She is also joined by composer Hans Zimmer, production designer John Hutman and editor Joe Hutshing. Meyers talks about the challenges of establishing her ensemble cast early on in the film. Zimmer speaks about how he composed the theme songs for both Iris and Arthur (Eli Wallach) while also having to worry about scoring the rest of the movie. Hutman talks about things like Iris’ cottage and how they built it from scratch just outside of London in order to save money. Being a writer, Meyers also touches upon various aspects like dialogue, character development and casting choices in this decent track.

Nancy Meyers is beautiful, smart, talented, and successful. What she is not (or not enough) is disciplined. She needs to shorten and tighten more scenes. And some scenes need rewriting and polishing. A comedy that is noticeably too long (as both Something's Got to Give and this movie are) is like a fatty trying to do ballet--the word lumbering comes quickly to mind. Nancy Meyers needs to push herself more as a writer in order to go from the good to the great. (Billy Wilder, whom she references countlessly and respectfully on the commentary track, liked to quote Voltaire on writing: "The good is the enemy of the great." When you have something down on paper that is good, that's not the time to curtail effort and relax but rather the time to work harder and make it better.) If NM ever seeks reactions to her commentary (and where else would she go on the web but here?), this Wilder tip by way of Voltaire is perfect advice. It would move her into the ranks of Lubitsch and Wilder. She's not there yet (hardly the most withering criticism).

Watching the movie first, I enjoyed the Kate Winslet plot much more than the Cameron Diaz plot. Cameron Diaz works so hard to be cute that I started not to like her. But the other plot has the dual interest of two men relating to Kate Winslet (Eli Wallach and Jack Black), and the emotions are richer, more complex. On the commentary track, Nancy Meyers seems (maybe) to sense some of the weakness of the Cameron Diaz scenes because she works a bit harder at times to show what purpose was intended for most of those scenes (even the 9-minute scene when Cameron Diaz meets Jude Law), and there's sort of an air of justification in her remarks. I enjoyed the commentary because of the respect NM shows to the roots of movie writing (she says she swiped a prop picture of Billy Wilder and Izzy Diamond), and because of the knowledge she has of classic scripts (Sabrina, The Apartment, even Bluebeard's 8th Wife--with the all-time classic pajama-bottom "meet cute"). The stories about Dustin Hoffman dropping by and ending up in the Blockbuster scene and about the origin of the phrase "boob graze" are wonderful--but the movie itself needs more work: there's too much rough and not enough (Wilder and) Diamond.

Hans Zimmer joins for the first 50 minutes. The editor and production designer also participates, but really it's Nancy Meyers who provides the commentary here. There are nuggets of info here and there that are interesting, but this is mostly a commentary for serious fans of the movie. Nothing essential here.