© Amazon Content Services LLC

Rating: PG-13 (Domestic Violence|Strong Language|Sexual Material)

Genre: Musical

Original Language: English

Director: Dave Meyers

Producer: Nathan Scherrer

Writer: Jennifer Lopez, Matt Walton

Release Date (Streaming): Feb 16, 2024

Runtime: 1h 5m

Distributor: Amazon MGM Studios

Production Co: Nuyorican Productions, Amazon MGM Studios

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Courtesy of Prime – © Amazon Content Services LLC

 

Press Conference with Writer/Actress Jennifer Lopez and Director Dave Meyers 

 

Q : This is unlike anything you’ve done before. Can you talk about how your album drove the idea for this original movie and why now is the right time to share such a vulnerable project?

Jennifer Lopez : I have been so proud to be able to realize this project at this point of my life. This is something that was really inspired by my personal feelings. There’s something more to this story, something bigger that I wanted to do with music.I felt i couldn’t have done it the usual way with a video, a promo or just the usual stuff. It felt like there was a bigger message.

So I called Dave and we started talking about it. I played him some of the music and I said that I wanted to do something but I still didn’t know exactly what. Which is kind of the reason. we created something that hadn’t really been done.It just didn’t fit in any specific category. After a few days of sitting at the table and talking, Dave told me: “This is the story about all that you just told me, this is what we should do.” And we started putting it down on paper, at the same time trying to describe it to people. They didn’t really quite get it, so we had to put down a script for them to kind of understand it.

Q : What did it mean to you working with Jennifer to such a private movie?

Dave Meyers : The very genesis of the film came from the private time we spent together. Like Jen said, she truly walked me through it. I hadn’t seen her in about 20 years, she had to explain the journey that she’s gone through personally. She told me a lot of truth, a lot of personal stuff was shared, and of course a lot of passionate musicAnything I asked to know more about, she was sharing. We just found together a nicer way to spin all of that into a piece that the world could explore with her. Jen’s always been like the most professional, hard working person that I met 20 years ago. But I think that what I got to experience this time around was a stronger will to get through this, something that maturity can achieve..

Q : Does this mean you found a different Jennifer Lopez from the one you met 20 years ago?

Dave Meyers : Now she has the courage of being vulnerable.It’s been such a rewarding process to do this movie. She’s bolder, stronger, more unapologetic about what she believes.bShe always always connected to this sense of commitment, always was a hard worker. But now there’s a kind of owning of where she’s at and who she is, It was wonderful to bear witness to that. I think it’s actually in the film. I think that that’s the difference.

Viewers are likely to interpret much of the movie as autobiographical, a stylized and fictionalized version of you. Where did you draw the line between reality and fiction in terms of what you wanted to share?

Jennifer Lopez : There isn’t a project that I’ve ever been involved with music or movies that I didn’t put a bunch of my life into, a lot of my personal experience. As an artist, you really have to draw on the experience that you haven’t but other people around you own. This movie is the same, It seemed like such an important moment in my life, a turning point where as a person and as an artist, I could really look at all of the things that I was good at, the things that I felt and knew about myself and put them all into this project.

Both professionally but also personally. So there are parts of it that are very autobiographical, parts of it that are not exactly what happened, just sharing the feeling of what happened. This Is Me…Now is super honest and true, but there are parts where we took some license and did what was best for the entertainment, for storytelling.It is a mix of it:, being personal, but also being able to fantasize, to be surreal, magical. This really created something really moving, entertaining and at the same time, super real.

Dave Meyers : She told me about the pain that she’s been in, specifically the pain that she went through when she broke up with Ben the first time. There was a lot of honesty that was shared in that first meeting. The first sequence of the film, the heart factory became sort of a Titanic level meltdown. Which was a metaphor for what she was giving me as her truth. So even behind the metaphor of sci-fi parts of the film, there is an incredible amount of truth.

Photo by Courtesy of Prime – © Amazon Content Services LLC

Q : Which are the musicals that inspired you, that you took inspiration from when you were making This Is Me…Now?

Jennifer Lopez : Every musical film that I’ve ever seen, I’m a huge fan of musicals. My mom was a huge fan of musicals and I grew up on them. Also growing up as well in the Eighties and Nineties with MTV and all the epic music videos that were made at that time. Combining all of these experiences together, we were able to make something that is fresh and new.

Funny Girl, West Side Story, The Music Man, every Disney movie that I’ve seen that has music in it. Plus the dramatic films that I grew up on. I think these days you have a lot of videos that are made for no money on an iPhone: that’s a different type of art. But growing up in the golden age of music videos, the golden age of cinema, you can tell there was a different kind of imagination, something that I wasn’t willing to let go, so I tried to make something even more like that. Epic in a way.

David was the perfect partner in that because he’s such a visual genius. What he did on this film, taking a lot of these scenes that were shot in green screen and turning them into what you can see in the movie, is nothing short of miraculous. We had a sizable budget, but it wasn’t the budget of a 50 or $60 million dollars movie, which is how our project looks like with the special effects.

Dave Meyers : We also took inspirations form those musicals that used a sort of abstract storytelling technique: Pink Floyd’s The wall was sort of like the last trying to do it. I guess Julie Taymor with Across the Universe tried something like that. There are very few films that dare to take on music, emotion and storytelling. Classic musicals have instead a very strong narrative.

Q : Can you talk about finding the right choreography for each song?

Jennifer Lopez : Those were all different. Every single one was treated as its own little film. Even though it was all the same director and the same artists. Every song had its own personality so I went with different choreographers in this film. There is a tribute to Singing in the Rain that I was so worried about because I did want it to be in a kind of contemporary take because it’s a ballad, but I had never danced that style before.

And I was very nervous about it. My amazing choreographer Tessa was like: “You can do this. It’s all about feeling and emotion and letting your body move from that.” She’s been fantastic with me and the choreography for this beautiful piece, one of my favorite moments.

Dave Meyers : This is what is unique and so specific about her. She was able to excel in all these different styles. She broke her back on some of these dance moves. And just killing it. This film sort of serves as a mirror of what Jennifer Lopez is capable of doing.

Q : What was the most challenging part of bringing this project together? And what was the most surprising?

Jennifer Lopez : Everything has been challenging. From getting people to understand what we were wanting to do to getting it made. The computer rabbits and everything that was done on green screen were done in a record amount of time. Same about the rehearsal period. We had a choreographer that left because of the Superbowl, so we had to replace him. There have been so many challenging things. The writing of the script. Every step of the way seemed to be a dead end, which we took as a challenge that turned into elevating it into something that we didn’t even realize it was being elevated into.

Dave Meyers : The more impossible it was, the more Jen was all for it. There have been some very sweet and mentor level conversations with Ben talking to both of us and saying it couldn’t be done in the way that we wanted to do it. And Jen was just: “Okay, we’re going to do it anyway.” She’s funded this movie herself. That is Jen’s spirit of rising above anybody that says no. Next to her, the impossible is a little less than impossible.

 Q : Without giving anything away we can tell this movie has a lot of famous cameos. How was that challenge of coordinating all these great actors?

Jennifer Lopez : It was a challenge. Some came on the same day, some didn’t. We had to make it work within whatever we could. It was actually probably the hardest scene to shoot with all of them. Also because we kept rewriting the script to adapt the lines to their personality and acting style. Most of them are personal friends, I truly have to thank them for their effort.. Not all of them understood exactly what they were doing, wearing those funny costumes in front of a green screen. I was like: “Just trust me. It’s going to be fine. I would never make you look crazy.” Even if it actually looks crazy. But luckily it turned out well and a lot of them have seen the film already and are so excited.

Q : How do you see this project fitting into your larger body of work and how does it represent in a chapter or evolution in your artistic expression?

Jennifer Lopez : I usually don’t write screenplays, it’s not my job. But Ben actually told me: “You actually do. Just start stepping into that, start owning that a little bit. Start owning a little bit of who you are.” I feel that in some way this movie ends a 20 year journey, about a lot of questions that I had about love and being myself a hopeless romantic. And at the same time what it means to enter into a healthier, more self-accepting phase.

What the movie shows is that there has been struggle and there have been hard times that nobody knew about. I kept it to myself. But then I gained the confidence to be vulnerable. And to admit certain things to the world. It made me more comfortable in my own skin, it empowered me in a way. To step into this next phase of my life. As an artist and as a human being, that will be a whole new chapter for me. Um, um, Feeling more free to express myself in a lot of different ways. Exciting ways.

Photo by Courtesy of Prime – © Amazon Content Services LLC

Check out more of Adriano’s articles. 

Here’s the trailer of the film.