caunes and Willem Dafoe. Music for the film is by Howard Goodall; the costume designer is Pierre-Yves Gayraud. The comedy’s editor is Tony Cranstoun; the production designer is Michael Carlin. The film’s director of photography is Baz Irvine; co-producers of Mr. Bean’s Holiday are Caroline Hewitt, Debra Hayward and Liza Chasin. Executive producers of the film are Richard Curtis and Simon McBurney. It is produced by Peter Bennett-Jones, Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner and the original character is created by Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis. The film is from a story by Simon McBurney and a screenplay by Hamish McColl and Robin Driscoll. Mr. Bean’s Holiday is directed by Steve Bendelack.
www.beansholiday.com
©2007 Universal Studios.

SYNOPSIS

It is raining and dreary in London. The waterlogged Mr. Bean has fortunately won first prize in a church raffle: a train trip to the French Riviera and new video camera. After taking the Eurostar to Paris, Bean arrives at the Gare du Nord station and casually films Sabine (Emma de Caunes), who has stopped to give a street performer money.

Comic confusion at the station’s taxi stand results in Bean’s arriving at the wrong next stop. He sets off for the correct station—walking through traffic on the Champs Élysées—only to find himself the angry object of the paparazzi when he obscures their intended target, the arrogant film director Carson Clay (Willem Dafoe).

Finally arriving at Gare Du Lyon, Bean misses his train to Cannes. He passes time at a restaurant, where he is served a platter of langoustine (which he eats complete with shell) and oysters so repellant that he tips them into a woman’s handbag.

On the platform, he asks a Russian named Emil (KAREL RODEN) to film him on holiday. Emil obliges, but is left standing on the platform as the train pulls away with his son, Stepan (Max Baldry), stuck on the shuttle with Bean.

At the next station, Stepan leaves the train with Bean’s camera. Just as Bean follows him, however, the train departs with Bean’s bag onboard. Emil passes on a fast train, holding a sign with a partially obscured number and his destination of “Cannes.” Bean and Stepan board the next train south to catch him, but (of course) Bean realizes he has lost his wallet. The ticketless two are quickly ejected from the train.

The following morning, well-meaning Bean and mischievous Stepan turn to street performance at a local market to earn money. The audience loves their two-man show, and throws coins at the urchins. Things are finally looking up as Bean spots a bus to Cannes. Naturally, Bean’s ticket flutters away while Stepan is driven away.

That night, Bean sleeps in a hay cart and wakes to find himself in a quaint French village. An explosion and soldiers in the square cause Bean to spring into action. Just as he wrestles a Nazi and “rescues” a café girl, Carson Clay—shooting a commercial— angrily shouts, “Cut!” Meanwhile, the clueless Bean unwittingly sets the director up to unleash an explosive that blows up the set. It’s time to get out of there, “tout de suite.”

Sabine, on her way to Cannes, assumes the hitchhiking Bean is a filmmaker and explains she is going to attend the premiere of her new film. At a motorway café, they meet up with Stepan. The three of them continue south in Sabine’s Mini Cooper, with Sabine assuming Stepan is Bean’s son and Stepan believing Sabine is Bean’s girlfriend.

At a fuel station, Bean’s photograph is broadcast on television as the suspected abductor of Stepan. As Sabine’s picture also flashes on the screen, she makes an escape plan. On being stopped at a police roadblock, Bean and Stepan disguise themselves, and Sabine explains she is late for her premiere and the police offer an escort.

They arrive at the Palais des Festivals in time for the premiere of Sabine’s film, and Bean and Stepan sneak into the auditorium—where the film is playing to a fidgety, bored audience. Onscreen there is a flash of Sabine, but her part has been largely cut. The ingenious and gallant Bean slips into the projection box, plugs in his camera and projects his holiday video on screen. As guards enter the booth, Bean escapes through the window. While the guards race toward Bean, Stepan appears and is happily reunited with Emil.

The thrilled audience applauds, believing “Carson Clay’s” new film a masterpiece. Amidst all the chaos (and Clay’s undeserved bows), Bean glances out of a doorway and spies the beach. At last, his whimsical journey is complete.

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

Travel Plans with Bean: The Comedy is Greenlit

Thanks to Rowan Atkinson’s unique ability to marry endearing physical comedy and slapstick with a charming personality, Mr. Bean, who began his life on British television screens in 1990, has become a worldwide star. The global success of the series propelled co-writers and Bean creators Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis to create the feature film Bean, which found the misfit embroiled in the Los Angeles art world.

Following the international success of the first film, it was only a matter of time before the comedy’s creators gave the character a second big-screen outing. This time, however, the filmmakers were keen not to retread the same narrative and stylistic paths. “We always felt that there was another movie to be made with Mr. Bean, but it would be a very different film from the first one,” explains award-winning actor and writer Atkinson.

Despite a decade having passed, it wasn’t difficult for Atkinson to again play the character onscreen. “I haven’t visited him much since the last film—the last time I played the character was on a British children’s TV program, about two years ago. But I didn’t find it difficult to understand him and know how he would behave in any given situation. I no longer have to work on him or think about how he’s going to react. I instinctively know Bean—his childish instincts are very strong to me.”

Atkinson, a British comic staple from such films as Love Actually and Four Weddings and a Funeral and television programs such as Blackadder, was intrigued by the chance to explore a different style of filmmaking in Mr. Bean’s Holiday. “I always believed that there was a European-style movie to be made with Mr. Bean,” he reflects. “The first movie had the story, format and tone of an American family comedy.”

That interest in a different style would carry across the plot. Atkinson continues, “I was always interested in Bean being the element driving the story, rather than him being a reactive element—a sort of satellite figure who was in the background while the story was being driven by other characters.”

Tim Bevan, co-chairman of Working Title Films and one of the comedy’s producers, explains how the project came together: “Once we had finished Johnny English, I suggested to Rowan that we develop two films—one of which would be a sequel to Bean. Both he and Richard Curtis felt that to make another movie about the same character, you would want to aspire to a different level of creative ambition and make it as pure and as cinematic as possible.”

To complement the simplicity of Bean’s style, the producers would turn to an unexpected source. Bevan offers, “Someone had the genius idea of involving Simon McBurney, who co-founded Théâtre de Complicité. He has a lot of experience with movement and mime. Essentially, both he and Rowan strive to do the same thing— engage the audience through more or less silent comedy.”

McBurney was intrigued by the prospect of collaborating with Atkinson. He recalls, “I first met Rowan and saw him work in the early 1980s when I was very young. I was mesmerized by his stage work, because he was one of those performers who could go onstage and nothing would happen—and you would be completely entranced, roaring with laughter.”

The writer/actor had long wanted to homage silent film comedy. “I absolutely love silent comedy, in all its myriad forms,” says McBurney. “One of the first things I did with Rowan was sit down and watch films by Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Carl Valentine. We also watched bits of Jacques Tati, and I thought it would be thrilling to make a film in which Bean hardly says a thing. He is the most wonderful character when he’s doing something, rather than saying something.”

As a student of this genre, McBurney worked with Atkinson to focus the story on a singular desire that drives the main character, with little psychological buildup—Bean’s simple desire to go on holiday in France. McBurney reflects, “The story is really motivated by action, very much in the vein of Buster Keaton—he has one idea, he falls in love and then he pursues the girl—or Chaplin in The Gold Rush, where he sets off in order to make money.”

“Simon and Rowan decided that the film should be a journey, and that we should keep it as simple and as pure as possible,” Bevan concurs. “Our hero would be going on holiday to the seaside, and the film would be entirely about his journey of getting to the beach and all the cock-ups and problems that happen along the way.”

Atkinson very much wanted to focus this chapter in Mr. Bean’s life on action, not dialogue. He notes, “By putting Mr. Bean in an environment where he doesn’t speak the language, he would have to deal with every situation in a silent way, and we would be able to maintain a bit of purity to the way Mr. Bean works.”

Taking the helm for this Bean adventure would be Steve Bendelack, director of British television hits Little Britain and French and Saunders, and the critically acclaimed feature film The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse. He was, according to producer Bevan, the obvious choice: “We wanted to find somebody who had a sense of comedy and worked with comedic actors, but also had a real sense of cinema. Steve was the right person.”

The challenge for Bendelack was to flesh out the new environment that Atkinson, McBurney and screenwriters Hamish McColl and Robin Driscoll had created for Bean. Notes the filmmaker: “It was interesting to combine the tried and tested things that Rowan does as Bean with some things that he hasn’t done before. We see him in a much wider context in this film—put in a real world with real characters—and we play on that juxtaposition.”

The subtlety of Atkinson’s performance had always been a source of fascination for the director. Of working with Atkinson to develop the material, he notes: “It’s a collaboration, because he knows the character so well. There is a part of his personality that is genuinely extrapolated into this character.”

Title character naturally cast, Atkinson, Bendelack and the producers would next search for an Eastern European scamp, a French beauty and an American actor who could muster every amount of arrogance needed for the role of a hack filmmaker.

Casting Disaster

The team decided that Mr. Bean would come across two main characters on his vacation travels, a young man and a woman. For the female lead, there was not interest in making Sabine a romantic interest, but rather an unknowing player who is swept up in Bean’s adventure. The boy, Stepan, becomes Bean’s responsibility as Bean struggles to reunite him with his family. Unfortunately for both, Stepan can’t speak English, and Bean doesn’t know Russian.

For the role of Sabine, the production wanted a performer who could play a struggling actor looking for her big break after years of trying, not an actress who was just starting her career. They wanted someone who would be believable as a frustrated artist. Thirty-year-old Emma de Caunes, one of France’s rising stars, who most recently starred in The Science of Sleep, understood the peaks and troughs of an acting career such as Sabine’s.

For de Caunes, the decision to accept the role was very simple, as she was already a very familiar fan of Bean’s, thanks to being introduced by her father—television presenter Antoine de Caunes (who also cameos in the film)—to Bean as a teenager. “When I was 15 or 16, my dad used to bring me the tapes of Bean, and I was really mad for it,” she notes. “I love the fact that he’s really quite innocent, like a child we can all understand.”

“We’ve been extremely lucky with the casting of the roles,” remarks Atkinson. “Emma de Caunes is everything that we would wish. She manages to convey tenderness, but has a volatility, which is our view of the French actress.”

For the role of Russian filmmaker Emil’s impish son, Stepan, Max Baldry was cast. Oddly enough, he was the first boy to come through the casting door. Once the filmmakers discovered Max spoke Russian and saw his boundless energy, they felt the fit was perfect. Who better to parry against Bean than someone he completely cannot understand?

For the character of Carson Clay, the filmmakers approached noted American actor Willem Dafoe. For the role, they designed a caricature of a pretentious art-house film director who has to pay the bills by making commercials, and then creates the most boring art-house film possible. Atkinson was pleased that Dafoe “kindly agreed to play an extremely egotistical, self-centered person.”

Of his interest in the role, Dafoe says, “I was a great fan of Rowan after seeing him in the Blackadder TV show, and I was really interested in the part. I play an art- house prima donna, a filmmaker who stars, writes and produces his own films, but we first see him making a yogurt commercial for money. In a way, he’s straight man to Mr. Bean, who is a constant thorn in his side.”

Dafoe adds, “It’s different than what I’ve done before, that usually whets my appetite. It felt like an adventure because I had to learn a new approach, which is always liberating. So much of it was physical comedy.”

Completing the primary cast of the international production are Czech-born actor (and often villain) Karel Roden as Stepan’s filmmaker father, Emil, and legendary French character actor Jean Rochefort as Bean’s snobbish maître d’.

Cast agreed upon, Bean and his cohorts would now take taxis, trains, buses and cars across Europe in search of relaxation, unanticipated fame and uproarious disaster.

Filming Across France: Monsieur Bean on the Road

Mr. Bean’s Holiday is set (and lensed) almost entirely in France. Filming took place over 12 weeks during summer 2006—in London, Paris, the Luberon in Provence, and Cannes, where the beaches and Le Palais (best known for hosting the Cannes Film Festival) served as locations. The filmmakers were careful to portray a France that would subvert Bean’s—and perhaps the audience’s—preconceptions of the country.

Director Bendelack and his team wanted Bean initially to have a clichéd idea of France—epitomized by the yogurt commercial that he disrupts: a France with peaceful, old villages set upon perfect landscapes, filled with men wearing berets outside the café, drinking Pernod (a liqueur flavored with anise). For example, when Bean awakes in a hay cart, it was vital for Bendelack to have him “see this beatific Provençal scene that is straight out of somewhere, not unlike the film Manon des sources.”

The real France, knows Simon McBurney, is something quite different. “I lived in France for a long time and I felt it should be portrayed as a very modern country— extremely urbanized and with an incredible sense of design. Very often in the TV shows, Bean was put into an unfamiliar situation. Now he’s in an unfamiliar country—the whole country becomes the situation and anything is potentially disastrous.”

Atkinson concurs: “France is a very big country with a relatively small population for its land mass, and there are many spectacular and beautiful vistas, which we have attempted to capture. We tried to capitalize on some of the extraordinary architecture and landscapes, because there is something inherently funny about this small figure of Mr. Bean set in this vast context.”

Again, occurrences common in silent film play a crucial role in the plot of the film. “I think it was Charlie Chaplin who said, ‘Life is a tragedy in close-up but a comedy in a long shot.’” Atkinson reflects. “There is that element that the more you draw back, the more inherently amusing the figure in the landscape becomes.”

The apex of Bean’s holiday journey is Cannes. Giles Jacob, the festival president, turned out to be quite a fan of Mr. Bean and liked the idea of the comic rogue up to his old tricks at the film festival. For the first time ever, a crew was allowed to film on the red carpet during Cannes. To shoot one key scene, the production even jumped behind an actual film entourage as it went up the red carpet. For one of the more complex scenes, it took over the equivalent of three public beaches on the Croisette.

For de Caunes, it was a surreal experience to be filmed walking the red carpet as an actual movie was receiving its premiere. She remembers, “It was great to have some of the craziness of Cannes during the festival in this film. Nobody knew that we were shooting a movie. People know me a little in France, so they were shouting, ‘Emma!’ And I was thinking, ‘No, I’m Sabine!’”

Setting the film in Cannes was just one way that the filmmakers wanted Mr. Bean’s Holiday to pay homage to the art of filmmaking. Throughout the comedy, part of the narrative is told through the simple or surreal images that Bean captures on his new camera.

“A very important element of the story is that Mr. Bean has a video camera with him at all times,” offers Atkinson. “Effectively, two movies are playing out throughout our film—there is the film that we are making, and then there’s the movie that Mr. Bean has made of his experiences on the road. What’s interesting is the way those two merge, overlap and intertwine.”