Director Mac Alejandre already detected the chemistry between Richard and Angel since he first handled them together in the youth-oriented Click, to the time they carried over their love team to the big screen in last year’s hit, Let the Love Begin.
"As I told Richard and Angel when we were outside a church in San Francisco, shooting I Will Always Love You (Regal Entertainment and GMA Films’ Valentine offering), they are, to quote a line from the inscription I saw outside the place, children of destiny," says the director. The best thing about this, he adds, is they’re willing to pay the steepest price for their destiny.
These big stars who take PAs (production assistants) and hangers-on for granted in the Philippines, didn’t raise a howl when they braved the cold and the backbreaking shooting schedule in San Francisco, to see the movie through.
Angel, for instance, was burning with fever on the second to last day of shooting, but chose to keep mum about it. Knowing fully well that every second counted, she didn’t want to let her illness get in the way.
But a member of the production staff touched her burning forehead one day and rushed her to the hospital not once, but twice for acute bronichitis.
Successive days of shooting with little or no rest – at Golden Gate Bridge, the Palace of Fine Arts, Union Square, Foster City Lake and Fisherman’s Wharf – all in Frisco, have taken their toll.
"It was 10 days of practically no rest," says direk Mac. We would pack up at 1:30 a.m. and resume shooting at 7 a.m that same day. The earliest time we packed up was 9 p.m. Instead of touring around the city and enjoying its sights, many of us just took this as our chance to sleep and rest some more."
Angel, a first-timer in San Francisco, didn’t have the chance to take in the sights and sounds of the city at all.
Richard was not spared the pressure of shooting in a foreign land where every second counts. He was still shooting a scene an hour before his – and everyone else’s plane were scheduled to return to the Philippines. So pressed for time was he that Richard’s bags were already packed and waiting for him on the set while he was shooting his final scenes.
Richard and Angel play the rich boy and the poor girl who fall in love and whose parents do everything in their power to tear their apart. They escape to the US (Richard helps Angel get a student visa), where love blooms and more problems crop up.
It’s another take on the old saw that the course of true love never ran smoothly. So it is with all things nice and beautiful, like a heartwarming story on young love this season of hearts.