In an early-2022 interview with Yahoo Entertainment commemorating the 20th anniversary of her teen road-trip dramedy Crossroads, director Tamra Davis told us she believed she was being blocked by the conservatorship of Britney Spears from contacting the star over the years. With the conservatorship close to ending after 13 years and a lengthy trial, Davis was hopeful they could reconnect.
A year and a half later and Davis still hasn’t had that reunion, she told us this week, but plans appear to be “loosely” coming together.
Crossroads, which has never been released on Blu-ray or streaming despite much fan love, will re-appear in movies theaters as part of a two-day event on Oct. 23 and Oct. 25, bracketing the release of Spears’s highly anticipated memoir, The Woman in Me.
“It was Britney who called to get the film re-released,” Davis revealed to us Tuesday, recalling one particularly famous Spears line. “I’ve been trying to do that forever. I was calling lawyers, I was calling people that I knew. … And then all of a sudden I got a call from Sony. ‘Hey, can you supervise the color correction we want for the film?’ And [they said] that it was Britney that called and got the film out of Paramount to Sony so that it could be released.
“So I know she knows that I’m there for her and we’ll do anything for her, but I also totally respect her privacy and also what she wants to do right now. And at least now I know that she’s in control of that, and she’s listening. Of course, I’d love to say hi, but she knows I’m there for her.”
Our conversation with Davis, whose credits also include the comedy favorites Billy Madison and Half Baked, took place just hours after the first excerpts were released from Spears’s memoir. Among the revelations: Spears said the experience making her film debut in Crossroads — in which she co-starred with Zoe Saldaña and Taryn Manning as estranged friends reunting after high school graduation for a cross-country road trip — was not easy because she fell too deep into the character through Method acting, and it messed with her mind.
“You never know what’s going on inside somebody’s head during the experience,” says Davis, who was unaware of Spears’s struggles at the time. “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.
“To me, I was always trying to get to the authentic Britney, where she wasn’t acting and where it really 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 and Taryn 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 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.”
At the time of our interview, Davis hadn’t yet seen the biggest bombshell: that Spears had an abortion at the insistence of Justin Timberlake, her boyfriend at the time she made Crossroads.
“Wow, that’s so crazy. [And I’m] so sorry,” Davis responded. “I mean, that’s why you write a memoir as you go through your life and you think about these things that happened to you and your regrets and those things. It’s important for her to be able to tell her truth and also understand how she saw things. … That’s really intense. I’m sorry that she had to go through that, and also I hope she had support going through that decision.
“Those are things that are really serious, and when you experience them, they stay with you for your lifetime. And I’m glad that she had the choice where she could make that decision. … It’s like that was the destiny of her and that child. [It’s] sad.”
Davis, who is currently working on a documentary about the history of boy bands (“from the Beatles to BTS,” she says though the emphasis will be on chart-topping ’90s acts like the Backstreet Boys and Timberlake’s NSync), is optimistic that the two-day theatrical release of Crossroads will lead to its long-awaited streaming debut.
And she still wants to touch base with Spears again, possibly even for a sequel, which she hopes would reunite the filmmaker and cast along with the original screenwriter, Shonda Rhimes, who went on to find major success as the creator and showrunner of TV hits like Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal.
“People are talking, so I mean I think it’s always great to discuss,” she says. “Shonda’s just so amazing. So who knows what she would have in mind for that, because she is just incredible with writing female characters and strong female leads and telling the story of what happens to women.
“The film starts out when they’re 10 years old and then jumps years later, so I’d be so curious to see how it jumps from there to now, but I’m just so happy to see Crossroads [again seeing the] light of day because it was really important film. And it was also rare that girls were making films about girls for girls by girls. That wasn’t happening in the ’90s, and it’s happening now. Finally, only in the last few years are we starting to really see what a female gaze [looks like] and the stories women tell.”
Crossroads will screen in theaters on Oct. 23 and Oct. 25.
