NEW YORK — What you’ve seen in the trailers isn’t just a mirage: Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda really do ride camels in Sex and the City 2.
The unlikely scene — shot on the same Morocco dunes as the 1962 epic Lawrence of Arabia — is not exactly a stroll down 5th Avenue. But if anyone can make a desert ride on a pair of hump-backed creatures best known for spitting look glamorous, it’s SATC’s Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis.
“It was laborious and it was herculean and it was one of the greatest experiences of my professional life to live and work with this cast and that crew every single day, to see the sun rise and set over our locations in the most far-flung places, to lay on the bed all day with these women exhausted and laughing,” says Parker, seated with her castmates and surrounded by sparkly Manolos (including a fuchsia version of the sapphire pair Mr. Big proposed to Carrie with in the first SATC film) and red-soled Louboutins during a press conference aptly located in the shoe department of Manhattan retail institution Bergdorf Goodman.
“To be on a camel with Kim Cattrall …” Parker continues.
“… That’s not something most people can say they’ve done,” Cattrall laughs.
Nor is it something most Sex and the City fans would expect their fab, fearless, feminine heroes to do (and yes, one of them, Davis, did take a fall). A portion of the 1998-2004 HBO television phenomenon’s second film adapt is set in up-and-coming tourist hub Abu Dhabi. But because the destination is ultra conservative and didn’t allow the film to shoot there, the Moroccan town of Marrakech stood in for the hotspot — where the girls — writer and Big (Chris Noth) wife Carrie Bradshaw (Parker), healthy libidoed PR exec Samantha York (Cattrall), married mom of two Charlotte Goldenblatt (Davis) and married lawyer and mom Miranda Hobbes (Nixon) — go on vacay.
Despite 40-degree heat, tight shooting conditions and the obvious fact that sand and stilettos don’t mix, director Michael Patrick King (who also helmed the first film and a number of SATC episodes) says the desert was a breath of fresh air compared to their shoot outside of Bergdorf in New York, which anyone who has picked up a tabloid recently will know faced its share of interruptions.
“We had New York, which was here, Bergdorf’s in front, with thousands and thousands of people watching and supporting, and it’s like an interactive theatre piece,” says King, who went so far as to shoot a few faux scenes to protect SATC 2’s heavily guarded plot. “The girls go to talk, everybody shuts up, I say ‘action’, quiet, lines, then applause.
“When we went to Morocco, in the middle of the Sahara Desert, (there was) not a sound, not a paparazzi — just a crew, the hot sun and the sun falling out of the sky quickly. It was a completely different, bizarre and magical time.”
King says his inspiration for the second film was the mostly female audiences who came out to the first one in 2008. After witnessing women getting dolled up for pre-show cocktails and taking photos of themselves in the theatres, he says he realized it was no longer a flick, but “an interactive party.”
Thankfully, an equally dazzling worldwide gross of $415 million for Sex and the City: The Movie allowed them to throw another pricier party set in “Samantha’s” suite — er, sweet — hotel hookup, the Mandarin Oriental Jnan Rhama Marrakech.
“I set down to write in what was the beginning of an economic downturn,” King says. “I don’t think it was my job to have Carrie Bradshaw sell apples under the 59th Street Bridge. I thought it was our job to give everybody the vacation that they maybe can’t afford now and they can go with their girlfriends to the night out and they can go on ‘vacation’ with their other girlfriends, which are these four ladies.”
The shoot wasn’t all couture and cosmos, however. Parker says they were without a bathroom some of the time (“There was literally no interruptions”) and Cattrall adds that there wasn’t any escaping fans in Morocco. “(They) kept calling us by our characters’ names and we would actually turn around.”
But the four women did get weekends off, and even celebrated Thanksgiving — twice.
“We worked on the actual day because, obviously, in Morocco they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving,” Davis says. “Our fantastic English caterers had made a fantastic American Thanksgiving dinner for us. Which they thought just the Americans would want to eat, and then everybody wanted to eat it. We ran out of the apple pie, the pumpkin pie because everybody loved it.”
Nixon’s son and Parker’s son joined them for a second dinner, which included s’mores and snake charmers.
“These are amazing memories that we have just as well as a group,” Davis says.
Parker’s favourite memory is equally fuzzy — and seems to dismiss any rumours of cast clashes, particularly the ones about her and Cattrall butting heads.
“We had this chance to live together and to know one another in a way we’ve never had the opportunity to do so in New York,” she says. “In New York we go home to our friends and our family and our children and our animals. And for me it just changed everything and I just came away loving them more than I ever have because I got to see them in a new way.”
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