He's considered romantic-comedy royalty, having written and/or directed Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually and Notting Hill.

But Richard Curtis says he's not feeling it anymore, being married and all.

"You've got to write about what you care about," Curtis says via phone from New York, where he's promoting Pirate Radio, a comedy about the illegal rock-'n'-roll broadcasts from boats off the U.K. in the '60s.

"And when I was writing those films, love and sex in all its forms, well I kind of didn't consider writing about another subject. But now that I'm a family man, as it were, I looked around and said, 'What else do I really care about?'

"And I decided I care about pop music, so I'll write a film about that. I mean, I downloaded three songs last night in the hotel (including Michael Jackson's This Is It) and a tune by a new favourite Norwegian band The Kings of Convenience who sound like early Simon and Garfunkel."

"I'm endlessly clicking the (iTunes) button and paying my 79p."

Music-fan Curtis reached into his childhood for the story of Pirate Radio. It was a time when the BBC all but ignored rock-'n'-roll music, and the "pirates" (there ended up being about a dozen such boats, the most famous being Radio Caroline) ended up with audiences of millions of Britons, listening, in many cases for the first time, to what would be dubbed British Invasion music.

In a montage at the beginning, we see a young boy in his room, listening to his transistor radio under his sheets. Curtis admits he was that boy.

"In fact, I was a more severe example. My parents lived in Sweden and I was sent away at eight to a rather severe British boarding school. You were wearing corduroy shorts all day and not allowed to talk in the corridors. And suddenly at 9 o'clock I'd switch on these guys -- the quintessence of freedom and anarchy and friendship and high spirits. And I remember how completely dedicated I was to them."

He even gets in a shot at his old authority figures, in the characters of British minister Sir Alistair Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh) and his assistant Twatt (Jack Davenport), who conspire to pass the Maritime Offenses Act -- real-life 1967 legislation that all but put an end to the pirate radio scene.

"I kind of patterned them on schoolmasters, those two. The unamused authoritarian."

That was, however, one of the few nods to reality Curtis made in the movie. Partly on the basis of having had to fight a lawsuit over his Love Actually script, he says he goes to great lengths to underscore the originality of his scripts by NOT doing research.

"In fact, I've always been a bit frightened by research. I once wrote a sitcom called Blackadder which was historical. We never did any research on that. We sort of relied on race memory, which was what I liked.

"As far as Pirate Radio went, I loved the story and I wanted to write a funny film that was about eight megalomaniacs in a corridor -- the idea of these huge egos forced to live with each other at sea. So that was enough for me. I wrote the film hoping I was right. The only thing I knew was what I heard, and what I knew about the Maritime Offences Act."

Said megalomaniacs are played by the likes of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rhys Ifans, Nick Frost and Bill Nighy.

Curtis does allow that he based one character on reality.

"During production, there was a 40-year celebration of pirate radio, tied to the Maritime Offences Act, and it was a lovely evening, a lot of old footage and a lot of cracking of jokes.

"And I did bump into this guy called Emperor Roscoe -- I don't think he was a real emperor -- who was very much in the back of my mind when I wrote the character of The Count (Hoffman), this noisy American who rhymed a lot -- 'The station across the nation with the imagination ...' all that."

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