Britney Spears Was Forced To Work 18-Hour Days While Filming ‘Crossroads,’ Movie’s Producer Says

After the release of Britney Spears’ tell-all memoir, The Woman in Me, Crossroads, the 2002 road trip film starring Spears, was re-released in theaters last month.

Ann Carli, the film’s producer, and director Tamra Davis, surprised an audience at The Grove AMC in Los Angeles with a Q&A that took place after a screening.

Carli stated that she remembered standing up for Spears when her team attempted to make her work 18-hour shifts each day of production.

“She was super busy,” Carli said. “One of the things that I thought was really important was that she had time to rehearse with the other actors.”

Carli mentioned that “the day before she was shooting, they had a giant Pepsi commercial. It was crazy.”

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

Carli said that she soon heard it directly from Spears. “They had her come to me and say, ‘It’s ok. I don’t mind [having] to work an 18-hour day.’ And I said, ‘Guess what? You don’t have to.'”

Spears stated in her memoir that her experience working on this film felt like method acting.

“The experience wasn’t easy for me,” Spears wrote. “My problem wasn’t with anyone involved in the production but with what acting did to my mind.”

“I think I started method acting – only I didn’t know how to break out of my character. I really became this other person,” she added. “Some people do method acting, but they’re usually aware of the fact that they’re doing it. But I didn’t have any separation at all.”

“I ended up walking differently, carrying myself differently, talking differently,” she continued. “I was someone else for months while I filmed Crossroads. Still to this day, I bet the girls I shot that movie with think, ‘She’s a little… quirky.’ If they thought that, they were right.”

Davis had been unaware the struggles that Spears had on set.

“So I read that today and I was like, ‘Well, it was such an interesting journey with her to get her to do this, to act, to be this character,’ and I had to break her down to remove Britney the star to make her Lucy the character,” she said.

“To me, I was always trying to get to the authentic Britney, where she wasn’t acting and where it was her going through these experiences. And so in a weird way, I guess she’s describing method acting, which she was. I worked very closely with the acting coach with her to just really try to make sure that her acting was comparable to Zoe [Saldana] and Taryn [Manning] and [co-star Anson Mount], who are incredibly talented actors so that she didn’t come in and give a line how you would deliver it if you were on The Mickey Mouse Club.”

“She had to really go deep and find this character. So, yeah, you never know. I’m shocked that she said that she started to become that character after a while, but I think there was comfort in that character as well, because she was just one of the girls, finally,” she concluded. “She was part of an ensemble and she was part of this group of people where you’re equal on a movie and you’re not just the star, which is who she was on tour. But on set, you’re the same with me. I’m the same as my sound man. We’re all part of a crew working on something.”

In her memoir, Spears also revealed that she had an affair with dancer Wade Robeson while she was dating Justin Timberlake.