Since 1995, Richard Curtis, who wrote the scripts for Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones's Diary, has been providing movie-lovers with one very simple, albeit crucial pleasure: watching Hugh Grant trying to find love while saying "actually" a lot. In Curtis's new one, Love Actually (whose full title is actually Love Actually Is All Around), Grant shares the screen with a juggernaut of talent— Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Colin Firth, Liam Neeson, and Laura Linney, to name a few—and this time, says Curtis, "they're not just 35-year-old people looking for love." A multi-narrative film with casually interweaving stories in the style of Robert Altman, Love Actually examines love in its many forms—family love, childhood crushes, even the affection between an aging rock star and his manager.

The movie marks Curtis's debut as a director. "I thought, I've hit 45. If I don't do it myself now, I'd just have a heart attack next time," he says. Along the way he gained an insight into why he has become the Go-To Guy when it comes to getting romance on-screen. "One of the stories in this movie has a little boy who's in love, and as we were auditioning, I found out that most of the little boys we spoke to couldn't give a damn about girls," Curtis says. "I've known who I was in love with every day since I was five. I can tell you the names of the girls in sequence."