Britney Spears’ ‘Crossroads’ Director Talks the Difficulties of Shooting a Moving Car: ‘They Never Would Listen to Me!’
Britney Spears’ Crossroads is like all great road trips — funny, difficult, and a little bit messy. And there’s a reason for that. Director Tamra Davis once shared that shooting scenes of a moving car, from another moving vehicle, is difficult. Here are the details.
The director shot much of ‘Crossroads’ from a truck loaded with equipment
If filming a movie in itself wasn’t complicated enough, Davis says chasing down the young Crossroads stars was a challenge. She directed much of the movie between two vehicles and some walkie-talkies.
It stars Britney Spears in her sole starring movie role. She plays Lucy Wagner, a valedictorian who leads an impromptu road trip to Los Angeles after graduation. Childhood friends Mimi (Taryn Manning) and Kit (Zoe Saldana), join her.
Moreover, ex-con and Lucy’s love interest Ben (Anson Mount) provides the vehicle for the road trip — a yellow 1972 Buick Skylark Custom Convertible. And according to Davis, that’s where some of the trouble began.
“When we were doing all those car things, I’m in a truck with all the equipment, following them with all the cameras and the lights,” Davis said on the MTV docu-series Making the Movie: Crossroads. “And they’re on their own, in the car with walkie-talkies, and they never would listen to me!”
Anson Mount said Britney Spears’ fame caused a ruckus during filming
Furthermore, Mount said the operation was complicated by the attention Britney Spears generated while shooting Crossroads. Mount indicated that the interest added to the already chaotic car-based shoot.
“The camera was on a moving truck in front of the car, and I was driving through this tiny little town in Louisiana,” Mount told MTV in 2002. “And we hadn’t really notified anybody that this was happening. So people were slowly catching on that Britney Spears is in a movie, and it’s being filmed in our town.”
In a separate, more recent interview, Manning said that the road trip nature of the movie was bonding for the young actors.
“I have not spoken to Britney in 10 years, but we had an amazing time on Crossroads,” she recounted to Us Weekly in September 2021. “We spent months in the car that we took ‘cross country’ sharing stories, joking, laughing, and had a friendship for years, especially while filming. I wish her only the best and am so happy about the progress of this week. Nothing but love for Brit!”
Tamra Davis said she loved researching other road trip movies
In a 2014 interview with HuffPost Live, Davis revealed that she enjoyed researching past road trip movies in preparation for Britney Spears’ Crossroads. Classic road films like, for example, Little Miss Sunshine and Thelma and Louise.
“What’s so fun when you shoot in a car is you get to research all the other road movies that have ever been done and you try to figure out where do they place the cameras and how many shots can you get with your people in the car,” Davis told HuffPost. “So just doing the research on the films is so fun.”
However, Davis maintains that challenges like bad walkie-talkie communication aren’t the only difficult aspect of shooting moving vehicles.
“Sometimes it’s making sure you get it before the road runs out or before you get to the next traffic light,” she said. “It’s kind of like you’re looking for that background, shooting in this direction, so there’s all these technical things that you have to worry about.”
In any case, Crossroads wound up being an important part of the lives of teen girls who loved the film. And for them, its message of friendship and change endures. “I still have people come up to me all the time and say what an incredible movie it was, how much it meant to them at that time, and how much of an impact it had on them,” Davis told Broadly in 2016.
