NEW YORK -- There are many things you can shoot in a studio, but a church wedding exterior is not one of them.

So it was that a mob scene was created on the streets of Manhattan last October outside St. Patrick's Cathedral, as Sarah Jessica Parker was filmed walking up the steps in a Vivienne Westwood wedding dress with co-stars Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon and Kim Cattrall. Fans, news cameras and paparazzi alike swarmed the barricades, and speculation about the top-secret plot of the Sex and the City movie ran wild on the 'Net.

"I spent a lot of time outside saying, 'This is like some crazy dream sequence,' " Parker says recalling the conspicuous shoot. "Michael (Patrick King, the director) and I talked at the end of every day, and it was, 'Let's do what we're going to do and not panic.' "

"He said, 'Very soon we're going to be off the streets of Manhattan and we're going to go underground and in post (production) and people are going to be talking about other things that are far more interesting and important than us.' And he was right."

As that scene and the speculation, we refer you to the old saying that begins, "when you assume..."

Sarah Jessica Parker is more than the TV incarnation of Carrie Bradshaw, the vessel of Candace Bushnell's sexual misadventures in the quasi-autobiography Sex and the City. She was a producer for five of the series' six seasons on cable, and was instrumental in putting the movie together. "I really love it," she says. "I don't know that I'll ever have this kind of a relationship to an experience again. I don't know if I'll ever feel this proprietary again.

"But I love producing. Sometimes I think it's just because I'm one of eight kids and I always was around chaos that needed to be controlled in some way."

She is in many ways not Carrie Bradshaw. She was a Broadway baby, rather than the starstruck twentysomething "immigrant" from Middle America that Carrie ostensibly was. She is not as big a shoe person (her favourite footwear is a pair of leather Greek flipflops she bought for $6 and has since spent hundreds of dollars to keep together). Rather than bow to fashion, Parker was the one who insisted they stick with Carrie's old Manolo Blahnik standbys rather than switch her allegiance four years later to a more current designer. "There's been a lot of designers since then that have become important to women," she says. "Christian Louboutin is very recognizable. All the bottoms of his shoes are red. A very clever man."

For her allegiance, Manolo Blahnik created a special pair of blue shoes that match Parker's eyes and play a key role in the plot of Sex and the City.

"I hope the fans like the choices we make in terms of the story we told," Parker says. "It was their devotion that made the movie, and I think Michael and I wanted to give them everything they thought they wanted and everything they didn't know they wanted.

"I'm very interested in the kind of experience it is to suffer a loss and disappointment at 40 than at 20. And I think that's what this movie is about, being a grownup and understanding your own complicity and disappointment. (The message is) friends are necessary and vital. But when you're 40, you have to figure it out for yourself.

"I just like telling their stories," she says of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte. "Somebody, foolishly or not, said they'd finance that story ... and I love these people, so I wanted to give it one more shot. Maybe I'm living in a fool's paradise, but I thought I could stay her (Carrie) forever. But that's probably the very reason I shouldn't."

Cast away from Ms. Bradshaw, Parker has been fodder for romantic comedies (Failure to Launch, Smart People), but she regrets never being cast in a period piece. "I always thought I was suited to that because in my head I live in a different time anyway.

"I also secretly always wanted to play a conductor. I think because growing up, we spent so much time at the symphony. We were allowed to bring a book because children get bored. But the conductors were so incredible."

But then she says she's learned life doesn't follow a script. "Pretty much every waking day of my life is not where I expected to find myself. I was an actor for most of my life from 8 years old. My dream and goal was to be a working actor, to live on 45th St. between Eighth and Ninth and have a studio apartment like all the other grownups I knew.

"And this is not the life I am living now. This is a very different person. I have more than I ever thought I'd have -- an extraordinary family, a husband (Matthew Broderick) and son (James) that changed everything."