Welcome to Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is the 1994 British Romantic comedy, Four Weddings and a Funeral.

It was directed by Mike Newell from a screenplay by Richard Curtis.

Four Weddings and a Funeral boasts an ensemble cast, headed by Hugh Grant and Andy McDowell, with Kristen Scott Thomas, Simon Cowell, James Fleet, John Hannah, Charlotte Coleman and David Bauer, as well as Coran Redgrave, Anna Chancellor and Rowan Atkinson.

Charles, a young man in his thirties with a close circle of friends, finds himself spending most of his Saturdays attending weddings, sometimes as a member of the wedding party, and always arriving late.

One Saturday, he again ignores the alarm and he and his flatmate Scarlet must rush to dress, find transportation, and drive to a country church in Somerset where Charles is to serve as best man at the wedding of Angus and Laura.

Charles's friends Fiona, her brother Tom, Gareth and his partner Matthew, and Charles' deaf brother David are all waiting for him, and together they manage to get through the ceremony and the lavish reception that follows.

During the festivities, Charles is mesmerized by an attractive young woman, Carrie, an American working in London.

Fiona breezily assures Charles that Carrie is out of his league, but the two of them have a brief conversation during which she flirts with him.

Charles passes up the opportunity to join his friends for an after party at Tom's country home, instead returning to the pub where both he and Carrie have rooms for the night.

He sees her in the parlor and goes for drinks, but when he returns, a large boorish man from the wedding intercepts him in search of Carrie.

Charles sees Carrie hiding from the boor and engages him in conversation while Carrie escapes to her room.

Later, Charles joins her and they spend the night together.

In the morning, he wakes up to find her fully dressed and packed, ready to leave and return to America.

She tells Charles, "I think we both missed a great opportunity here."

Charles is bereft and reenters the round of other people's weddings, hoping against hope that he will somehow see Carrie again.

The idea for Four Weddings and a Funeral, appropriately enough, came from screenwriter Richard Curtis's personal experiences with weddings.

At the age of 34, roughly the age of Charles in the movie, Curtis realized he had attended 65 weddings in an 11 year period, or roughly one wedding every two months.

At one of those weddings, he met an attractive young woman, a fellow guest who wanted to spend the night with him, but Curtis turned her down.

He regretted it ever after, and later created the story for Four Weddings and a Funeral where the same situation plays out rather differently.

After making the rounds for a while, Curtis's screenplay came to the attention of Director Mike Newell.

"It was handed to me in my agent's office," he later recalled, "by a very bright and forthright assistant who, knowing that I said no to everything, sort of hit me in the chest with it and said, 'You should do that.'"

Newell read the script and agreed, and he and Curtis began auditioning actors in early 1992.

But a few months later, the funding for the film dried up.

Newell and Curtis kept at it, confident that at some point the money needed to make the movie would come through.

"We auditioned for over a year," the producer Duncan Kenworthy told the Guardian some 20 years later.

"Not intentionally, but because we couldn't get the film off the ground.

But we kept on meeting and talking through the winter of 92, auditioning people."

Kenworthy believed the delay in fact made the movie better.

"Shooting is expensive, but talk is cheap," he said.

"Just by talking and talking, we win out all of the ambiguities, the unfunny lines, the misunderstanding about character that can be so damaging.

The film wouldn't have been anywhere near as good if it hadn't been delayed."

The financing finally came together, but by the time shooting began in the summer of 1993, the budget was a mere 2.7 million pounds, equivalent to about $4.4 million at the time, and the shooting schedule was only 36 days long.

Extras, among whom were several genuine aristocrats, had to provide their own wedding clothes for their scenes, and Rowan Atkinson playing a vicar ended up presiding at two of the weddings to save the expense of paying an additional actor.

And yet somehow, it all came together.

Perhaps the outstanding feature, "Four weddings and a Funeral" and one that contributed significantly to its success is its remarkable ensemble cast.

While some of the actors went on to become widely recognized stars, including Hugh Grant, Andy McDowell, and Kristen Scott Thomas, many of the others like Simon Callow and Sophie Thompson are primarily familiar from British television programs and motion pictures, dramas and comedies alike.

During the year or so when the film's funding was uncertain, the production team continued to hold auditions.

They considered about 70 actors for the leading role of Charles before settling on Hugh Grant, who was just about ready to give up on acting, "I wasn't really getting any work at all."

He said in 2016, and then to my great surprise, this script came through the letter box from my agent and it was really good, and I rang on and said, "There must be a mistake.

You've sent me a good script."

Screenwriter Richard Curtis was not enthusiastic.

He genuinely didn't want me to get it said Grant.

He thought that the character should not be posh and should not be in any way good looking.

He should be a kind of every man.

But Grant was able to make Charles's verbal ramblings and stammer rings utterly convincing.

And so one Curtis over and got the part.

Several American actresses were considered for the role of "Carrie," including Marissa Tomei and Sarah Jessica Parker.

Originally, Jean Triplehorn was cast, but she dropped out when her mother died.

Andy McDowell was in London promoting the film "Groundhog Day" when she read the script for "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and decided she wanted the part.

Every once in a while you'll read a script that will just blow your mind.

McDowell later said this was one of those.

She took a 75% cut in her usual fee to play "Carrie" but ultimately earned around $3 million when the film became an international hit.

There were doubts that would ever happen.

The US distributor, Gramercy Pictures had concerns about everything from the title to the sex scenes to the liberal use of profanity.

At the same time, the production team wasn't sure whether the movie was funny or not.

Grant later recalled, "I thought we'd screwed it up."

When we went to watch a "Rough Cut," all of us, me, Richard Curtis, Mike Newell, the producers all thought this was the worst film that's ever been perpetrated.

We're gonna go and immigrate to Peru when it comes out so no one can actually find us.

Some cuts were made and "Four Weddings and a Funeral" had its first preview in the seaside community of Santa Monica, California, on the western edge of Los Angeles.

"The titles came up."

Said Director Newell, and nobody knew what to expect.

And then about a minute and a half into the film, this guy lets out this huge gaffer, and from then on, it was the preview made in heaven.

The show business paper, Variety described "Four Weddings and a Funeral" as the little film that could, despite the difficulties with financing and the delays in production, not to mention the limited budget and shooting schedule.

The film became a worldwide success that essentially rewrote the rules for an entire movie genre.

In a review in Variety, Todd McCarthy called "Four Weddings and a Funeral," a truly be kindly romantic comedy that was frequently hilarious without being sappily sentimental or tiresomely retrograde.

A review in the Los Angeles Times called it a tasty, sophisticated romp, a romantic comedy that wears its skill lightly and garnishes its humor with style.

Other critics, however, agreed with Richard Corliss assertion in Time Magazine that audiences would forget all about it by the time they leave the multiplex.

Events proved him wrong.

"Four Weddings and a Funeral" became an international hit and the highest grossing British film in history.

It appeared on dozens of annual top 10 movie lists, was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay and best picture, and received a host of other nominations and awards.

It was also the first British motion picture to win a Cesar, the French equivalent of an Oscar for best foreign film.

"Four Weddings and a Funeral" also made Hugh Grant a major star.

He later headed to other hit romantic comedies written by Richard Curtis, "Notting Hill" in 1999 and "Love Actually" in 2003.

Curtis told The Guardian in 2012, "Grant was very much like the character of Charles.

That doesn't ever happen.

I remember him winning his Golden Globe in early 1995 and making a speech that was just full of jokes.

He was very taken aback afterwards when people assumed that I had written it.

But in real life, he's much funnier than I am."

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night At The Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.