Last month, Jennifer Lopez released the trailer for her upcoming new film, titled This Is Me...Now: A Love Story.
The film, which will be released Feb. 16, is described by Prime Video as a “narrative-driven cinematic odyssey” that will accompany Jennifer’s forthcoming album, This Is Me...Now — and from what we’ve seen so far, it looks like a pretty wild ride.
In the trailer, Jen finds herself in multiple relationships and marriages, with her friends worrying that she might be a “sex addict.” At one point, she’s seen on the back of a motorcycle with her real-life husband, Ben Affleck; attends a therapy session with a counselor played by Fat Joe; and delivers several heartbreaking lines about love.
Now, if you’ve been on social media much over the past few weeks, you might know that the trailer for Jen’s new film sparked quite a mixed response from fans.
But fast-forward to today, and Jennifer is opening up about the forthcoming film in a little more detail.
Speaking at a press conference this week, per People magazine, Jen — who is listed as a cowriter at IMDb and was accompanied by the project’s director, Dave Meyers — admitted that she found herself doubting her writing skills while putting the film together.
However, she revealed that Ben helped silence her doubts by offering a sweet word of advice.
“I was like, ‘I don’t write, I don’t do this,’” she recalled telling him. “He was like, ‘You do, you write, you direct, you produce, you choreograph, you do all the things. Start stepping into that, start owning a little bit of who you are.’”
While the director, Dave, reportedly said that Jen funded the entire film herself, she went on to explain that the project was inspired by the way she feels her life is “magical” and “surreal at times.”
“I went in the studio and I made this album, and when it was done, I just thought to myself, There’s more to this story,” she said. “There’s something bigger I want to do with this music.”
“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, because it didn’t fit into any one specific category. Not quite a film, not quite a video, but a story nonetheless, something very original,” she added.
And adding that the film marks a “turning point” in her life, Jennifer explained that the project depicts her entering a “healthier” phase of her life.
“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 said.
“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, and gaining the confidence to be vulnerable and to admit certain things to the world 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,” she added.
