Crossroads producer says Britney Spears’ team wanted her to work 18-hour days: ‘I said absolutely not’

Spears starred opposite Taryn Manning and Zoe Saldaña in the 2002 film about three girls on a road trip across America

The producer of the 2002 road trip movie Crossroads has recalled putting her foot down to protect Britney Spears when the singer’s team tried to push her to work 18-hour days.

Spears’ tell-all memoir, The Woman in Me, is out now – and her movie has been re-released to mark the occasion, with producer Ann Carli and director Tamra Davis surprising an audience at The Grove AMC in Los Angeles with a Q&A following a screening.

“She was super busy,” Carli said, according to Variety. “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.”

She described how, 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”. Carli recalled: “I just said, ‘Absolutely not. I’ll shut the movie down right now, because that’s not fair to her.’”

Carli said she later heard from Spears directly. “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 starred opposite Taryn Manning and Zoe Saldaña in the film about three girls on a road trip across America. She played Lucy, a young woman trying to find her mother.

Writing in The Woman in Me, Spears compared her experience to Method acting, a practice where actors try to live like the characters they are portraying at all times.

“The experience wasn’t easy for me,” she said. “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. 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.”

Spears in ‘Crossroads’ (Paramount/YouTube)

Spears continued: “I ended up walking differently, carrying myself differently, talking differently. 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.”

Read the biggest revelations from the memoir here.

In Adam White’s four-star review for The Independent, he wrote: “For the most part, this is a scorched-earth kiss-off to an incredibly dysfunctional family, a book so breathtaking in its rage that you can practically see the spittle on its pages.”