Sex in Morocco

The Sex & The City cast on riding camels, celebrating Thanksgiving with snake charmers and shooting the sequel, which hits theatres in India this week

The Sex & The City cast on riding camels, celebrating Thanksgiving with snake charmers and shooting the sequel, which hits theatres in India this weeku00a0

Sex & The City stars Kristin Davis (Charlotte), Sarah Jessica Parker (Carrie), Kim Cattrall (Samantha), Cynthia Nixon (Miranda), Chris Noth (Mr Big) and filmmaker Michael Patrick King get together in New York before curtains rise on the sequel to the Sex & The City film. The girls talk about bonding in the desert, female empowerment, fan reactions, and Thanksgiving. And the men, surprisingly, also manage to get their lines in.

Starring Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie

Starring Cynthia Nixon as Miranda

Starring Kim Cattrall as Samantha

Parker:u00a0Well, I also think that it's hard to deny that there is, as you've said, this wonderful search, this endeavour for love. But there is an emotional ingredient when I talk to people in the gay community.

The clothing is fun and it's just the cherry on the sundae, it's the souffle. But it's really this ability to articulate emotion, embarrassing and candid and intimate, and the humorous way of observing our emotional journeys that a lot of my gay friends really, really love. And I think that they are very comfortable saying that. And it's taken maybe the straight community of men a little bit longer. At the luggage carousel they used to go, "I watch your show." Or they'll say, "My wife, my girlfriend forced me." Now they seem to volunteer more freely the fact that occasionally they even watch it on their own, if the remote got stuck, buried or not, you know, or whatever.u00a0 But I think maybe generally that that's been my experience.u00a0

Nixon: Also, right from the beginning, there was a conscious decision made that we would never see these people's parents. We would never, you know, with maybe one exception see their siblings, two exceptions, but that because that they were each other's family. And I think certainly for many gay people and for many non-gay people, that's the reality now, that maybe you have a family that you come from that you love or maybe you have trouble with but that you come to New York and you create your own new family.

What's one of the most empowering thing you find about being a fun and fearless as woman?
Davis: Our characters are different but yet, we're very, very together. And no matter if we always agree, like sometimes the characters disagree, like Charlotte judges Carrie. I love that part of the storyline because I think that we do this in life. And it doesn't really serve anybody, but it's human nature. And then, luckily, Charlotte had enough time and honest conversation to realise, and tell herself: "That's really unfair of me to judge my friend and try to put my own preconceived notions on my friend."u00a0

But I love the fact that what we've created all together and what Michael has created in the writing for us, is these really powerful women who can be each powerful in their own right and still be together.u00a0

Cattrall: The most powerful thing for me is that we have encouraged a lot of women to change the way they feel about being single, about having cancer. All the story lines -- about getting married and then being deserted, being alone, being lonely.u00a0 That's a very powerful thing in this era of post-feminism. We've helped define what it is to be successful, smart and also feminine.u00a0

Parker: I really love how these women love each other in an era where women are really unkind to one another and call each other all kinds of horrible names, and there's a vernacular that it seems our ears have adapted to, which I find really objectionable.

Nixon: There was a time when Charlotte and Miranda were having a big fight about Charlotte's decision to stop working and to focus on having a child. And Miranda was very disapproving. And Charlotte really called her on it. And Charlotte said, "Isn't that what the feminist movement is about? It's not about you have to work or you have to stay home. It's about choices." And I think that, as Sarah said, these four women are so different from each other and they have such different points of view and they've made such different life choices. But they love each other and they're not shy about offering their opinions to each other and their advice. And I think that that's one of the things that I'm extremely proud of. I think we are a feminist show.u00a0u00a0

What was it like shooting in the Middle East?u00a0u00a0
King: We shot in Morocco for Abu Dhabi.u00a0 Morocco has a great tradition of filmmaking. They did Ben Hur. They did Lawrence of Arabia. We actually shot on the Lawrence of Arabia dunes. In New York, which was here in Bergdorf's, in front of thousands and thousands of people watching and supporting, it was like an interactive theatre piece. Every now and then someone breaks through and we have to stop and get everybody back behind the barricades.

When we went to Morocco, in the middle of the Sahara desert, there wasn't a sound, no paparazzi, just the crew. It was a completely different, bizarre and magical time. Different colours, different sounds, great crew, South Africans, Moroccans, Brits, Germans, everyone, it was an IHOP of crew with big meals in tents.

Cattrall: Every meal in a tent.u00a0

Parker: It was laborious and it was Herculean but it was one of the greatest experiences of my professional life to live and work with this cast and crew every single day, to see the sun rise and set over our locations in the most far flung places, to lie in a bed all day with these women exhausted and laughing, to be on a camel with Kim Cattrall as it disobeyed all orders.

Catrall: Not many people can say they've done that.u00a0

Parker: No, but I'm telling you, it was, it was indescribably wonderful to be so far away in such a wonderfully foreign place and to have this incredibly cinematic experience. To be in the dunes of the Sahara for days and see things that we will never see again, to smell things, to eat things, I mean, yes it was hard but it was -- we could not have done it anywhere else this way.
u00a0
We didn't even have a bathroom. There were literally, literally no interruptions.

Michael, what was your inspiration this time around?
MPK: My inspiration for the first movie was the girls reuniting. And my inspiration for this movie was the audience at the first movie. When I saw the audience showing up dressed and having cocktails before and groups and going out, and saw some people taking pictures of themselves in the theatre seats, I thought this is an interactive party.

The one rule we always tried to follow on Sex and the City from the writing camp is 'Don't repeat.'u00a0 Dare yourself to change it, break it, move it forward. It started out as a four single girls and very early we married one of them off. I mean, we defied the rules. So I knew it had to be a different vibe. And I sat down to write in what was the beginning of economic downturn. And we still are in it. And I thought, 'What's my job?" I'm not a banker. I can't go and balance your books. I'm a movie maker, happily.' And like they did in the Great Depression, I thought Hollywood should take people on a big vacation that maybe they couldn't afford themselves.

So I thought it's going to be a big party. I want to make a big extravagant vacation. I don't think it was my job to have Carrie Bradshaw sell apples under the 59th Street Bridge.

Could each of the girls tell us about their best memory of Morocco?u00a0u00a0
Nixon: Those first very heady days in the desert. It's like, "Wow, we really are far, far away in a place that we've never been before." And what was so great was that we were mostly in Marrakesh but then our first filming was out in the desert. When we arrived we had musicians waiting to greet us.u00a0

Catrall: And scarves.u00a0

Nixon: And scarves. We were in wardrobe, but everybody else was taught to tie turbans to help them keep cool in the desert. And I mean it was just -- it was so amazing to land in this small airport, kind of in the middle of nowhere.

Parker: We were shooting out of country for the first time. In New York, we go home to our friends, family, children and our animals, and it changed. For me, it just changed everything. They became ever more necessary. And I was challenged by the work they were doing and how good they were and what thoroughbreds they were and how nothing could get us down, no matter what.u00a0u00a0

Cattrall: We were welcomed by the people of Morocco and felt so protected that we really did feel like a royal family. I couldn't believe that people actually watched the show, and knew the characters. They didn't know our names in particular, but kept calling us by our character's names.

We also had weekends off so it was a bit of a vacation. Mostly on locations you don't get that; you usually work on a Saturday.

Davis: So beautiful, so beautiful... So on Thanksgiving day, our fantastic English caterers make an American Thanksgiving for us, which they thought just the Americans would want to eat. And then everybody wanted to eat it and there was none left.

Cattrall: (Overlapping) They ran out.u00a0

Davis: (Overlapping) Exactly, they ran out of the apple pie and the pumpkin pie. Everybody loved it.u00a0 When Cynthia and Sarah's sons came to visit for the weekend, we had another Thanksgiving at our hotel. We had snake charmers visit to show the boys, because we were
in Morocco.u00a0

King: (Overlapping) The traditional snake charmer.

What will men learn from this if they go with their wives and girlfriends?
Nixon: Possibly nothing, but maybe something. I'm sorry. I'm always a little suspicious about learning from an entertaining and fun movie.

But maybe to trust themselves and in a tradition and... God I don't know what the hell I'm saying.u00a0u00a0

Parker: Maybe they'll learn that it's okay to just...

Cattrall:u00a0 Just spend a lot of money on your gal.

King: The men will learn that Charlotte's nanny is God's gift to men.u00a0

Ladies, could you tell us what you want men to learn from this?
King: I think they'll be surprised how much the movie's for them as well.u00a0u00a0 I mean when I sat down to write it,
I realised that Mr. Big is now very prominently a part of Carrie Bradshaw's life. And so there's a couple of deliberate shout outs to men in this movie in terms of their point of view, because it is the struggle of the men and women together that makes the women better.

Nixon: There is one thing though, there is something that happens, as you know, an event that happens.

The kiss.
King: Don't say that.u00a0

Nixon: Don't say a kiss, no, an event that happens that could...

King: Please don't say a kiss, just say an event.u00a0

Nixon: An event possibly poisonous to their relationship. And I give credit to the writer of Mr. Big to turn poison into medicine, to not go to the impulsive place that men often do in an event like that and instead create a bridge to a deeper relationship. And I think that's something.u00a0

Parker: You know it's really -- it's wonderful, the couple of people I've spoken to, they're straight men, they might think that this whole franchise is anathema but they have loved that really the men -- there is not a villainous move by any man in this movie.

Any consequences are on the part of us and the choices we make and some momentary reckless behaviour or cavalier attitude about cultural standards.u00a0 That's all, it's all us.u00a0 And we become, frankly, a little wiser.

Plot of the sequel
It's two years since Carrie Bradshaw married 'Mr. Big', the man she'd always dreamt of being with. Carrie has to deal with her relationship taking a turn for the worse -- Big likes to watch old black-and-white movies on TV and eat take-out food, and that doesn't let Carrie be the free-wheeling party girl she used to be. Miranda deals with a new boss who can't handle an intelligent, powerful woman, and Samantha works as a public relations executive who gets the fashionable foursome an all-expense-paid trip to Abu Dhabi.

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