Written by Cece Gair

“I miss you. I miss you so much that I totally quit smoking, and candy is only mildly comforting. You’ve ruined all my vices for me.”

*All photos courtesy of Tiffany Paulsen

In a year where it seems like everything that can go wrong has gone wrong, Tiffany Paulsen’s Holidate is perhaps one of the few things that is spectacularly right. Written and produced by Paulsen and a smash-hit on Netflix, Holidate follows holiday-skeptics Sloane (Emma Roberts) and Jackson (Luke Bracey), who are tired of feeling the pressure to have a significant other during the holidays. For Sloane, it’s about getting over her pretentious ex, while dodging her mother’s relentless attempts to marry her off to her next door neighbour. For Jackson, it’s about not having to spend Christmas at a girl’s parents’ place on the third date. After a disgruntled post-Christmas meeting at the mall, Sloane and Jackson agree to be each other’s New Year’s holidate, a person to bring to festive events with whom you have no long-term connection. As New Year’s rolls into Saint Patrick’s Day, into the Fourth of July, into almost a dozen other holidays, Sloane and Jackson come to realize that maybe they don’t want to only be each other’s holidate. The result is a riotous, laugh-out-loud-heartwarming holiday movie with all the right elements: slow-burn romance, true-to-life awkwardness, and just the right amount of cheerful holiday skepticism.

Washington-born Tiffany Paulsen is no newcomer to the movie scene. She created 2007’s Nancy Drew (also starring Emma Roberts), wrote the Disney Channel original sequel to Adventures in Babysitting (2016, starring Sabrina Carpenter), and worked on 2019’s Turkey Drop. Speaking on Holidate, Paulsen talked about how she approaches screenwriting. “I’m not a big outliner. A lot of writers – especially screenwriters – know what they’re doing before they actually do it – outline, outline, outline, treatment, treatment, treatment. You have to do a little more of that when you start working for studios and somebody’s paying you as opposed to how Holidate was an original script that I wrote. This was just me hunkered down in my office with this idea that I knew had something to it.”

This is not how screenwriting often goes, as Paulsen says, “It’s a little bit different experience than with some of the studio movies that I’ve written, since with Holidate I just got to do everything on my own time, my own imagination, not having to answer to anybody, not having to show any outlines or work. I really enjoyed doing that – I think I’m more of a spontaneous writer. I really like to just sit down and see where my characters take me once they start talking to me. Not that I don’t know what the story is. I generally have a really strong vision of my opening scene or my opening conversation and I’m really big on a book-end. I love a book-end in almost everything that I do.”

In fact, the original ending to Holidate would have been a book-end in a slightly different way than the final cut, but for sometimes-inevitable shooting complications getting in the way. “Actually, we set a couple of endings for Holidate, but the original ending in the screenplay was Luke and Emma back at her porch on Christmas, about to go in. Once again, they’re there and she’s just a mirror of him going to Carly’s house in the beginning where he’s like, “I don’t know. The family Christmas on day 11.” Then she’s just like “fucking holidays”. Then mom opens the door and they’re swept up. It was a complete, very sweet bookend. We tried a few other endings, as well. We tried the house being on fire and everybody coming out – that Sloane’s mom had burned the turkey again or something. Then they all came out on the porch. That’s why we settled on the ending that we did, which was seeing where all of those relationships ended up, by doing the still photos.”

Tiffany says all-in-all, Holidate was a very special movie to film. It turns out very similarly to how it was originally written, thanks to director John Whitesell and the cast being in love with the original script. “I was really, really lucky on this script that our director, John Whitesell really kept me in as a partner with him. He didn’t want to change anything about the script and I think that’s what brought everyone together. I haven’t had an experience this positive and successful where everyone from day one was, “We love the script. We’re not changing it.” Save for a few things being tweaked here and there, all the dialogue, every line that I wrote ended up in the movie as they were written, all of those stories. If anything, we had to lose a lot because we had so many characters and they all had complete stories. I was sad that a lot of things that were in the script for everybody didn’t make it into the movie, but for the most part, everything that I wrote ended up on screen, which is really exciting. I got to go out to Atlanta three separate times to be on set during filming. it doesn’t always work like that.”

As far as her input on casting choice, Tiffany got to watch the auditions for the movie, and the on-screen chemistry between Emma Roberts and Luke Bracey was obvious from the very first read. “It’s not like Emma auditioned. Emma was an offer. She ended up loving it and wanted to do it. Then it was watching Emma read with a couple of the guys to see who had that best chemistry. Getting to be involved on that level … once she and Luke – who’s a real cutie, a tall drink of water – read together, it was very obvious they had such amazing chemistry. Then thanks to John Whitesell’s amazing relationships in the industry, we also got some amazing supporting actors in people like Kristin Chenoweth and Frances Fisher.”

When asked about her experience as a woman in the film industry, Tiffany commented that it’s difficult to avoid being “typecast” as a writer. “I have definitely experienced that, with people going “we don’t think you can do that. You’re not the thriller girl, or you’re not the action girl.” This industry can be really judgmental in that way. I had an overall development deal at Disney Channel and I did a lot of projects for them, so people would say “oh, she’s the Disney Channel girl.” Nancy Drew was my first feature, so, “oh, she’s sweet, younger, soft.” Then you watch Holidate, which is always what I set out to do. Right? My whole aspiration was to write edgy, romantic comedy. Nora Ephron is my writing guru – my goddess of writing. I go, “wait a minute. No, I never set out to be the soft, sweet, kids and family writer”, which, although it’s great and I’m still doing projects in that space, I’m a writer for lots of things, not just children and family movies.”

As far as any future projects that are outside the type of thing that she’s already worked on, Paulsen is looking forward to getting into series writing and doing more directing, as she’s set to direct a movie for Netflix next year.

We also got to ask Tiffany a question that Holidate fans are dying to know the answer to. Will there be a sequel? Tiffany herself doesn’t know yet. “We’re all certainly hopeful. I think we knew we had a cute movie and it was really fun, but the response has just been overwhelming on an international level. I think we would all love to do another one and we loosely talked about what that story would be and where the characters would go. I think the story of her going to meet his family in Australia would make the most sense for those characters. Because she spent this year with her family, so I think that would be really fun and fish out of water, since you’ve got two characters that have really only spent a few hours together over the course of this year, on these 11 days. Wouldn’t it be fun to be completely close quarters, traveling together, and now you really get to know somebody on a different level. I think there’s a whole lot more to explore with that relationship. That would be fun. But you never know with Netflix. It’s not like dealing with a regular studio, so who knows? I imagine we will find out in the next couple of weeks if they would pull the trigger on that. We’re hopeful, but we have not gotten the green light yet, so we’re still waiting.”

As is often our way of ending interviews, we got to ask Tiffany about some of her film preferences. The first movie she recalls seeing is The Wizard of Oz, but the movie that inspired her to become a screenwriter was When Harry Met Sally (1989), which was written by Nora Ephron. When I asked her to pick five movies she couldn’t live without, When Harry Met Sally was at the top of the list, along with Notting Hill (1999), Sixteen Candles (1984), True Romance (1993), and As Good as It Gets (1997). Her current guilty-pleasure series is The Bachelor and Bachelorette, and she just finished The Queen’s Gambit (2020), which she highly recommends.

Writer and Executive Producer of Holidate, Tiffany Paulsen

Whether you’re having a bad week or a great week, Holidate is the perfect movie for holiday-lovers and skeptics alike, available for streaming on Netflix.