The directors: Michael Patrick King and ‘Sex and the City 2’

When Michael Patrick King was first approached about working on the "Sex and the City" series in 1998, he was intrigued by two things: One was the ambiguous look on Sarah Jessica Parker's face at the end of the pilot, when she appears to morph from insouciance to stoic dismay as her future love Big drives away. The other was the lure of "taking sex out of the shadows. I like the fact that it's not so dark and shamey. We took sex out of the black, inky oil stain and we made it pink and fuzzy like Champagne."

It was an exciting new realm for the 55-year-old writer-director of now two "Sex and the City" feature films. "Having been raised Irish Catholic, shame-based and never talking about sex, suddenly, I had this whole world that no writer had had," says King, the son of a janitor and a Krispy Kreme worker. When he wrote a scene set in a taxi cab with Charlotte complaining about her new lover's sexual preferences, "and the four girls are talking about anal penetration but comically — I thought, ‘This has never been written before!' "

One only has to look at King's Sunset Boulevard office to recognize the distance he's traveled. In one glass display case is the famed white tutu skirt worn by Parker in her first season as columnist Carrie Bradshaw. Yet right above that is a black-and-white photograph of a family of Tinkers, poor Irish nomadic folk that "Sarah Jessica gave me as a gift after the first movie, so ‘you never forget where you come from.' " Another photo shows Andy Warhol, like King, a son of Pennsylvania who through self-invention, climbed the heights of pop culture. King, a kind of scrappy, clever leprechaun, notes that Warhol came from Pittsburgh rather than his own hometown of Scranton: "He's a little more steel. I'm more coal."

Parker notes that even after all these years of working with King on the character, the two still get dazzled by some of Carrie's forays into excessive luxury. "He always thinks we respond that way because we're from working-class people," says the actress. "This minute-to-minute appreciation of anything grand and spectacular. He relishes the opportunity because, growing up where he did, it was a big deal to pursue what he wanted. For him to be in the driver's seat is probably beyond all of his own dreams."