This is Lily and Sergio’s wedding in Austin, Texas, and it took eleven years to get here.
The film opens with Sergio reading her a letter, and the first thing out of his mouth is “Lily, my love, my everything, pumpkin sugar muffin honey bun, the day has finally come.” Which tells you almost everything about him in one breath. Then he says he told her eleven years ago that he was going to marry her, and that he intends to go ahead and do it, and about thirty seconds later he’s gone.
It started in geometry class, freshman year of high school. He asked her to be his girlfriend on December 10th, 2005, and he can still give you the date without thinking about it. She was the writer, the valedictorian, the nerdy one. He was the quarterback. If it had been chemistry class instead of geometry there’d be a joke here, but it was geometry, so there isn’t.
The part of his letter that got me is the structure of it, because he tells the same story three times and it lands harder every time. Whenever football ended and everybody wrote him off, she pushed him, and he says “you told me to follow my dream, and I did.” Whenever he wanted to go to engineering school, she pushed him, follow your dream, and I did. Whenever he graduated and the job took him away from her, she pushed him again. Same three words, three times, over more than a decade, and every single time he listened.
Her letter is the other half of it. Ten years of long distance, thousands of miles, and what she’s excited about isn’t the wedding, it’s the ordinary part: “no more flights or road trips to see each other, no more waiting a month before we see each other again.” She just wants to wake up next to him. After eleven years, that’s the prize.
The toast is where the title comes from. Somebody who has known them both forever gets up and says “once in a while, right in the middle of an ordinary life, love gives us a fairy tale. This is your fairy tale.” And then the pastor picks the same thread up and runs with it, teasing them about arguing and about her football team and what she watches on TV, before landing on the line that every morning they wake up, they’ll both have a miracle in the house.
And then in the vows themselves Sergio says it plainly. Wherever you are, you are mine. My miracle.
The reception was not a quiet one. There is a man in this film who attempts a full-length slide across the dance floor, and I want you to know he committed to it completely.
How This One Was Filmed
Nothing here is complicated. The letters were recorded separately and clean, the ceremony got its own microphone, and everything else is just being in the right spot and letting people be themselves. Whenever a couple has this much history, your job is not to add anything. The full list of what I carry to a wedding is over at kit.co/whoismatt.
For music, the three licensing sites I use and recommend are Soundstripe (the code WHOISMATT gets you 10% off), Artlist, and Musicbed.
If you’re getting married in Austin, Dallas, Houston, or honestly anywhere else, I’d love to talk about filming it. Get in touch at filmstrong.com.