It was New York, however, where the film was shot for three months, that really made an impression on Diaz. She spent Sundays hanging out in Central Park and getting lost in the endless nooks and crannies of the city just like any other newcomer. “You can walk down the street and end up in a gallery or some wonderful ethnic-food restaurant, or you can stop in a shop that sells, I don’t know, staplers from all over the world!” she enthuses, sounding, endearingly, more like a tourist than a movie star. “You don’t get that in L.A.—that kind of, I don’t know, specialty.”
The cast and crew took to spending Saturday nights at Sing Sing, an East Village karaoke bar where, says Diaz, “there’d be 30 of us in this really tiny room screaming at the top of our lungs. All of a sudden it would be four in the morning and we’d have no idea what time it was, no idea how long we’d been there, and nobody would be ready to go home. It was awesome.”
Kutcher, for one, doesn’t think Diaz is ready for a recording contract. “It’s tough to beat me rocking out to ‘Sister Christian,’” he says. “But Cameron gets an A for effort.”
Diaz went so gaga for New York that, in the end, she decided to make the city her second home. Though the Southern California native insists she’ll never sell her house on the West Coast (“My family’s there, so I’d never just leave”), she recently purchased a place in Manhattan, reportedly a West Village two-bedroom with an asking price of just under $3 million. “You know, bicoasssstal,” she says, drawing out the word in a mock pretentious way. For Diaz, what’s most appealing about the city, aside from the exotic stapler shops, is the fact that, she says, “I can actually have a life.” While there’s no escaping the paparazzi—even atop the Andes, as she’s learned—she finds it easier on the East Coast, where, unlike in Los Angeles, a mob of photographers isn’t permanently stationed outside her door. “I’m done with L.A.,” she proclaims, sounding, for the first time, less like kooky Cameron and more like a woman who’s not afraid to piss a few people off. “Those guys [the paparazzi], you can’t get away from them. You have no options because everybody’s in a car. Here, I can walk down the street like everybody else.” In New York, she adds, “not everybody is there to be rich and famous or attach themselves to rich and famous people. People want nothing from you. They just want to say, like, ‘Hey, how’s it going, Cameron?’ I like that interaction. I like to be in a place where I can be open to people and not worry about the consequences.”
