Carmi makes you laugh… and cry

If you’ve ever cried or laughed so hard while watching a Star Cinema movie, chances are Carmi Raymundo is responsible for your laughter and tears. The longtime screenwriter has spent the last decade or so crafting stories that your favorite love teams brought to life on the silver screen.

Carmi’s credits include Piolo Pascual and Toni Gonzaga’s Starting Over Again, as well as the trilogy that launched John Lloyd Cruz and Sarah Geronimo as a love team: A Very Special Love, You Changed My Life and It Takes a Man and a Woman. She has also worked with Daniel Padilla and Kathryn Bernardo in Crazy Beautiful You and their latest, Barcelona: A Love Untold.

But to this day, Carmi’s best-known and most-loved screenplay is the one she co-wrote in 2007 with Vanessa Valdez. Not only did One More Chance make a killing at the box-office, but it redefined the romantic comedy genre, changing the way Star Cinema would approach it in their subsequent movies.

One of the reasons why One More Chance resonated with viewers is that it has so many “hugot” lines. Carmi says she doesn’t really know where she gets those lines from because she has never been in a relationship.

“I’ve fallen in love, but the affection was never returned. Maybe, it is there where I get those ‘hugot’ lines. Or maybe, the things I cannot say in person, I put them on screen,” she explains.

Carmi developed the story of One More Chance with Vanessa and its director Cathy Garcia-Molina, from an idea the latter had about a movie revolving around what she called “the anatomy of a breakup.” At the time, they were having trouble coming up with a unique concept for a movie featuring the love team of Bea and John Lloyd. So when they finally settled on that one, Carmi gave it her all.

She threw herself into researching and writing. She talked to as many different people as she could, asking them about their breakups and how they bounced back. At the same time, she and Vanessa were already working on an early draft of the screenplay. If during Carmi’s research she happened to come across an anecdote or something that piqued her interest, they’d go back and rewrite the screenplay to make it fit.

?“Remember the chicken skin Basha and Popoy quarreled about? It should have been fish belly. And the three-month rule of moving on after a breakup? There’s no such rule,” reveals Carmi. “Vanessa and I just made them up after we interviewed a guy who was still smarting because his girlfriend was able to move on pretty quickly from their relationship. It’s not even three months and his ex already has a new one, the guy said. That struck us, so we used it in the script.”

?Of all the movie’s scenes, people most often quote the one in which a tearful John Lloyd’s character tells his ex, “She had me at my worst. You had me at my best, and you chose to break my heart.” According to Carmi, she and Vanessa came up with those now-iconic lines on the fly when direk Cathy’s team called them out of the blue asking for revisions. So they dashed off a few lines on a napkin and placemat they found in the coffee shop where they were at the time.

?“We never thought those lines would be remembered, but we lost the tissue and the placemat. Sayang,” Carmi says ruefully.

?Carmi has since become more careful about holding on to mementos from her projects. But to hear her talk about Barcelona: A Love Untold, you’d think that working on it was so memorable that she doesn’t really need anything to remember it by.

“Sagrada Familia has a very special role in that movie. I’ve read its story. Ang Sagrada ay isang simbahang hindi matapos-tapos. When Ely loves, it’s like Sagrada Familia. With Mia, her problem was, she was in love with a person who has not stopped loving another. Magandang metaphor ang Sagrada Familia for their love story.”

?Barcelona: A Love Untold became a big hit. And Carmi is happy, the movie was able to help people realize how good it feels to love and be loved. — With reports from Almed Garcia and Julian Mauricio