Interview: Discussing ‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’ with Director Michael Morris

When making Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth installment in the popular British film adaptations of Helen Fielding’s novels, director Michael Morris explained to Awards Radar on Zoom, that they never referred to it as “Bridget Jones 4,” because he wanted this entry to stand out amongst the previous three that came before: 

“When you come into a franchise, especially the fourth installment of a franchise, lots of people, I assume, think they know what they’re going to get, because there have been three before it. However, my real goal was different. From the working title onwards, we never called it once Bridget Jones 4. It’s never had that working title. It’s never had an email with a subject line about it. This has always been called what the film is called. It’s its own film, and I wanted to make it for you. I wanted to make it for people who would say they love movies, but they don’t know that much about the Bridget Jones films and are surprised by what they get.”

Morris immediately subverts expectations, right from the top of his movie, with a twenty-minute-long opening scene that sees its protagonist, played by Renée Zellweger, still reeling from the loss of her husband, Mark Darcy, and father. We see the character at her most vulnerable, as she finds the will to learn how to live – and love – again. In coming up with that sequence, the director explains that it was a deliberate choice for the movie to have an unconventional opening: 

“Most films will give you the opening credits either in the opening scene or just after. Our opening credits come twenty minutes into the film. That’s very deliberate. It’s almost like an overture of a symphony. The overture is there to give you a sense of all the flavors and the feelings that are about to come. It was really important to me that I pulled the rug a little bit from the audience, because it seemed like it was a knockabout comedy. She’s racing around getting ready, things are burning, the kids are going crazy, and Daniel Cleaver is making funny jokes. It feels like something familiar. 

It’s much more chaotic visually than the previous films. It’s almost all handheld in a way that they haven’t been before. Nonetheless, you think, “Oh, here we are. We’re back in Bridget’s kitchen, and here she goes to this dinner.” You don’t know what it is. Then it turns out it’s the memorial dinner, and Mark Darcy is dead. That hits us, and then we hit with the dad scene. And it’s that scene, which I love dearly, that you’re experiencing a double-whammy. However, he sets up the movie by saying, “Promise me you’ll live. You have to live.” It’s not until then that we can start the David Bowie song, and the credits come in, because now we’re ready. There was a lot of back and forth, to be honest, about that. It makes certain people nervous to withhold the movie’s beginning for that long. But it was the right way to sweep the audience into it.”

Of course, there was much to talk about, including the director’s collaboration with his cinematographer, Suzie Lavelle, on crafting some of the movie’s most staggering visual choices, working with Renée Zellweger and Hugh Grant as they return to reprise their iconic roles, and the film’s “balloon” scene. 

Listen to the full conversation below: 

[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]