Jennifer Lopez Talks Inspiration, Challenges, And New Chapter With This Is Me Now… A Love Story
Jennifer Lopez is ready to share more of her life, including heavily publicized love life, in the new movie This Is Me Now… A Love Story. The film accompanies the upcoming album This Is Me… Now, which is her first new solo project in 10 years and a sequel to her 2002 album This Is Me… Then. Pop Culture Planet attended a press conference featuring both Lopez and director Dave Meyers to talk about the process of making this introspective film.
After creating the album, Lopez felt she still had so much more to tell. “When it was done, I thought to myself, there's more to this story. There's something bigger I want to do with this music. I just don't want to do the normal, put out a video and do this and do that and promo and blah, blah, blah. It felt like there was a bigger message,” she said. “I played [Meyers] some of the music and I said, ‘I want to do something.’ I don't know exactly what I want to do, which is kind of why I think we created something that hadn't really been done. It didn't fit into any one specific category. Not quite a film, not quite a video, but a story nonetheless. Something very original.”
As much as the film is autobiographical, there are elements that are fictionalized, but still personal to Lopez. “It seemed like such an important moment in my life. I was at a point in my life where I could really look at all of the things that I was good at and the things that I felt and knew about myself and put them all into this project in a way. So yes, there's parts of it that feel kind of very autobiographical and then there's parts of it that are kind of meta. Not exactly what happened, but also the feeling of that is what happened,” she explained. “There was things that were kind of more taking license and really doing what was best for the entertainment and storytelling of the film. That mix of it being personal, but also being able to be fantastical, surreal, magical is what I think makes it really kind of moving, entertaining, and at the same time, super real.”
Metaphors, including Lopez’s portrayal of a construction worker at Heart Factory, also play a role in the film to contribute to her truth. “That stemmed from her telling me the pain that she's been in, specifically the pain that she went through when she broke up with Ben [Affleck] the first time. There was a lot of honesty that was shared in that first meeting,” Meyers added. “So the Heart Factory became sort of a Titanic level meltdown, which was a metaphor for what she was giving me as far as her truth. So even the metaphor of sci-fi parts of the film stem from a scent of Jen's real story, the truth.”
The musical inspiration of Funny Girl, West Side Story, The Music Man, and more can be seen throughout the film, but the visuals stand out. “David was the perfect partner in that because he's such a visual genius. What he did on this film from taking a lot of these scenes that were shot in green screen to where they wound up was nothing short of miraculous on the budget we had,” Lopez stated. “We had a sizable budget, but it wasn't the budget of a $50 or $60 million film, which is, to me, this kind of looks like that. The special effects are that good in this.”
With a film that stands out in all aspects of different choreographed dances, extravagant music, and emotional storytelling, challenges are bound to emerge. “Everything was challenging about making this movie, from getting people to understand what we wanted to do to getting it made to doing it in the amount of time,” Lopez said. “Some of my fans who knew that it was coming were like, ‘What's taking so long?’ But the computer graphics and everything that were done on green screen were done in a record amount of time.”
“I guess I would say that Jen's drive, it's almost like the more impossible it was, the more she's all for it,” Dave added. “I just think that Jen's spirit of rise and above anybody that says no is why she's here. It's why she is who she is. It's why she's just yet again at the doorstep of something new. So that was evident for me as a partner to her. It was always my impossible that was a little less than her impossible.”
Despite challenges in being shut down, script writing, and coordinating multiple celebrity cameos, the film serves as a new chapter for the pop icon. “So it ended this 20-year journey about a lot of questions that I had, about love and being myself, a hopeless romantic, and what it means to really enter into a kind of healthier, more self-accepting phase for myself,” she explained. “What the movie shows is that there has been struggles and there has been hard times that nobody knew about that I kept to myself. Gaining the confidence to be vulnerable and to admit certain things to the world, I think has only made me more comfortable in my own skin and 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, of feeling more free to express myself in a lot of different and exciting ways.”
This Is Me Now… A Love Story premieres February 16 on Prime Video.
