InkBlog

It’s one of our all-time favourite Christmas movies, the rom-com that came long before the days of Airbnb, where two strangers swap houses for the holidays, with plenty of romance thrown in. Of course we’re talking about The Holiday , starring Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Jack Black.

Diaz, who plays LA-based movie trailer editor Amanda, moves into journalist Iris’s picturesque cottage for Christmas, while Iris heads to Amanda’s sprawling LA mansion. Diaz ends up falling for Iris’s brother, widower Graham (Jude Law).

You might recall one of the film’s best scenes when Amanda is in a taxi headed back to Heathrow but then suddenly realises she’s in love with Graham. Just as tears start streaming down her face, she leaps out of the taxi and starts running across snowy fields, jumping over fences in high-heeled boots (a real skill in our eyes) before eventually reaching the cottage gate, attempting to catch her breath as she reunites with Graham, “You know, I was just thinking why would I ever leave before New Year's Eve?"

Well, Diaz has just opened up about filming that scene with Vulture, saying "it wasn’t actually in the script". “I was running, like, seven miles a day in heels. That whole scene took a week to shoot."

The actress added, “They only used two shots, but we shot like ten shots of me running across ten different fields. And I’m wearing that Valentino cashmere, wool trench coat, a turtleneck cashmere sweater...And jeans, and my high-heeled boots. And we covered all the hillside with this fake snow, which was totally biodegradable. It was the most incredible — it doesn’t snow in England. It rains in England. But there are swabs of snow."

Diaz continued, “I’m just this tiny little thing running in the distance. And of course, the music is blasting while I’m shooting it. So I had the tempo to which I’m running. I’m flying down this field and up this hill and down this row of trees. And the camera’s on a track, and it’s tracking me as I run through the trees. Literally, I was so fit by the end of that week. I ran probably seven miles a day in those heels. Through mud and hills. It was so hilarious. I was literally like, 'I’m not even complaining right now because my job is to run, and I’m okay with that'. But I’m sweating.”

The actress said the final scene when she reached the gate was filmed “the day I had not been running” so she had to improvise, “Breathing as if I had just run seven miles. I think we shot it in over a week. And I just said to Nancy [Myers], ‘How did this go from four lines of description into a two-week scene of shooting?’ She was like, ‘I don’t know. I just always pictured it this way.’”

According to Diaz, during the filming of The Holiday, it felt like they were filming two separate movies, “The funny thing is that I did a lot of acting on my own, and just with Jude. Because we only had one scene with Jack and Kate. Our characters never crossed over. Basically Kate and Jack did their movie; Jude and I did ours. We only had the one scene at the end, where we all came together, and we shot that kind of at the beginning of the [shoot].”

The actress also spoke about her incredible cashmere wardrobe that’s been our winter goal since forever, admitting her dressing room was “full of every piece of cashmere that was available to any one person.” She added, “We collected every piece, and it was just wall-to-wall cashmere sweaters and coats. And we just spent the whole day pulling out outfits and putting them together, and talking about scenes and what we would wear, and what my character would wear.”

While it might be our favourite festive film, Diaz admitted, “I haven’t seen the movie since it came out as a premiere. So I’m not as well-versed.”

Time for a re-watch, we reckon.

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