Nancy Meyers | The Holiday Season #1 Transcript and Credits
SAM: I’m Sam Clements and this is The Holiday Season, a podcast that takes a detailed look at writer-director Nancy Meyers’ 2006 Christmas classic, The Holiday.
I love romantic comedies, and I love films set at Christmas.
So, it’s no surprise that I’m a huge fan of The Holiday; a rom-com set at Christmas!
The Holiday is the film where two women trade homes, only to find that a change of address can change their lives - starring Kate Winslet, Cameron Diaz, Jude Law and Jack Black.
The film was described as “a modern holiday classic” by the Huffington Post.
And “Bridget Jones’s Diary without the big knickers” - hmmmm - by the now defunct News Of The World.
Over the course of the series, we’ll learn more about director Nancy Meyers, take a closer look at the screenplay, get into the making of the film, and look how it became such a festive staple. We’ll talk to experts in the film industry, members of the cast, and those people who made it all happen behind the scenes.
It goes without saying, but there will be spoilers for The Holiday in this podcast. Please do pause the show if you’ve not seen the movie before - go and watch The Holiday, you will have a fabulous time - and we’ll be waiting for you when you come back.
My fascination with The Holiday began in December 2006, when I watched the film at the cinema - the now sadly demolished Cineworld Southampton - and I’ve been hooked ever since. I was a 19 year old film student at the time, not exactly it’s target audience. I went with my friend and fellow Holiday enthusiast, Simon Renshaw.
SIMON RENSHAW: My name is Simon Renshaw and my relationship with The Holiday is a 13 year, okay, obsession is too much. It's not an obsession. It's like a long, treasured relative that I see once a year at Christmas.
SAM: Do you remember when the film first came out?
SIMON RENSHAW: Yeah, I remember it very well. I was at university with you. And we went to see it together a number of times. In my memory, I mean, this is 13 years ago, so I might be wrong, but I seem to remember seeing it three times. Is that right? Did we go three times?
SAM: I feel like I’ve seen it so many times with you I can't remember where or when. I just remember being there with you.
SIMON RENSHAW: Ok, that’s very sweet of you. Yeah, we've seen it together at the cinema since then. But I think upon its theatrical release, originally, in 2006, I saw it three times. All I think, at the Cineworld in Southampton where we were Unlimited members, and therefore able to see the film unlimited times.
SAM: And can you remember watch you thought after that first viewing?
SIMON RENSHAW: I remember turning to our friend Liam as the closing credits appeared on screen. And I remember grabbing his arm with my hand in the grips of absolute euphoria. I was so excited, not because the film had ended after substantial running time more because I just loved it. I mean, it's so silly. It is such a confection. But one that I, that continues to give me a great deal of pleasure.
I mean, our expectations were not high. We like Nancy, but it looks like pap, and that trailer is terrible. I remember seeing it at the time and I've rewatched it recently and it really is bad and selling quite a different film, I think. It doesn't have any of the warmth or the humour really, that that exists in the film. But my expectations were not that high and were exceeded massively. I just couldn't believe it. And we went back a few days later, it was within the week we saw the film again. Which is absurd.
SAM: More from Simon later in the series.
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It’s been fun to see the awareness of this film continue to grow and grow, especially as it fell into the Christmas movie cycle during the December TV schedule.
And it still brings me joy, all these years later. I even hosted my own screening of The Holiday at the Clapham Picturehouse in 2017, and to my surprise people who I didn’t even know turned up!
I had hoped to play Hans Zimmer’s joyous score for the film in the foyer as customers arrived, but the only Hans Zimmer CD I could find in the local charity shop was his soundtrack for Crimson Tide. So, the audience were treated to Hans’s epic submarine soundscape as they settled in for The Holiday. The guy has range!
So that’s me - but where did The Holiday come from?
The film was written, directed and produced by Nancy Meyers. A longstanding Hollywood figure who - arguably - isn’t as well known as she should be. You’ll have heard of her movies though, The Parent Trap, What Women Want, Something’s Gotta Give and yes, The Holiday. Nancy Meyers has been making movies in Hollywood since 1980, she’s an Oscar-nominee and her films perform fantastically well at the box office.
I spoke to Los Angeles based director and producer Amy Adrion. Her Sundance selected documentary Half The Picture celebrates women filmmakers in Hollywood, their artistry and their perseverance. Amy interviewed a number of high profile directors for her movie. I asked Amy who is Nancy Meyers?
AMY ADRION: Nancy Meyers is a writer and director working in Hollywood, whose credits span so many films that I'm sure all of us are familiar with. In getting ready to do this interview, I just looked at her IMDb credits and I was like, holy crap did she write Private Benjamin and Baby Boom? And so many of these films from the 80s and into the 90s when she, you know, started doing more directing in the late 90s and 2000s. But so many films that are kind of classic comedies or romantic comedies very often with strong, interesting, complicated female leads at the center. So films like What Women Want, Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday, The Intern, It's Complicated. And I think she's also marked, which I find so impressive with really knowing how to work with really big movie stars, which is something that many women directors don't have the luxury of doing. It's just hard to get cast attached to your projects, especially A-list cast and she's worked with Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton and Helen Hunt and Anne Hathaway, Robert De Niro. So many big movie stars and I think she's really done a great job of leveraging what makes them movie stars into their character’s roles in her films.
SAM: She’s been working consistently since 1980.
AMY ADRION: And in a business that's hard for everyone and certainly hard for women. I mean, what a testament to her, to her tenacity and her talent that she's gone from being such a significant screenwriter to being a very significant and hugely financially successful writer and director.
SAM: Do you think the name “Nancy Meyers” sells a movie?
AMY ADRION: I do. I mean, I think she certainly has her style, her world. People kind of have an idea of what a Nancy Meyers film is. And I think, you know, she does have an audience who, who is going to be there when she has a new movie to open and as I said, that's, that's very rare for any director.
You know, she's like Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson. She is a director who has a very distinct take on the world and kind of storytelling that people really enjoy.
SAM: Why is Meyers a name we should be aware of? I spoke to Dr Deborah Jermyn, Reader in Film and Television at Roehampton University to learn more about the filmmaker.
DEBORAH JERMYN: As an academic I've always been interested mostly in popular cinema. And I've been interested in women's cinema and particularly how in both those instances they’re modes of filmmaking which are often not held in very high esteem. Increasingly I was interested in Nancy Meyers, because she has the distinction of being the most commercially successful woman filmmaker of all time.
Sam: That’s right - she is the most commercially successful woman filmmaker of all time. As a director, her films have to date made over 1.3 billion dollars at the global box office and that’s only from the 6 that she’s directed, not including the films that she wrote and produced in the first 20 years of her career.
AMY ADRION: And very few directors at all, can consistently open a film, you know, consistently get box office and get audiences in the seats. And Nancy Meyers is one of those handful of directors and one of the incredibly few women directors who has that kind of power and connection with her audience.
DEBORAH JERMYN: And yet, very often people that are knowledgeable about film, including my own film students, didn't know who she was, it wasn't a name they recognized. And so I really want to sort of, kind of get to the bottom of this, like how can you be that successful one level, but not be someone whose name holds a kind of instant recognition factor for a lot of people.
As I started to research I was increasingly struck by how often she's kind of belittled in critical reviews. I think she's esteemed among kind of her industry, and among her fellow practitioners perhaps, but not in kind of critical circles. And so I kind of thought we needed to pay some attention to this and try and undo it a bit.
SAM: Deborah has in fact written a book about Nancy Meyers, published by Bloomsbury Academic.
DEBORAH JERMYN: Yeah. So I have the distinction myself of writing the first kind of full length monograph on Nancy Meyers. There have been other smaller bits of work about her you know, a few chapters dotted here and there but certainly nothing like the body of work you would have expected to see given how important she can be considered to be, not just to women's filmmaking or women's history in cinema, but kind of Hollywood cinema, popular filmmaking. I was the first person to say, let's have an entire book on this woman.
SAM: But, even amongst Deborah’s academic peers, there’s been a resistance towards Nancy Meyers
DEBORAH JERMYN: And an important person in the room said to me, oh, isn't it the case that if no one's done a book on her yet, that could be because we don't need a book on her. And I just thought that was a really, well, a surprising and problematic way of looking at it. Because if we take, if we take it to be the case that just something hasn't been written about at length that it doesn't deserve to be written about length, then we're going to fall into a lot of problems.
SAM: So is Nancy Meyers a respected figure within the film industry?
AMY ADRION: Well, I think she's in a really interesting position because she is a consistently successful director. So I think that lends you a very solid amount of respect in this business because it is so hard to make movie after movie and get an audience to come out. I think that there is simultaneously a lot of respect there, and then there, you know, there is that element of Nancy Meyers films are synonymous with like house porn or fancy kitchens or, you know, beautiful successful women in lovely homes, often in comedic or romantic comedy situations. And I think a lot of those elements are perhaps not as respected, as her films maybe aren't considered serious films. And I think in general, you know, that's just something in our culture, film stories that deal with women, women's issues, women characters, fantasies that women have about, you know, possibilities in their life and success and romantic happiness. You know, it all comes with a little bit of eye roll or scorn or condescension. And I think her films have certainly had, you know, experienced some of that.
SAM: This is something Deborah has come across time and time again in her research
DEBORAH JERMYN: The thing that's most frequently returned to in terms of talking about what's distinctive about her films is the way they look. And this Nancy Meyers style in terms of these really exquisite homes and interiors that she makes the centres of her films. So quite often what you'll see in critical reviews is, they look so beautiful, they're stunning, but they're, they're very superficial. So certainly that kind of really intricate interest in design is central to her work, particularly kind of the space of the home. So where that has often been belittled, as I say as a kind of superficial interest, another way of approaching it is, you know, how are homes important to the narratives of her film in terms of character development, what do the homes tell us about the kind of characters. And certainly she talks frequently about how much detail speaks to the lives of the people that live there. So she says something like, you know, if it's the sheets on the bed aren’t the right kind of sheets, I've got to change them. So that level of really infinite detail.
The other thing that's often said about what sort of typifies her films, very much linked to the idea of these exquisite interiors is that the milleur is this kind of privileged white middle class. So she continually returns to, you know, the lives of this very privileged set of people where, you know, they have problems, but you know, their problems are pretty nice. And they take place among them in these beautiful homes. And, you know, she's obviously always spoken about as you know, a rom com director. As I talked about in the book she's frequently referred to as the rom-com queen. And, you know, some of her films clearly do fit quite neatly into that some of them less so. So if you think about things, things The Parent Trap, yes, it has rom com features, but it's, you know, it's more than that as well. But I think talking about her as the rom-com queen has been quite a neat way of kind of pigeon holing her.
Thing about rom com, of course, is that it's a genre which is held in really low esteem. And so if you pigeonhole her in that way and say she is the rom-com queen, then it becomes a kind of an easy shorthand of a way of not taking her films seriously. So it's become a sort of, you know, problematic kind of circle of criticism. If we only talk about her as a rom-com director, then we don't move on to looking at her films in more nuanced ways.
SAM: The Holiday currently has a 49% positive rating from critics on popular review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, and an 80% positive rating from the audience. Which is fine, art is meant to be discussed and critiqued. The difference between those Rotten Tomatoes scores implies that there’s clearly some strong feelings both for and against The Holiday.
What struck me was just how The Holiday was written about on general release by a number of mainstream outlets, some of the language is extraordinary.
The original review of The Holiday in Empire Magazine from January 2007, uses some pretty extreme comparisons:
“If the Long Island set Something’s Gotta Give was a slice of pure Hampton’s porn, then this is Hollywood porn and English countryside porn: rustic charm and LA luxury living all wrapped up in a big festive bow.”
PORN!?
DEBORAH JERMYN: Yeah, definitely. Again, that's something I do to talk about in the book is why does this term recur in so many ways in several ways. Often she's referred to as a purveyor of interior porn, for example. And again, I think it's about, you know, suggesting it’s not work to be taken seriously, it's not art. I think it's patronizing and gendered as well in terms of sort of suggesting that you know, women should be the object of the gaze and not the practitioner. So it's almost a way of kind of like putting women back in their place I think.
SAM: Deborah expands on this idea in the preface of her book:
“ “While the popular and flippant usage of the -porn suffix has become common in the vernacular of post-feminist discourses, it is striking here for the insidious manner in which it operates as a reminder that the person behind these films is a woman” The flippant suggestion that Meyers makes softcore designer pornos glibly denigrates her skills as a female director (and by extension, questions and undermines the taste of her audience). ” [Preface, page xvi]
Deborah continues to say that it’s a loaded term, suggesting that it’s use implies that “she is out of place, having achieved such mainstream and commercial momentum in Hollywood , that the “proper” territory for women in film lies not somewhere behind the camera, or in command of it, but in the realm of sexulalised spectacle”.
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SAM: The general tone of the contemporary reviews of Meyers’s work is that of begrudging enjoyment - that Empire review for The Holiday actually ends up giving the film 3 out of 5 stars.
I personally find it a little bemusing that Meyers’s films, which bring me such joy, sometimes receive such a spiteful response from film critics. This is something that Meyers has experienced for her entire 40 year long career.
Nancy Meyers actually mentioned the subject herself, at a BAFTA screenwriters lecture in 2015, hosted by Briony Hanson.
NANCY MEYERS: And the reviews, I’ve read a couple and then I stop reading them because every time I forget, and I also think ‘now they’ve going to embrace me, now I’m older, I’ve proven myself time and again.’ Forget it.
[Laughter]
BRIONY HANSON: Do you care?
NANCY MEYERS: I do care, I wish I didn’t care. I wish I was bigger but, you know, I care.
DEBORAH JERMYN: Something I was really, really struck by sometimes was just the kind of sheer vitriol of the way critics would talk about her films. And, you know, I think partly it's directed at the genre, because critics feel they have a kind of free rein just to kind of belittle it and belittle the audiences for it. But also I think it's often very gendered. So there’s this kind of disdain for the presumed rom com audience, which is, you know, women and with Nancy Meyers films it also seems to be older women. And of course, she's an older woman herself. So it's often quite patronizing in the way it sort of talks about her work and her audiences. This idea of pandering, for example, is something that comes through quite often as if as if you know, if you're making these kinds of films or watching these kinds of films, you can't be a kind of critical thinker of any kind.
AMY ADRION: There's such a double standard in our culture in film and criticism between men and women. I mean, there are certainly many many male directors who are very particular about the design of their films, you know and even the social strata that they tend to make their work in. So you look at you know, Wes Anderson, for example, who is absolutely celebrated for the craft that goes into making his films which are very idiosyncratic, tend to be, you know, very upper income families and people and the design is just so impeccable. And there's so much respect for that and what it means to be an auteur and have that kind of vision and for women it's different and I think it's seen as like a catalogue or something you know, like a furniture catalogue and it's just not. There's less appreciation for the craft that goes into the design of the film. And I think in all of her films, the design is key to understanding her characters and to creating a certain kind of mood of comfort and aspiration and, you know, wonderful fantasy for her audience. And that's absolutely valid just as it is for, you know, whatever kind of fantasies we explore in Marvel movies or in Wes Anderson or in Quentin Tarantino films. But, you know, again, in worlds where the women's stories are centered and highlighted there, there tends to be a little bit of disparagement about that.
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SAM: Surely Nancy Meyers films are just escapist fun?
DEBORAH JERMYN: This question of, they are, they are escapist, and I don't think it's anything wrong with saying that viewers can take great pleasure in just looking at the spaces of a Nancy Meyers film. So you know, the architecture is amazing, if you read her talking about the kind of the details she puts into this. In the post production I read about It's Complicated, she went through frames getting rid of, of sort of spikiness on the greenery in the garden, for example. But to have those kinds of pleasures doesn't mean that other kinds of critical work or unpleasantness can’t also be explored. You know, thinking about The Holiday, there were there was a lot of time dedicated to the pain of Iris’s relationship. She doesn't sort of shy away from like, the self destructive past that she's had that you know, the kind of the difficulties of being in a relationship of unrequited love. I don't think she's resistant to giving a lot of screen time to showing that in these beautiful spaces people can experience, you know, unpleasant things.
AMY ADRION: Her female characters are often marked by being very successful women. I mean, I think she's doing a lot of things you just don't see in other movies. First of all, women are often the leads, basically, almost always the leads. They're complicated, but they're not, you know, they're not like the hot mess career woman who needs to be brought low by some like schlubby guy to like, learn how to live life and enjoy it. I mean, they all have things that they need to learn, as we all do in life. But just the fact that she centers those kinds of characters, and they are successful and they're financially successful, and they live in beautiful places, often that they deserve because they're good at what they do. Just that fact is so rare in films and is you know, a bit radical. You can see why her movies kind of, tweak some people some critics, some audience members who might be a little, I don't know unnerved by that. But certainly we spend 12 months a year really actively indulging so much male fantasy in so many films. You know, it's wish fulfillment, it's fantasy, it's men and wanting to be heroic and important and significant and you know, indomitable. That’s so much of what we're used to seeing in movies and people don't look at that and go like ‘oh how childish’ or you know ‘how male fantasy’, we just take it as stories that people connect to because we do have those you know, feelings and women have feelings of wanting to be successful and self assured and meeting like the most incredible guy you've ever laid your eyes on. And Nancy Meyers films provide that.
SAM: On the topic of those successful female protagonists, fellow writer - and actor - Mindy Kaling brought this up with Nancy Meyers herself at the 2019 “Produced By” conference. Kaling was in conversation with Meyers to discuss her own movie, Late Night. Kaling asked Meyers about the popular discourse around her production design:
Kaling said: “I often think male writers focus on those aspects of the movie because they can’t relate to the central problems of the protagonist - for instance - a 62 year old woman’s children have left the house and she has an empty nest”
Kaling says: “That would irritate me, do you ever feel like your movies are misunderstood?”
Meyers, with her producers hat on, replies with “Not by the people to who go to them, which is all that really matters” followed by “I don’t love when a critic or journalist will pick up on that aspect because they are missing the boat and they are missing why the movie works”
Meyers continues: “It’s a cheap shot” - “it’s never done to male directors who make gorgeous looking movies, where the leads live in a great house. It’s never brought up” - “with me, it’s an easy thing to go after but I’m not going to change”. [Quoted from this Hollywood Reporter article]
And people really do go out and watch those films. Whilst writing her book, Deborah learned that The Holiday holds a special place in people’s hearts.
DEBORAH JERMYN: Generally one of the most intriguing things to me that emerged in the process of doing the book was just finding out how well loved The Holiday was. So I mean, quite often when I’d be talking to people about what are you doing, I’m doing on this book on Nancy Meyers, and people don't know who she is, when you start to listen to some of the films, they recognize the films straightaway. And, you know, the jigsaw all comes together a bit. And the thing that really struck me was as soon as you say The Holiday and the response would be ‘Oh The Holiday! I love The Holiday’. And that happened so many times. I know it's anecdotal but I thought there's something really interesting going on here, that people had such affection for it, and that they spoke about it as the film that they would put on every Christmas. And it was like a ritual for them. And of course, we look at other films that we do that with like It's A Wonderful Life and we really revere those films and it seemed like something like that was happening with The Holiday. That's what got me more and more interested in The Holiday was just seeing, seeing that response. When I first saw The Holiday I wasn't that taken by it. I found it, it didn't feel terribly imaginative to me. But seeing how other people loved it so much that that really intrigued me. And of course, I'm like, and then I started rewatching it and rewatching it. And over time, I think that question of returning to a film because it's comforting is a really powerful thing that cinema can do.
SAM: Deborah has written a whole book on Nancy Meyers, did she get to talk to her?
DEBORAH JERMYN: I did think about a lot. In my experience, you spend a lot of time, you probably know this, a lot of time chasing people to sort of, you know, interview them. And I kind of thought in the end, I can do this book without that, that process, because there's other materials where I can, you know, get her, you know, statements and testimonies and interviews and so on. So I didn't try to get in touch with her, and also kind of think sometimes it can be harder to write about someone's work once you've had that kind of, you know, connection with them. I thought I kind of need to be able to do this, you know, sort of dispassionately as I might. However, sometime later I was at a preview screening of Home Again, and Nancy Myers was there as a producer doing a Q&A with her daughter [Hallie Meyers-Shyer] and there was a bit of Q&A going on with the audience and I thought, here’s my moment! If I don't, if I don't say something now, I never will, so put my hand up, didn't quite know what was going to say. And I started to ask a question, and she interrupted me, Nancy Meyers interrupted me and said, ‘hang on, are you the one that wrote a book about me?’. And I said ‘Yes, I am’. And so she had read it!
So we, you know, spoke for a moment and then when the credits of the film began, she beckoned me backstage, and I went backstage and had a little chat with Nancy Meyers. So that was quite a special moment.
SAM: Where would Deborah recommend people go next after The Holiday?
DEBORAH JERMYN: You can argue that, you know, the canon has to start with Private Benjamin. Go back to 1980, I mean, she's not a director then. But as a producer and a writer, obviously, she's got a really kind of big career that precedes her becoming a director.
In terms of her work as a director, for me, I think Something's Gotta Give and It's Complicated are the most interesting films, because I really liked what she does with putting older women in romantic roles. And again, we're seeing more and more of this now. But when she made, Something's Gotta Give that was a really risky move. I think there's just some great lovely moments in Something's Gotta Give where she gives a space for older women to speak. You know, some of it’s problematic again, it is suggesting that older women can only reach fulfillment because they reconnect with a heterosexual romance. Obviously, there's a lot of limitations around what that might say about, you know, old women's aspirations. But you know, within the context of what we might expect contemporary Hollywood to be doing at that time, you know, it's a really, it's a really interesting and lovely film, I think.
Sometimes I feel a little bit irritated you know, I do find some of the limitations of where she sets her characters, you know that can be problematic. But they're also comforting. One of the things I wanted to talk about in the book was, kind of eradicate this idea of a guilty pleasure. There's nothing wrong in saying Nancy Meyers film just makes me feel good. At the end of it, you know, it lifts my spirits and whereas romantic comedies are often spoken about something you should feel a little bit embarrassed or apologetic about enjoying, I think that you know that a Nancy Meyers film just says let loose. You know, this is what these films do, they are generic films, but there's lots to be said for the kind of enjoyment we can take from that.
SAM: I asked Amy, if Nancy Meyers made a grittier type of movie, would she get more attention from awards bodies like The Academy?
AMY ADRION: How sad would that be if Nancy Meyers kind of chucked her whole legacy to be like, I'm going to get their attention. I mean, there's so many there's so many of all different kinds of movies and there really aren't that many Nancy Meyers kinds of movies. I mean, she fills a void, that really only she and her work, you know, does, puts out into the world. I think she's incredibly rewarded by audiences who flock to her movies. So you know, not all directors, not all films are necessarily going to be Academy favourites.
I think her films are kind of a lesson in what great writing and what movie stars can do. There's a lot of great writing in Hollywood and by women, well, I wouldn't say that, I would say there's a lot of great writing by women directors. But again, so rarely do they get to really access iconic movie stars, you know, big gorgeous, charismatic movie stars and her films, they just have such great characters and the roles are played by really fantastic actors and that's just a recipe for movie magic. And that's kind of what so much of Hollywood did well for decades until we got into the bigger you know, visual effects kind of fantasy films and now so much of Hollywood is that but really if you have a great strong script and really compelling actors, I mean there's nothing that can compare to that.
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SAM: Something Deborah Jermyn said in our interview really stuck with me, and I think it sums up what this series is all about.
DEBORAH JERMYN: You don't have to find every work by a filmmaker to be brilliant to think that they deserve critical attention and sustained analysis. And that's always what I've kind of wanted to say about Nancy Meyers. This isn't about, writing about her isn't about sort of presenting love letters to her work, it's about saying she deserves our attention, look at what she's been achieving.
SAM: So, with 40 years of filmmaking behind her, what is Nancy Meyers working on now?
Well, we don’t know.
When asked in 2019 by Mindy Kaling what she was working on next, Meyers simply replied: “I am taking a break” - “the business has changed in a way that is somewhat unrecognisable to me. I am not sure how much I want to do it”.
This echoes the concerns that Meyers has around the future of the type of films she makes. When asked about her daughter, Hallie Meyers-Shyer, career as a writer-director at the 2015 BAFTA screenwriters lecture she said
NANCY MEYERS: The last 35 years you could make movies about people. This movie The Intern was very hard to get made, for me it was hard to get made and I have had successes so there’s a track record there they could look at and feel good about. It was still really hard to get made. So I worry about her because I worry about the climate and the landscape, you know, of the movie business. But I think with my movie getting made, you know, and I know a couple of other people that have gotten movies made that are not superhero movies or whatever, maybe the pendulum is swinging back in the direction of human beings and human stories and comedies about adults.
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SAM: I for one hope that Nancy Meyers does pick up the typewriter and draft another screenplay soon. I feel like rom-coms are possibly having a resurgence, especially on streaming services such as Netflix, and in 2019 two of the highest grossing films in cinemas were romantic comedies, Yesterday and Last Christmas. But what do I know?
In the meantime, there’s a wealth of Meyers scripted and directed projects out there. Check out her filmography, find something that you like the sound of and let’s carry on the conversation around her work.
That is really the goal of this podcast, I’m not saying Meyers is a perfect filmmaker, or that The Holiday is the perfect film, but I think Meyers is a complex filmmaker, working at the very top of her game, and I think The Holiday is one of her greatest accomplishments. The fact that the film still feels fresh after 13 years and is on regular rotation each Christmas is testament to that.
In the next episode we’ll get into The Holiday and take a closer look at the screenplay.
Thank you for listening.
If you enjoyed the show, please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, and tell your friends over Christmas, word of mouth is a great way to spread The Holiday love.
The Holiday Season is written and produced by me Sam Clements, and Louise Owen.
The show is edited by Louise Owen, with sound mixing support from Andy Snook at the Silk Factory, and the brilliant team at No.8 London.
You heard contributions from Simon Renshaw, Dr. Deborah Jermyn and Amy Adrion.
I highly recommend reading Deborah’s book, Nancy Meyers, published by Bloomsbury Academic.
You can watch the full 2015 Bafta screentalk with Nancy Meyers and Briony Hanson on the BAFTA GURU Youtube channel. [You can also read the transcription]
Our music is by Martin Austwick and our artwork is by Olly Gibbs.
You can find links to their work and more at 90minfilmfest.com/theholidayseason