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New York City wasn't always the buoyant, untroubled metropolis we know today. Once upon a time, it was a place so grim, so hard and Dickensian, that it shocked Charles Dickens himself, who in 1841 flatly declared, "All that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here." He was writing about a once notorious neighborhood known as the Five Points, the sights and smells of which a less celebrated author captured even more vividly in this guided tour of one of its slums:

Saturate your handkerchief with camphor, so that you can endure the horrid stench, and enter. Grope your way through the long, narrow passage—turn to the right, up the dark and dangerous stairs; be careful where you place your foot ... for it is more than shoe-mouth deep of steaming filth.... Turn to your left—take care and not upset that seething pot of butcher's offal soup that is cooking upon a little furnace at the head of the stairs—open that door—go in, if you can get in. Look ... there is no bed in the room—no chair—no table—no nothing—but rags, and dirt, and vermin, and degraded, rum-degraded human beings.

This passage is from a book entitled Hot Corn, an 1854 study of what was not yet known as the criminal underclass. (The title refers to a popular street food.) The text is reproduced in the 1928 history The Gangs of New York, written by Herbert Asbury, which in turn has been the inspiration for a new movie directed by Martin Scorsese, also called Gangs of New York (minus the "the"). Set in a city more Mad Max than Edith Wharton, the film details the bloody battles in mid-19th-century New York between "native Americans" of largely English ancestry and the Irish immigrants who were then disembarking on the city's docks at the rate of 15,000 a week. The melting-pot metaphor doesn't really suffice here; the movie's depiction of a fight between a dog and a sack's worth of hungry rats, staged for bettors, is an apter analogue for Scorsese's savage vision of a young America's struggle to forge an identity. (It makes present-day identity politics seem tame stuff indeed, unless A1 Sharpton, like some of the movie's more colorful characters, has secretly taken to biting opponents' ears off.) The picture will open shortly before Christmas and may prove to be the darkest, most violent film the director has ever crafted. (The New York of Taxi Driver could be the New York of On the Town by comparison.) Needless to say, it is also one of the most unlikely big-budget, nearly three-hour epics ever made—a big gamble for Scorsese and Harvey Weinstein, co-owner of Miramax, the film's producer. Whether today's audiences will take to a saga of rum-degraded human beings who are not also horny college students remains to be seen.

But one thing Gangs of New York has going for it, aside 1 from America's greatest living director, is a cast headed by Leonardo DiCaprio as an Irish gang leader, Daniel Day-Lewis as a native gang leader, and, in the love-interest role, Cameron Diaz. More specifically,  Miss Diaz plays an occasional whore who also happens to be a skilled pickpocket—the "finest bludget in the Points," as one admiring character in the film describes her, bludget being 19th-century slang for a comely female thief. It says something about the success of "the American experiment," if we may momentarily indulge in patriotic sentiment (and reference our high-school textbook), that this character is played by an actress of English-German-Cuban-Cherokee descent. It may also say something about the American experiment's success, or at least about its peculiarity, that she has earned tens of millions of dollars and become recognizable around the globe by, most famously, pretending to put semen in her hair. Is it any wonder immigrants are still clamoring to get in?

"I DON'T CARE WHAT IT IS. IF I GET TO WORK WITH MARTIN SCORSESE I'LL DO IT."

It's a long way from the Five Points to the courtyard of the Chateau Marmont, in Hollywood, where if you saturate your handkerchief with camphor you will only miss the scents of jasmine and bougainvillea, along with the occasional waft of exhaust from Sunset Boulevard. As careful readers of this and other magazines already know, the hotel's courtyard is where nearly all show-business interviews take place. (The remaining handful occur while swerving in and out of traffic on La Cienega in someone's BMW X5.) And so here is Cameron Diaz herself, dressed casually but crisply in blue jeans and heels and a half-off-the-shoulder black sweater, swaying her way out of the lobby's Old Hollywood gloom and looking every bit the easygoing, long-limbed dazzler she typically plays on-screen. When she smiles, her eyes and teeth react to the hazy, early-afternoon light with the same electricity you might have thought cinematographers and lighting designers spend hours trying to confect. This is not a movie star of whom it is said, "She's so much smaller and washed-out-looking in person." This is a woman whose genetic blessings are as manifest as her lack of affectation. No actorly preening here: as she says of her current job, filming the sequel to Charlie's Angels with her "best friends," Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu, "It's not like it's brain-twisting crazy-mama anything. It's just, like, fun." Sure, but try getting William Hurt to admit that.

Diaz will confess to being a hard worker, even a bit of a perfectionist, but to hear her tell it, "fun" is pretty much the prime directive of her career. Just yesterday, she says, recounting a typical day on the Charlie's Angels set, "we're like—we're totally soaking wet and sprinklers are all over us and we're like laughing our asses off and we're like, This is so silly. This is our job.

DAZZLING DIAZ "I just had a good time with her," says Martin Scorsese of his Gangs of New York leading lady. "It was always refreshing when she was there." Diaz spent a total of five months in Rome for the complicated shoot.

This is what we get to do every day. " She offers one of her signature laughs—not a Julia Roberts cackle, more like an extended, hiccuping giggle, one that seems to express both delight and embarrassment at life's fortune, a laugh that seems to say, Don't hate me. As an actress, she may on occasion use it as a crutch; but to observe that seems almost churlish, like objecting to Jack Nicholson's arsenal of eyebrow inflections.

Off the clock, Diaz is known for being much the sort of guy's girl she is often cast as, most notably in There's Something About Mary; the 1998 comedy that made her a star and in which she was depicted lounging around in bikini underwear while watching Sports Machine and dreaming about an ideal date who would take her to ball games and buy her "hot dogs—big, sausagey hot dogs." A caricature, but maybe not so far from the truth: she can follow football, is a connoisseur of fart jokes, and has a potty mouth. More impressive still, she won a celebrity burp-off at the 2001 Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards, dispatching the girlie-men of 'NSync and the Backstreet Boys with a surprisingly resonant basso profundo belch. A true sportswoman, she then apologized for what she alone perceived as an uninspired effort: "I must say, next time I will do it better." Unlike many women whose livelihoods depend on maintaining cheetah-like svelteness, she also eats—or, more to the point, allows herself to be seen eating in public. Jennifer Egan, the novelist whose book The Invisible Circus was made into a 2001 movie with Diaz, remembers one day when that film was shooting on location in Portugal and Diaz was required to spend the afternoon jumping into the Atlantic Ocean. "She had to wear this bikini and she looked terrific. But she had the hugest lunch—I mean, she ate like a truck driver. And I thought, How many actresses would eat a two-course lunch when they know they have to spend the rest of the afternoon in a bikini? The idea that she needed to change herself in any way or guard herself didn't seem to occur to her." (Lunching at the Chateau Marmont, she plays against type by ordering soup and an artichoke, but then, true to form, scarfs nearly a whole basket of bread.)

"I HAVEN'T REALLY VENTURED OUT ON MY OWN BEING THE BIG STAR OF A FILM. THAT JUST DOESN'T REALLY INTEREST ME THAT MUCH.''

The veneer of olde-tyme grime and grease that coats everything and everyone in Gangs of New York—the movie's sets and costumes look as if they'd been hosed down with a mixture of soot and tallow— doesn't obscure the radiance that has put Diaz in the uppermost tier of Hollywood actresses in box-office terms, a group that at present is arguably restricted to herself, Julia Roberts, and Reese Witherspoon—not necessarily in that order, but not necessarily not, either. At any rate, with Diaz having reportedly joined the $20-million-a-picture club, if only for Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, as the sequel to the $ 125million-grossing film has been uncleverly titled, it is safe to say that she is history's most successful model turned actress. Perhaps more important, in a career that dates back only as far as 1994's The Mask, she has also secured herself a place in cinematic history—and in future Oscar-night nostalgia-clip packages—three times over: (1) for her delightfully off-key karaoke rendition of "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself" in My Best Friend's Wedding; (2) for the "hair gel" scene in There's Something About Mary; and (3) for her completely gratuitous and utterly winning "booty" dance in Charlie's Angels, a fusion of gawky and sexy (her own choreography, by the way), which was easily the most memorable performance in boys' underwear since Tom Cruise launched his career in Risky Business by scampering about in his tighty whities. All three scenes trade on Diaz's signature gameness, her willingness to not let her beauty get in the way of her inner goofball. (She is often compared to Carole Lombard.) But lest anyone think looks and charisma are her only stock-in-trade, remember that she is a skilled-enough actress to make audiences believe that Dermot Mulroney would choose her over Julia Roberts in My Best Friend's Wedding and that Tom Cruise would choose Penelope Cruz over her in Vanilla Sky. Neither assignment could have been easy. (She herself is currently dating the actor Jared Leto, star, most recently, of Requiem for a Dream. Past boyfriends include Matt Dillon and Vincent D'Onofrio.)

A brief biographical sketch: Diaz was born 30 years ago in Long Beach, California. ("I'm so happy to be out of my 20s," she says with an enthusiasm that anyone who has survived his or her own 20s would interpret as genuine.) Her Cuban-American father was an oil-company foreman with a "twisted" sense of humor. ("Go play on the freeway" was a favorite parental request.) Her mom, who worked for an import firm, is of English-German-Cherokee extraction. (Diaz attributes her flat, wide cheekbones to her Native American heritage.) The younger of two sisters, Cameron grew up in a middle-class neighborhood otherwise dominated by boys; despite being saddled with the nickname Skeletor, she passed her childhood playing football and baseball and getting into her share of scrapes. She has said she never considered herself beautiful—"Are you kidding? My nose has been broken three times and I have a serious pimple problem" (in truth, she does have a bit of a schnoz)—but at some point amid all the roughhousing she blossomed. A photographer noticed her at a Hollywood party when she was 16, and with one thing leading to another, she soon had a contract with the modeling agency Elite and was working as one of the more employable "girls" in Europe, Japan, and Australia—successful, if well short of Gisele Bundchen status.

By her account, her movie career has been something of a fluke. It certainly wasn't something she would have eagerly debased herself for—unlike, say, everyone else in the profession. Her first role, which she got at the age of 21, came about due to the coincidence of Elite's being headquartered in the same office building in Los Angeles as The Mask's casting director, who one day asked the agency for some headshots. The film's director, Chuck Russell, was looking for unknowns and seized on Diaz's picture. He had her flown in from Paris, where she was living at the time, to audition for the lead, a slinky, femme-fatale-ish nightclub singer, opposite Jim Carrey. To her mind, it wasn't much of a break. "I wasn't really interested," she says. When the day of the audition came, "I called my agent up and I was like, 'I don't feel like going.' I was bloated—I had started my period. I was angry. I said, 'Is there another part I can go read for that I don't have to put on a dress?'" She ended up auditioning for a smaller role, but Russell was so enamored that he wanted her for the lead anyway, despite her lack of enthusiasm and the fact that she had never acted before. "She was just a natural walking in the door," says Russell (whose most recent movie was The Scorpion King with the Rock, another more or less natural). "Obviously she's lovely. But what I think really makes her unique is this charm she's got, and humor that she's got, that makes her appealing to both men and women. In fact, that's probably not a bad definition for what makes a movie star. It's why women can think Mel Gibson is gorgeous and guys can still imagine they would like to be a friend of his. I knew with Cameron I could make her look explosively good and still make her greatly sympathetic."

Diaz herself came around and committed to the role once she realized Russell was serious about casting her—even though the studio, New Line, was dead set against the idea. Carrey at the time was known only as "the white guy" on television's In Living Color, and New Line was hoping to land an actress who might provide at least a gentle gravitational tug at the box office—not a woman "who hadn't even done a soap commercial," as Russell puts it. "They wanted Anna Nicole Smith," explains Diaz. In the end, with Russell threatening to quit just two weeks before principal photography was set to begin, New Line finally signed off on Diaz. "I was, like, sick to my stomach," she says, recounting the first day of shooting. "I was going to throw up—I mean literally, like 'Pull over! I'm going to be sick!' I was like, 'Oh my God—what am I doing?"' One way or another, she figured that out and rewarded her director with a performance that drew appreciative if not quite glowing reviews. "A real find," noted Variety.

(There's an alternative version of Diaz's "discovery." On the commentary track of the DVD for There's Something About Mary, one of the Farrelly brothers remembers their first meeting with the actress: "I asked her, 'Is it true you had to fuck Jim Carrey to get into the business?' She said, 'No, I blew him.'")

Rather than do the obvious thing—more roles as "the girl" in high-concept comedies and blowhard action movies—Diaz followed The Mask with a series of dark, little-seen independent pictures such as She's the One, Feeling Minnesota, and A Life Less Ordinary, movies in which she deliberately low-beamed her charm and showed a flair for playing ball-busters. (Like everyone else, Harvey Weinstein compares Diaz to Carole Lombard. "But at the same time," he says, "you can see her doing all the Barbara Stanwyck roles.") It was 1997's My Best Friend's Wedding, in which Diaz is first seen wearing a bright-yellow shift and looking like the world's most luscious Easter chick, and in which she subsequently goes nose-to-nose with Julia Roberts and wins, that anointed her as someone with the potential for true stardom. But during filming she was taken aback by the amount of scrutiny her co-star received, and was quoted as saying, "I don't ever want my name to be the first over the title." And so, rather than do what would now seem the obvious thing—big romantic comedies—she's taken supporting roles in films such as The Invisible Circus, Vanilla Sky, and Being John Malkovich, in which she frumped herself down in a frizzy brown wig, lumpy sweaters, and makeup that made her look puffy, as if she'd been crying for three straight days. (Compare that with the thick glasses and stringy hair most actresses affect when they want to play dowdy.) And then there was Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday, where, as the improbably young, improbably hard-assed owner of a pro football team, she proved her tomboy mettle by holding her own in a locker-room scene while acting opposite the largest penis ever seen on film outside of a Long Dong Silver movie— Boogie Nights included. The movie that established her as an A-list attraction, There's Something About Mary, was hardly an obvious star vehicle; before it was released, in the summer of 1998, few people would have predicted that a movie built around a semen stalagmite and male genitalia caught in a tuxedo zipper would be a blockbuster to the tune of $176 million. As she says, "When we were doing that movie, my agent tells me, people were like, 'You're going to let her do that movie? Are you crazy?' I didn't think about where it was going to take me. I was just like, 'This is the funniest thing I have ever read.'" * Even her most blatantly commercial vehicles, the Charlie's Angels pictures and last spring's raunchy girls' comedy The Sweetest Thing, carefully position her as part of a threesome, maybe the apex of a triangle but not "the" star.

"YOU HAVE A FEELING CAMERON LIKES TO ACT, WANTS TO STICK AROUND," SAYS ONE PRODUCER.

When it's suggested to Diaz that she W makes success sound like an inadvertent lark, she laughs. "The whole thing is totally inadvertent." When it is further suggested that, from a conventional career-management point of view, she seems to have rather stumbled her way to stardom, she laughs again. "I did. It's so silly. I just have no idea how it happened—it's almost embarrassing to say. But what I know is this: I work my ass off." Describing the way in which she chooses projects, she holds a finger up, says, "I want to see which way my own wind is blowing," and adds, "I haven't really ventured out on my own being the solo person, the big star of a film. I don't know why, but that just doesn't really interest me that much."

Others see her as maybe more savvy than she lets on. In the words of one producer, who hasn't worked with Diaz but admires her greatly, "I think she's been rather smart about her career. I think she's reaching past what seemed to be a comedy career and trying to get more serious. And if you were her manager, you wouldn't necessarily be advising her to go out for the big sort of Meg Ryan/Julia Roberts roles. I think being the third banana in a Cameron Crowe movie [Vanilla Sky] is a brilliant idea. I think laying back in Gangs of New York and letting Leonardo and Scorsese take all the heat—I think it's just a brilliant way to play your career, being very selective and not taking full responsibility for these damned movies. Because once you do that, it's a slippery slope. I mean, look at Demi Moore. It went from $10 million, $12 million, $15 million a picture to gone. It's amazing how quickly it can go. And you have a feeling Cameron likes to act, wants to stick around."

CALIFORNIA GIRL Diaz had a modeling career for five years before she made the rare successful transition to acting. Here she poses poolside with model Brian Leider.

It was like, 'I don't care what it is. If I get to work with Martin Scorsese, I'll do it.'" That's Diaz describing her reaction, like that of any sentient actor, to being offered a part in one of his films. For Gangs of New York, she would spend a total of five months in Rome, where the film was shot at the legendary Cinecitta Studios—Fellini's old stomping grounds—on a 1.5-square-mile set. Diaz has no formal training as an actor; by her account and others' she was challenged by the intensity of her co-stars, especially Daniel Day-Lewis, who came out of retirement to do the picture—he had given up movies after appearing in 1997's The Boxer to apprentice as a cobbler in Florence—and who even offscreen stayed fiercely in character as Bill the Butcher, the film's nominal villain. At times, his commitment to the role could be intimidating; crew members have described his on-set deportment as "scary." "I think, even after the film was finished, it was a few months before Daniel could get rid of the accent," says Diaz. "He talked in it all the time. And I'm amazed by that and admire it so much. I learned a lot from him, but it definitely was a tough discipline for me. It's hard to remove yourself from your own life that long." The former SoCal tomboy also admits she had a hard time adjusting to some of the physical demands of performing in a period film. "The corset threw me off," she says.

The shoot was punishing at times. A love scene between her and DiCaprio has them smacking each other around pretty roughly. Then she nearly bites his face off, Hannibal Lecter-style, before the two of them finally succumb to each other. One imagines that the scene was either very carefully choreographed or very dangerous and painful to shoot, or both. "We basically beat the shit out of each other for the day," Diaz explains. "But it was a lot of fun. We laughed our asses off. Because at one point it just became a test of stamina, like who was going to be able to endure it? Who was going to be able to flail about the longest without having a complete coronary? So those scenes became less about the kissing and that kind of stuff and more about 'O.K., can you do this again?' 'I don't know, man. I don't know if I have it in me.'"

"Seventeen takes," says Martin Scorsese, speaking in a rush of words, sentences piling up and even overlapping, as is his custom. "Yeah, 17 or 18 takes. We choreographed it, but that was it: you walked in, they hit each other, slammed against the pillow, fighting and scratching. The thing was that it was quite demanding. They would, after each take, collapse on the bed." The director pauses half a beat to imitate the sound of Diaz and DiCaprio panting—ahuh, ahuh, ahuh— then continues: "I'd say, 'You kids ready again?' We knew that she had done Charlie's Angels and that she was into this physical thing, and I quite honestly felt I could ask for anything, really. The biting-kissing thing was from the script. But then when we tapped into the energy of these two kids, you couldn't stop them."

Scorsese is sitting in the plush, emerald-green screening room in his Manhattan offices, located on a steel-and-glass stretch of Park Avenue (probably a swamp or maybe a pig farm at the time of Gangs of New York). He has been trying to make Gangs of New York for two and a half decades, since the project was first announced, a little too optimistically as it turned out, with a full-page ad in Variety in 1977. Potential drawbacks from an investor's point of view included the film's obvious expense (it was clear from the start that the Five Points neighborhood would have to be built from scratch rather than recreated somewhere on location), the film's violence (an early draft of the script includes a child being killed for a penny and a cop having his billy club shoved down his throat), and the fact that it takes place in a setting that for most audiences will be a historical nowhereland (true, the time frame coincides with the Civil War, which is an important political backdrop to the film's action, but there are no antebellum mansions or dashing young rebs).

CHARLIE'S ANGEL "It's not like it's brain-twisting crazy-mama anything. It's just, like, fun," Diaz says of filming the sequel to 2000's phenomenally successful Charlie's Angels.

The project got traction only when Leonardo DiCaprio came on board in 1998, but even then there were bumps. Gangs of New York was originally set up at Disney, but the company got cold feet, and after being rejected by MGM and Twentieth Century Fox, the movie was finally given the breath of life by Miramax, which is co-financing the film with an English company, Initial Entertainment Group. The script, by Jay Cocks (who also co-wrote The Age of Innocence with Scorsese), was reworked, with eventual contributions from Steven Zaillian (Schindler's List) and Kenneth Lonergan (writer-director of You Can Count on Me), to give the characters added depth and perhaps to downplay some of the bleakness and violence.

At the time Gangs of New York was coming together, both Scorsese and DiCaprio were represented by Artists Management Group, the Michael Ovitz-led company that has since imploded. Diaz was also a client of AMG's, but Scorsese says it was Joe Roth, then the chairman of Disney, who brought the actress to his attention. "Joe mentioned that if I were to consider Cameron, just consider, he said that she would help in terms of a big budget of this kind, that it would help to have people in the picture who are somewhat popular with the box office. I don't mean to be reductio ad absurdum, but you have to keep remembering that it behooves you to think of putting people in the film that people would want to see. Similar thing with Sharon Stone in Casino.'''

Scorsese is well known for his encyclopedic knowledge and a not unrelated discursiveness—Diaz says his on-set direction often consisted of long lectures on the historical context of a given scene or character—and when asked what it was in Diaz that spoke to him and persuaded him to cast her, aside from her box-office appeal, Scorsese replies with an erudite and ultimately cohesive five-minute answer that ranges from the status of women and children in mid-19th-century America to the biases of the era's media to the reasons behind the country's westward expansion to the fact that William "Billy the Kid" Bonney was bom in New York City. Unfortunately, there isn't space enough here to print it all, but the gist is that Diaz's character represents a kind of life force in the film's underlying emotional and symbolic scheme—let's say a more sophisticated version of "the girl" —and that he saw in her work a lightness, a humor, and a freshness that would bear that freight. "Not that she's funny in the movie," he adds, "but that she has the ability to be funny, the ability to see absurdity."

Impressed with her dedication and emotional fluidity, he ended up working closely with Diaz as her character evolved over the course of the shoot, the two of them adding shading to the role. Scorsese also praises Diaz's sheer nerve, especially in a scene in which Bill the Butcher uses her for a knifethrowing demonstration. "She was very brave, very brave. The knives were on wires, but it's very hard not to blink when you see a piece of sharp metal coming at your head." Diaz herself demurs: "It wasn't that scary. Marty's just being kind." Still, in tribute to her sangfroid, a crew member presented her with flowers upon completion of the scene. "I mean, I just had a good time with her," Scorsese says. "It was always refreshing when she was there."

This is seconded by Harvey Weinstein: "She was the inspiration to all of us on the set. I remember Leo turning to me and Daniel when she left and asking, 'Are you guys going to stick around?' None of us wanted

to be around after she left, including Marty. She was the soul of the movie. She's totally fearless. She's tough. There's nothing she wouldn't do. I think all of us—Marty, myself, Leo, and Daniel—really felt indebted to her. We probably wouldn't say that about each other, but we would say it about Cameron."

As has been chronicled in numerous newspaper and magazine articles, the set in Rome wasn't always a place of sweet harmony. Aside from the "normal" stress of filming a movie about urban warfare involving hundreds of extras in period costume—Luc Sante, the writer who was the film's historical consultant, likens Scorsese's labors to "juggling flaming bathtubs"—there was the added squeeze of money matters. Although it's unclear how much Miramax itself put up on a budget that has been estimated to be as high as $ 115 million—Weinstein has said his company is on the hook for only $32 million— Gangs of New York is the most expensive film the company has been associated with; Weinstein reportedly spent time more or less reminding Scorsese of this. Since both men are passionate, accustomed to getting their way, and said to have operatic tempers, the result was, by many accounts, a fair amount of friction: "occasional arguments," in Weinstein's words, "but only creative." Or, as he put it at a press conference last May at Cannes, sounding as if he had been addressing a kindergartner, "Now sometimes there is a limited budget and sometimes—we'd all like to have a thousand extras fill every nook and cranny of every sequence—but sometimes we have to make a compromise." "I'd always try to get a little more, naturally," Scorsese confesses with what approaches a twinkle in his eyes, recounting the temptations of working on an outdoor set that he controlled as opposed to the messier dictates of location shooting.

Whatever tension surrounded Gangs of New York apparently didn't abate after production wrapped, and the film's release date was postponed from December 2001 to summer 2002, and then again to December 2002. The first change came because Miramax was reportedly concerned about the film's violence in the light of September 11, although there were also doubts that Scorsese, a noted tinkerer in the editing room, would have the film finished in time. (It's telling, both about how long it has taken to get Gangs of New York to the screen and about the serial horrors of recent American life, that one of the reasons Disney dropped the project back in 1999 was concern over the film's violence in the wake of the Columbine shootings.)

Diaz thinks the film's drawn-out postproduction has been "just torture for Marty." But she also thinks the stories about behind-the-scenes conflicts have been overstated and misinterpreted. "Marty's an artist, Harvey's a businessman—never the twain shall meet. But they have to find their way of making it work, and that happens with every single movie, especially of this caliber, of this scale. They both just want to make the best movie that they can.... And I have to say, Harvey makes movies because he loves movies, obviously."

Scorsese soft-pedals any tension in much the same way. "It's the nature of a picture this size, and of two personalities like Harvey and myself, to a certain extent." He then allows himself a brief flash of amused irritation: "And the showman, Weinstein the showman. 'I announce this picture will be released on such and such a date ... I change my mind ... ' He's a showman and that's what you go for. But the studio has to question what you do, and they've got to come in. Each film has its own set of surprises and conflicts." In other words: you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette. Weinstein offered his own perspective at Cannes: "This is an attempt of art—not like half the shit you see from goddamn Hollywood ..." An apt bottom line no matter how the film is received by audiences and critics.

Weinstein says he will push "strongly" for a best-supporting-actress Oscar nomination for Diaz, which would be her first in any category. (She did win a surprise best-actress award from the New York Film Critics Circle for There's Something About Mary.) The producer will no doubt keep his promise and bang a big drum. "She deserves it," he says.

Ambition remains a tricky subject for Diaz herself. It has been reported, erroneously, that she is also serving as a producer on the Charlie's Angels sequel—a suggestion that seems almost to horrify her. "I'm not a very good multi-tasker," she says more than once, making a mantra of it while comparing herself unfavorably to Drew Barrymore, who is, in fact, a producer on the Angels movies. "Lucy and Drew both amaze me because those girls are just like workers. Lucy, she's on that fricking BlackBerry like every second. She's there typing, Drew's making phone calls. And I'm just like, 'You guys need me on the set? No? Good. I'm just going to mosey on back to my trailer and whip up a little something to eat. Anybody hungry?"'

By her own reckoning, introspection—at least for public consumption—isn't her strong suit. But she gives it another try: "I love working with people and having a good time. I mean, I say it so often I almost feel like people must be like, 'Shut up already with you-had-a-good-time. We understand you had a good time.' But really, honestly, it's, like, it was a good time. And that's why I do it." She doesn't seem to want to belabor the point, and neither will we.