The Holiday is a Christmas present for fans of romantic comedies. You get two love stories in one. Cameron Diaz plays Amanda, a Hollywood business woman who just found out her boyfriend (Ed Burns) is cheating on her. Kate Winslet plays Iris, a British book editor who just found out that the author (Rufus Sewell) she’s pined over for three years, has gotten engaged. Both women need a vacation, and they help each other out.
Iris and Amanda switch homes for the holidays and have parallel adventures. Amanda gets used to driving on the left and meets Iris’s brother (Jude Law). Iris relishes West Coast luxury and discovers a spitfire of a 90-year-old screenwriter (Eli Wallach) and romances a movie musician (Jack Black).>/P>
It was also a gift to talk to two inspirational women on the same day. Cameron Diaz emitted a glowing presence even with her hair dyed brown. She continues to do things her way, like when she filmed the travelogue series Trippin’ and defied etiquette in the gross-out comedy There’s Something About Mary. Kate Winslet looked sharp in a blazer and jeans but had no idea who designed either. She cut through the superficial aspects of celebrity to get down to work.
With Winslet’s staggering resume of serious, dramatic films, a romantic comedy almost proved to be her biggest challenge. “It’s just a whole new genre to me,” she told Dish. I’ve never done a romantic comedy or something that is labelled as that before. I was so excited to do something new and also nervous. The worry of ‘can I be funny’, it’s a terrible thing to be concerned about. And Jude and I would speak on the telephone a lot before we started shooting, ‘Oh my god, they’re going to fire us, they’re going to recast, what if we don’t make them laugh?’ You know, very nervous about the whole thing.”
It wasn’t just the comedy that frightened Winslet though. The modern British character spoke a whole different language than she usually speaks on film. “Also, I haven’t played a contemporary English woman in a film before. I’ve done a lot of period English films but never a contemporary person. I’ve done it in American but this was new to me. And actually I did not like the feeling initially. I thought, ‘Well, what do you mean I can’t hide behind something? What do you mean I don’t have a wig or an accent or a strange costume?’ It was me and my hair and my voice and clothes that I would choose to wear and there was something oddly intimidating about that and it took a little bit of getting used to.”
Diaz is almost an old pro at romantic comedies. Singing bad karaoke in My Best Friend’s Wedding and rubbing gross stuff in her hair in Something About Mary proved she was game for anything. In The Holiday, some of her antics required stunt men. In one particular scene, she drives on the wrong side of the road. “The great thing about that was the streets were shut down, blocked off,” she said. “Nobody could get on the street that didn’t know I was behind the wheel of the car. But, it’s crazy. Driving on the wrong side of the road, on the wrong side of the car, both things. I can barely walk properly in England. It’s crazy because you step off the curb and it says look right. Every time it says to look right, but you always only see that when you look left first.”
Rumor has it that the casting of The Holiday took forever. Director Nancy Myers explained why she cast Diaz in the role of Amanda. “Cameron is a real comedienne and one of the great rewards of working with her is how much she makes me laugh,” she said. She is great with dialogue and is really adept at physical humor.
Though the film was written for an American and a Brit, both actors agreed they could have switched roles. Accent or no, love stinks. “I can relate to Iris and I can relate to Amanda,” said Diaz. “I think that we’ve all been through these relationships before. That’s life. It’s the journey of love. This lifetime is to try to figure out how to make love work and nurture relationships. There’s definitely something that I think everybody can see a bit themselves, maybe not the exact same experience, but certainly the human aspect of it.”
Winslet did not even limit her identification to the film’s female characters. “I think I relate to all the characters, both men and the women to be honest with you,” she said. “The subject of love, it’s endless. It’s absolutely endless and it can be the most glorious thing in the world but it can also be the most shattering thing when you’re in a situation like the one Iris is in, when you love someone who doesn’t love you back. So I mean in a way I sort of relate to all of them. That’s what [writer-director] Nancy Myers does brilliantly is that she constructs these stories that have characters in them that we feel as though we know. We feel as though we’ve either been that person or we’re friends with that person.”
The holiday season is a time when families and lovers spend time together, so The Holiday is designed with men in mind as well. “I don’t feel like this is a chick flick and that’s really weird,” said Winslet. “That’s not me trying to sort of plug or sell the movie in a whole other way, but I don’t because it really is about relationships. And it’s about two separate relationships that happen with women and men. Actually there are more men in the film than there are women, which is something that Nancy pointed out to me a couple of days ago, even though I wasn’t aware of that.”
If men are intimidated by the fabulous good looks of Jude Law, they may take comfort in seeing him raise two daughters as a single father. They’ll also see a more sensitive side of party animal Jack Black.
“Jude and Jack are not the dudes in this film,” said Diaz. “They are going through their own issues. They need to reconcile things for themselves and get to understand themselves in a certain way and know what they want and go after it. There’s a moment where you have to be with them as well and they make the decision of what they don’t want. I think that guys will definitely relate to it.”
In her story, Amanda must decide whether to get involved with an existing family or protect herself from such an emotional investment. Working with the little girls who played Law’s children opened Diaz up to a new world of acting.
“What was so great about them was that they had never done it before,” said Diaz. “It was really great to watch them grow as actors. It sounds funny, but they learned so much and we watched them from the first day they were on the set to the last day. They were like, ‘We’re making a movie with Cameron Diaz and Jude Law,’ but they didn’t have any idea of what their responsibilities, what it meant to be doing that.”
In real life, Diaz is still quite far from having kids. Though her long term relationship with Justin Timberlake is public knowledge, she does not talk about it at all in interviews, and admits she has trouble even committing to work.
“I hate committing myself to anything,” she told Dish. “I’m really bad at saying, ‘Yeah, I’m going to be there in three months and I’m going to show up and going to stay for three months.’ It’s really hard for me. It has to be something that I’m really sure that I’m going to be able to get there, be there and be happy that I am there. It’s probably the lack of discipline honestly. It’s probably being a spoiled brat and getting my way every time. I’m sure that’s probably what it is. It’s a way of life. I just don’t want to do it. I’m sure I’ll suffer for it later, but I’m happy right now.
Spending time without loved ones would be no problem for this independent spirit. “I love being alone. I love it. I just love being by myself. I’m good at it. But, not in a weird way. Not like ‘leave me alone.’ I’m very comfortable by myself.”
Winslet is happy on the other end of the spectrum. Married with children, her days of holidaying away are past. “I can’t think of anything in particular that would make me feel like I wanted to just get away,” she said. “I’ve got my kids and my husband and there’s absolutely no reason why I would ever want to get away from them. So it would have to take a lot, I think, to make me feel like I wanted to run away and hide somewhere.”
Her Christmas present may be that elusive Oscar. Though she has been nominated four times in the past, Winslet has yet to win. Her other holiday film Little Children may have enough critical buzz to seal the deal.
“It isn’t something that I feel like I’m aiming for. It isn’t a goal of mine. I just feel so incredibly lucky that I’ve had that acknowledgement and that experience. I mean it’s just something that if you’re really, really lucky you get that, you get that pat on the back. The truth is, every time I have been nominated and I’ve attended the Academy Awards I have instinctively known that I wasn’t going to win. Absolutely. And so it’s been nice because I’ve just been able to go along and really just enjoy the whole experience.”
The Holiday opened nationwide on December 8.
