The Boat That Rocked

Richard Curtis' The Boat That Rocked opened in the UK in April 2009 as a major Working Title release and underperformed at home. The original UK cut ran 135 minutes; Curtis recut and shortened it for the U.S. market, where it was retitled Pirate Radio and released later in the year at 117 minutes. The two versions differ in pacing and in several supporting-character moments.

It has one of the largest casts Curtis ever assembled: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Nick Frost, Rhys Ifans, Tom Sturridge, Kenneth Branagh, Jack Davenport, Tom Brooke, Chris O'Dowd, Ralph Brown and Emma Thompson, with January Jones in a supporting role. Danny Cohen shot it. The soundtrack, a double album Curtis curated himself, was one of the most commercially successful music compilations attached to a British film of its era: it reached number one in the UK and went platinum in three weeks.

The story draws on Radio Caroline and the wider history of the offshore pirate stations that broadcast to Britain from international waters during the 1960s, until the Marine, &c., Broadcasting (Offences) Act 1967 effectively shut them down. Curtis has said openly in interviews that the dates and ship names in the film are deliberately fictionalised composites. The film was nominated for the BAFTA for Best British Film in 2010, and no other film about the pirate-radio era has reached as wide an audience.