NEW YORK -- It was all hush-hush, with top-secret, tightly guarded scripts for "Sex and the City: The Movie," and then the actors arrived for their first week of shooting.

"It wasn't just a couple of fans with camera phones," Kristin Davis, who plays Charlotte, recalled in animated fashion, as if she were talking to the girls over brunch. Onlookers had video cameras and notebooks, and fans reported what they saw as if on the front lines of a military maneuver.

"Girl, she's pregnant and talking to Big," a man who was now sitting among the writers at a table at the Mandarin Oriental hotel had dutifully told friends after he spotted Charlotte with a baby bump and actor Chris Noth.

If that pairing had been combustible, chaos erupted when the four female stars -- Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall and Davis -- walked down Park Avenue.

No wonder that writer-director Michael Patrick King started talking about "dream sequences" to throw folks off. Or maybe not. But with some of the key scenes shot inside, there are still some surprises awaiting moviegoers come Friday.

The film has been a long time coming, and Parker acknowledged that as she and her fellow actors -- including newcomer Jennifer Hudson -- and King made the rounds of tables rimmed with a dozen interviewers each.

As is typical, each entertained questions singly, although Nixon addressed the persistent rumor that the women hate/despise/dislike each other. "We all love each other. We've had our disagreements and our arguments over the years, but we certainly are very devoted and admiring of each other."

Parker -- suffering from allergies just like non-fashion icons who weren't clad in a dress by Lanvin, strappy sandals by Proenza Schouler (even she couldn't estimate the heel height, joking "I've lost all perspective") and earrings from Fred Leighton -- said she had been working on putting the on-again, off-again movie back together for two years.

"The most surprising thing of all is that we made the movie and that we are finding ourselves here today talking about it. I don't think, given all the fits and starts and all the obstacles and all the dead ends and all the resuscitation that happened, I don't think I would do anything differently because it seems to be, for myself and Michael Patrick King, standard operating procedure.

"I don't know what it is. I think we both come from backgrounds of chaos and large families, and this is just what we grew up with, and what we know, and maybe that's how we work best."

When the question is raised about a film franchise, she said it would be "greedy" to even entertain the notion. Parker remembers shooting the first season of the show in a vacuum and later debuting on "a network that was really under the radar" back in the day before Tony Soprano came to HBO and much of its programming was male-dominated.

The show became a word-of-mouth hit, with the audience growing each year thanks to reruns, videotapes, DVDs and syndication. If a woman describes herself or a friend as a Carrie, Miranda, Samantha or Charlotte, everyone knows what that shorthand means, although they all shared a love for New York.

"'Law & Order' shoots New York one way. Woody Allen shoots New York one way," Parker said.

"The way we shoot New York is a very specific city, a very specific time, very specific women, and although our city has changed in many ways ... the truth of the city isn't necessarily reflected in this movie. You're not seeing life on a subway in the early morning hours and all the different shapes and sizes and colors and ages of people."

"SATC" jumps off from the columns Parker's Carrie Bradshaw writes, and it's a city that's been "shined up and glittery and aspirational. It's a city of promise and potential and all that stuff that a girl dreams of when she comes here, but it's not the entire truth."

The movie tries to close the age and racial gap by adding Oscar-winner Hudson as Carrie's assistant. The lack of a face of color had been a shortcoming during the series, Parker said, and it was important to contrast what it's like to be 20 with what it's like to be 40. Or, gasp, 50!

The big-screen continuation of the series toys with the idea of fairy-tale endings and whether they're real or not.

"I'm really the beneficiary of my mother and her generation's hard work, so I tend not to believe so much in the idea of a fairy tale, but I do believe you can find contentment, but it can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, and there's not a definition for it anymore," Parker, married to actor Matthew Broderick and mother to their 5-year-old son, said.

"I think that's what Michael's really talking about is, what is happiness for you is not for me, necessarily. ... And I think we're lucky to live in a time and a place and country -- still, mostly -- where we can be those people."

The movie, Parker added, is also about "being a grown-up and what it means to be disappointed and to suffer loss and to find joy in friendships and joy in your city and what those relationships mean to you and, most importantly, to know what forgiveness means."

As for what Parker might say to her on-screen counterpart were she to walk into the room, the actress confessed, "I would be really kind of intimidated. ... She was probably the cool girl, and I'm not that."

When Davis was asked which of the show's characters she most resembles, however, she picked Carrie.

"I used to say Charlotte all the time because, obviously, I play her. But I've decided now it's Carrie because Carrie is always searching and analyzing because she's a writer and that's her job and because she's not sure where she fits into the scheme of the coupledom world, and obviously I'm not sure of this myself, as Kristin."

Charlotte struggled as she searched for her happy ending, which arrived in the form of her onetime divorce lawyer, an unlikely match for the brunette beauty.

"She so tenaciously pursued her dreams and her goals, and it so didn't really work out in any way that she expected, and thank God she found Harry. And Harry, I feel like, just opened her up and grounded her in a way to say, I may not get the picture-perfect version of what I want, but I'm going to embrace the version that I get."

In fact, Charlotte is so happy that she becomes terrified. "When bad things happen to her friends, it's got to be coming for me, because it's happening to them," Davis said of Charlotte.

"All of us, to a certain extent, feel that way about our success. ... I know a lot of fantastically talented actors who can't find enough work."

Strawberry-blond Nixon, who plays lawyer, wife, mother and dutiful daughter-in-law Miranda, has had no trouble finding work before or after "SATC."

Her first professional job was an "ABC Afterschool Special" co-starring Butterfly McQueen, and she's since played Eleanor Roosevelt, starred in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" off-Broadway and won a Tony Award as a distraught mother who loses a young son in an auto accident in "Rabbit Hole."

Nixon, clad in a sleeveless, pleated ivory-colored dress with a blood-red belt, said it was surreal to return to her role of Miranda.

"It was like 'The Secret Garden,' the ivy had all grown over and you found the key and you opened it and lo and behold, it was all still there." Even the boy who played her son, Brady, is back, giving the real-life mother of two special delight.

But the characters are older, which is why the theme of forgiveness looms so large.

"When the series started, and we would date guys just for one episode, and we would break up with them for seemingly inconsequential reasons, and there wasn't any real price to pay, you can't keep doing that -- or shouldn't keep doing that, particularly when you hit the ages that we are.

"So, at a certain point, when someone hurts you or when something is wrong and you feel betrayed and you have to find a way to deal with that, the idea of forgiveness naturally comes into play. ... Whether we can forgive or how we can forgive, it's not something that 20-year-olds probably think about a lot, but as you get on in life and people hurt you, it's something you have to think about."

With the character of Samantha marking her 50th birthday on screen (Cattrall will be 52 in August and cheered this brave twist), maturity and what it brings are unavoidable.

"One of the things that comes with age is an awareness that you don't have to solve it right now, that if you don't know the answer right now, you shouldn't do anything, you should wait and see," Nixon said. "With age comes slowness or hesitation that can mean the difference between the right choice and a really terrible mistake.

That's advice Miranda could have used, although Nixon said she likes her character, neuroses, vulnerabilities and all. Still, it seemed as if the four women had their fairy-tale endings when the series went off the air, but the movie revisits that prospect.

"There's this theme in the movie about Carrie reading to Lily, Charlotte's daughter, and the fairy tales and all the fairy tales end with a happy ending, and Carrie herself is in the midst of a very non-fairytale ending, and she tries to convey to Lily, it doesn't happen like this, right, you don't get what you want and then everything's perfect after that."

That was a reason to make the movie, Nixon said.

"You might reach a point in your life where everything seems like, 'I've gotten everything I wanted,' but it doesn't mean that you then die the next day. Life goes on and more things happen to you, and some of them are good and some of them are bad and a lot of them are unexpected, so these people had their stories wrapped up, but they have half of their lives still to live."

Cattrall's Samantha Jones is living part of hers in a Malibu beach house with boyfriend Smith Jerrod (Jason Lewis). In one unforgettable scene, she strips off her clothes, lies down and covers key body parts with homemade sushi.

"The sushi was chilled when it went on my body, and then it became warm," said Cattrall, clad in a V-neck turquoise dress overlaid with tiny squares of fabric the size of Cheez-Its. "Where I take it and I actually eat it came from the fact that I was starving and I had been on the table for hours. 'Keep it, do that in the take,'" was the director's advice.

Samantha has always been a trailblazer, whether yanking off her wig while undergoing treatment for breast cancer or taking up with a much younger man. "I really loved the idea," particularly after the unhealthy relationship with Richard Wright, played by James Remar.

Cattrall says, "When I started dating my younger man [chef Alan Wyse, 28], I first of all felt very much like Samantha." She wondered, what would they talk about, how would it work?

"And that has never been a problem. I'm with someone who is a fully formed person, and he has different energy levels than I do, God knows, and he's at a different point in his life, but there's so much common ground with what we have together. I'm very glad I -- I -- got over the ageism."

Spoken like Samantha, reel and real.