Much of Richard Curtis’ “Pirate Radio” was shot aboard a ship anchored off the coast of England.

Focus Features / Alex Bailey

Growing up in the mid-1960s, British writer-director Richard Curtis didn’t have much choice in music around his house.

“In my dad’s generation, they literally had eight records,” he says. “They had ‘The Unforgettable Nat King Cole,’ two versions of ‘My Fair Lady’ — the stage and the movie one — ‘Hello, Dolly!’ by Louis Armstrong, and one called ‘Mantovani: Song Hits From Theaterland.’ ”

Not much for a young kid at the time to get excited about. However, Curtis, who has written such hits as “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Notting Hill” and “Love Actually,” had older sisters and babysitters who started playing these “brilliant singles by the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and the Supremes.”

When he was 8, Curtis was sent off to boarding school — “a rather cold and weird atmosphere” where he wouldn’t see his parents for 13 weeks at a time — and his lifeline was listening to pirate radio on his little transistor every night. You see, until 1973 the BBC had a monopoly on broadcasting in the UK, and back in the mid-’60s it played only about two hours of recorded music each week, despite the rock ’n’ roll explosion taking place in Britain at the time. So young people listened to offshore stations, some of them transmitting from ships in international waters that would broadcast — to quote the Kinks — all day and all of the night.

“It was genuinely this image of freedom and music and friendship,” the now 53-year-old director recalls, sitting outside on a beautiful day in Beverly Hills.

The director’s love affair with rock once drove him to lean against a radiator for an hour to raise his temperature so he could get released from school and listen to the first broadcast of the Beatles’ “White Album.” That love hasn’t stopped.

Curtis’ new film, “Pirate Radio,” which opens Friday, tells the story of one fictitious station broadcasting off the coast of England in 1966. At the time, there were considerable efforts by some in the British government to silence these seafaring rogue DJs and close down the stations with the Marine Broadcasting Offenses Act, which went into effect in 1967.

Originally called “The Boat That Rocked” when it was released earlier this year in England, “Pirate Radio” stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh and Rhys Ifans, with Emma Thompson making a memorable cameo. It is less a realistic account of the real battle than a raucous celebration of the music and the spirit of the times.

The film owes some of its style to Robert Altman films like “M*A*S*H” and “Nashville,” as well as boasting a soundtrack with some 60 songs from the era.

Much of the film was shot on an actual ship, which unlike the fictitious one supposedly out in the North Sea, was anchored in relative calmness near the harbor of Weymouth, on the southern coast of England.

“One of things I loved about ‘M*A*S*H,’ ” says Curtis, “is its complete disinterest in period. They all have different hairstyles, and they talked like people from the 1970s even though it was meant to be about Korea. And I was very keen that this movie didn’t lock into a period style. As I said to the hair and makeup person, ‘I didn’t want anyone looking like Peter Tork,’ ” referring to one of the Monkees.

Being on ship also made it easier to follow Altman’s lead when it came to the way he shot the film, says Curtis.

“I just wanted a camera that roved a lot. And actually my best friend back in England is Paul Greengrass, who makes the ‘Bourne’ films, and he said to me, ‘Don’t worry about focus; everything fits with everything.’ And so I decided that I would have a much more fluid atmosphere in the way the movie was shot, and that in turn led to a much more relaxed atmosphere with the actors.”

Hoffman plays an American known as The Count, a nod to Emperor Rosko, a star on a pirate station at the time, while Ifans is a sex-and-drugs star named Gavin.

“So the hideous New Zealander had lots of Herman’s Hermits and Seekers, and Nick Frost’s character had only British bands like the Small Faces and Spencer Davis Group,” Curtis says.

During the process of writing the film, he came up with a playlist of about 300 songs, with 15 of them written into the script.

“Obviously, the names of the girls — I only named one Elenore, so I could play ‘Elenore’ [by the Turtles] and one Marianne, so I could play ‘So Long, Marianne’ [by Leonard Cohen] when she leaves.”

Curtis also tried to find songs that people hadn’t heard in a while like “Friday on My Mind” by the Easybeats or “Yesterday Man” by Chris Andrews. But he found that others didn’t work.

“There is this weird magic between celluloid and music,” he says. “You think you got the perfect song, and you put it on and it turns out your favorite song takes too long to kick in.”