With Sex and the City setting romantic-comedy records on its opening weeked, star and New York City resident Sarah Jessica Parker sat down with reporters about what going back to the role of Carrie meant for both herself and the city she calls home. 

Q: When you’re working on Sex and the City, you can feel the love that you have for it and obviously the love that [writer/director/producer] Michael Patrick King has for it. What has this meant to you?  It’s got to be like a dream that you haven’t woken up from yet.

A: In may ways it is dreamlike. The difference is there are like all these textures that don’t exist in the dream, you know? There is responsibilities. There is an audience that you feel responsibility for. There is the studio you feel responsibility to, and there is people’s time and talent that you’re asking of. And there is worry.  In dreams you’re sort of living in one dimension, but in life you have wonderful, strange, unique, once-in-a-lifetime experiences that are extraordinary, but they are filled with real human beings.

It just kind of makes it that much better than a dream, if possible.  It’s just been this wonderful thing that fell into our laps that we now feel very proprietary about. I mean we want to protect it and nurture it and serve it up in the right way, and it’s been just such a privilege to be part of this experience for all these years.

Q: You’ve done a couple of movies between the show, but was it great to step back into Carrie’s shoes?

A: It was. It was great and exciting, but it was also challenging because it was a different story we were telling. You know, Carrie has never had this experience. She’s never experienced this kind of sadness or loss or disappointment or rage, and it was all new and it was so exciting to play the year in that life, in her life.  But to be surrounded by those actresses and those actors, and shoot on the streets again the way we do, and the whole thing? All the times we didn’t think it was gonna happen, the fits and the starts...it’s been really worth every effort.

Q: Does it feel great to be kind of an ambassador of New York?

A: Well I’m very proud of the association. You know there is a lot of people that I think are ambassadors, great ambassadors of our city, but we do recognize, Cynthia and I, because we live here - and I’m sure Kim too - that there is an association, and it’s such a privilege because we are from here, we’ve lived here our whole lives and the city means a lot to us. We see all the promise and potential, so it’s wonderful to be identified in this way with this city. I don’t know. You feel very proud.

Q: I interviewed lots and lots of girls for the pieces that we're doing, and there were two things that they universally said...The girls always said, "This is what made me want to come to New York," and another thing that I think was so inspiring, and hopefully that you all are getting with the movie, is "This is a show that I watch with my girlfriends, and it’s what friendship means to me." That’s what they are all so excited to see - what these friends do. The men are great, but it’s the friendships that a lot of these people were coming for.  Is that what you all were trying for?

A: Well I think that is everything that she talks about in the beginning of the movie, this narration. She says that people come to New York looking for labels and love. Labels can be anything, whether it’s a job, a title, merchandise, material things, and love can be love with friends or love with a romantic partner, or love with the family, and it’s how you pursue that love that changes.

So, yes, the story is about friendship and love and pursuing love, but it’s about forgiveness, and that comes with pursuing love. I think it’s a wonderfully smart story about where we were and where we are now. I think bringing Jennifer Hudson in was so smart, because not only is she just beautiful to look at on screen, but she brings a sense of that idealism of coming to New York and what it means and the definition of this as a destination point.  And also this real innocence about falling in love and the ease and the simplicity of it rather than the complexity.  So I think it’s a great accomplishment on Michael Patrick’s part that he has been able to weave all of this into this screen play.