Lopez says a lot of the film — in which Affleck appears — feels “very autobiographical,” but with a surreal or meta twist.
Jennifer Lopez’s new “cinematic odyssey” may be called This Is Me … Now, but the project is filled with references to her past and sometimes-messy love life.
The Prime Video project, which drops on February 16, coincides with her first studio album in a decade and, per the streamer, “showcases her journey to love through her own eyes.” Anyone who’s seen the trailer for the film, however, knows this isn’t a straight-forward narrative — and instead is one filled with dance breaks, many a metaphor and some very surreal moments as the self-described “hopeless romantic” works her way through heartbreak.
One such heartbreak making its way into the film, according to director Dave Meyers, is the one that came after J.Lo and now-husband Ben Affleck broke up for the first time in the 2000s. Speaking with press alongside Lopez this week, Meyers said a scene which takes place in a factory and sees the singer attempting to stop the meltdown of a literal heart-shaped furnace was inspired by that split.
“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 the first time,” said Meyers. “There was a lot of honesty that was shared the first meeting. So the heart factory became a titanic-level meltdown, which was a metaphor for what she was giving me as far as her truth.”
While there are a lot of out-there elements in This Is Me … Now, the director said a lot of those still stemmed from Lopez’s “real story.”
Lopez, meanwhile, said including those nuggets of truth isn’t anything new — and, after her renewed relationship with Affleck inspired new music, she was ready to put it all out there for her fans.
“There’s not a project that I’ve ever been involved with, whether it’s music or movies or anything, that I didn’t put a bunch of my life into and a lot of my personal experience,” she shared.
“As an artist, that’s all you really have to draw on, the experiences you have and the experiences of other people around you that you bore witness to and with this one, it seemed like such an important moment in my life, a turning point in my life and I was at a a point in my life where as a person and an artist, I could really look at all the things I was good at and the things I felt and knew about myself and put them all into this project,” she continued. “Yes, there’s parts of it that feel very autobiographical and there’s parts of it that are kind of meta, not exactly what happened, but the feeling of that is what happened.”
Saying some creative licenses were taken for storytelling purposes, Lopez believes the mix of personal and fantasy “makes it moving, entertaining and at the same time super real.”
According to Lopez and Meyers, a number of studios passed on the film as she and Affleck pitched it around Hollywood. The two said a lot of people “didn’t quite get” what they were trying to do, with Affleck even giving them some “mentor-level” advice on how to get the project going. Per Meyers, Lopez funded the project herself — and called up her own celebrity friends for cameos.
“They didn’t understand what they were doing, they were out there wearing funny costumes on a green screen,” he said, referring to cast members like Sofia Vergara, Derek Hough, Keke Palmer, Post Malone and Kim Petras.
“They were like, ‘What am I doing?’ I was like, ‘Just trust me, it’s gonna be fine, I would never make you look crazy and if it looks crazy, we’ll throw it in the garbage,'” said Lopez. “A lot of them have seen the film and are so excited.”
Prime Video
Being with Affleck and working on this film in particular has caused a shift in Lopez, who called this time in her life the end of one chapter and the beginning of a new one.
“Ben said this to me, I was like, ‘I don’t write, I don’t do this.’ And he was like, ‘You do you write, you produce, you do all the things, start stepping into that, start owning that a little bit. Start owning who you are,'” she revealed.
“[This Is Me … Now] ended this 20 year journey and a lot of questions I had about love and being myself a hopeless romantic and what it means to enter into a healthier, more self-accepting phase for myself,” Lopez continued.
“What the movie shows is that there have been struggles, there have been hard times that nobody knew about, that I kept to myself,” she concluded. “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 to step into this next phase of my life as an artist and as a human being … a whole new chapter of me feeling more free to express myself in a lot of different and exciting ways.”
This Is Me … Now hits Prime Video on February 16.
Prime Video
