Ahead of the release of Britney Spears’ memoir “The Woman in Me,” the 2001 road trip flick “Crossroads” is back on the big screen. To celebrate the global fan event, in which the film will play in theaters again exclusively on Oct. 23 and 25, director Tamra Davis & producer Ann Carli surprised an audience at The Grove AMC in Los Angeles with a Q&A following the screening.
While reflecting on their experience making the film, Carli recalled the challenges Spears faced in balancing her global music fame with the responsibilities of starring alongside Taryn Manning and Zoe Saldaña.
“She was super busy. One of the things that I thought was really important was that she had time to rehearse with the other actors,” Carli said. “The day before she was shooting, they had a giant Pepsi commercial. It was crazy.”
At another point during the shoot, Spears’ team “wanted her to be recording at night after she did a full day’s work on the set.” That’s when Carli put her foot down. “I just said, ‘Absolutely not. I’ll shut the movie down right now, because that’s not fair to her.’”
Later, Carli heard from Spears directly. “They had her come to me and say, ‘It’s okay. I don’t mind [having] to work an 18-hour day.’ And I said, ‘Guess what? You don’t have to.’”
During the Q&A, Davis also revealed that Spears herself was behind the film’s re-release. “I haven’t seen it in a really long time … It was not available. You can’t stream it. You couldn’t find it,” Davis said. “I tried everything. I kept trying: my lawyers, my agents all helped me.”
That is, until Spears stepped in. “It was one call from Britney. She wanted it re-released to promote her new book.”
As for Spears’ motivations, Davis speculates the pop icon also wanted the film back in the discourse so fans could “look back on her life and see how overprotected she was.”
Davis added: “Clearly, this means something to her because she wanted this to be released with her book. I think she wants people to look back at her work and see it in a different way.”
