Crossroads producer reveals Britney Spears’ team wanted her working “18-hour days”

The producer and director behind Britney Spears’ iconic film Crossroads recently revealed that they didn’t want her working too hard, and that they had to fight with Britney Spears’ team to get her a break.

Britney Spears is known for a lot of things: her angelic voice, her hard work ethic, and the girly pop 2001 movie Crossroads.

The film saw Spears, Taryn Manning, and Zoe Saldaña as childhood friends who reignite their dwindling friendship through an adventure-filled, cross-country road trip.

However, as Spears was at the beginning of her pop star fame while filming the movie, her team wanted to overwork, which the film’s director and producer recently revealed that they put a stop to.

Crossroads’ crew didn’t want Spears to overwork herself

Spears recently released her highly anticipated memoir The Woman in Me and, to celebrate its premiere, Crossroads was re-released in theaters

During a surprise Q&A at The Grove AMC in Los Angeles, director Tamra Davis and producer Ann Carli discussed working with Spears and how her team wanted her to work non-stop.

“[Spears’] team wanted her to be recording at night after she did a full day’s work on the set,” Carli explained, “I just said, ‘Absolutely not. I’ll shut the movie down right now, because that’s not fair to her.’”

“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.’”

Carli added, “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. The day before she was shooting, they had a giant Pepsi commercial. It was crazy.”

Davis also revealed that Spears herself was behind the movie’s re-release as she “[hadn’t] seen it in a really long time … It was not available. You can’t stream it. You couldn’t find it. I tried everything. I kept trying: my lawyers, my agents all helped me. It was one call from Britney. She wanted it re-released to promote her new book.”

The director also expressed her theory that Spears wanted the film to be re-released because she wanted her fans to see how “overprotected” she was at that time.

“Clearly, this means something to her because she wanted this to be released with her book,” Davis said “I think she wants people to look back at her work and see it in a different way.”

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