Crazy in Alabama, 1999

Director: Antonio Banderas (directorial debut)

Actors: Melanie Griffith (Aunt Lucille), Lucas Black (Peejoe), David Morse (Uncle Dove), Rod Steiger (the Judge), Meat Loaf Aday (the Sheriff)

Release date: 1999

Studio: Columbia Tri-Star

Filming Locations: Houma, Louisiana and Hollywood, California

"I learned a lot of secrets that summer. You can bury freedom, but you can't kill it. Taylor Jackson died for freedom. Aunt Lucille had to kill to get it. Life and death are only temporary, but freedom goes on forever." (Peejoe)

Crazy in Alabama premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 9, 1999 (and reportedly received a five-minute standing ovation that brought Melanie to tears), followed by its U.S. theatrical debut on October 22, 1999.

What better way to find out about this film than directly from Antonio himself? The special edition DVD has a wonderful photo montage narrated by our first-time director. It not only tells you something of the plot, but makes clear Antonio's vision for this film and what a very special project it was to him. Perhaps if the critics in America, who almost universally gave the movie a "thumbs down", could have listened to Antonio describe his film, they would have understood what so many of us saw in the movie. So, without further embellishment (and with our sincere hope that Columbia and Antonio will not mind our borrowing from their work product!), here is the man himself to tell you about his movie:

"Hello, I am Antonio Banderas, and I'm going to be talking to you about my first experience as a director with my movie, Crazy in Alabama. And I must say that I don't remember precisely the day of July of 1997 in which I finished the first reading of Crazy in Alabama, but I do remember the strong impression that this story produced in me. When I closed the last page of this beautiful and daring script, I knew already that my time to jump to the other side of the mirror had arrived. 52 movies as an actor in
front of the camera makes you think what it would be like to tell stories from your own point of view, how you perceive the world, relationships and events. My interest in politics and social issues linked to radical characters who are there to break the rules, were reflected in every line of the written story. Crazy in Alabama is basically the combination of two powerful stories and that's what makes the narration unusual and that's what determined finally the style of the movie. The first one of them takes
place in the hot and turbulent summer of 1965 in a little town in the state of Alabama. And the other one takes us on a ride from the same Southern state all across America to California where Lucille Vincent, after she has left behind her dark and compulsive past, is in a very personal way in search of freedom and fulfillment of her particular American dream.

The cinematic elements represented a challenge and a risk too because there is not a line of story which drives you from the beginning to the end in a usual way. The combination of basically two different movies in one and the collage style of the piece sucked me in rather than pushed me out because I found that the contrast between the two stories was more complimentary than
repelling to each other. Because that is what brought to me a bitter smile in what I considered a very sad comedy. Just like life itself.

And the fact that a raw, 13-year-old boy is talking to us from the Alabama of 1965 adds a naïve accent to the form of this tale and allowed me to distort and break the story into positive reflections about freedom, injustice, life and death.

'IN THE SUMMER OF 1965, WHEN I WAS 13, I THOUGHT I KNEW EVERYTHING ABOUT LIFE AND DEATH'.

Peejoe, our 13-year-old narrator, is discovering the world that surrounds him, that it is not only a world full of children's dreams but one of adult nightmares. Carried by his strong and solid personality, he will [go through] an initiation process destined to set up a range of principles based in humanity, logic, tolerance and respect, contrary and opposite to those ones conformed through many years through the society and people around him. Even overcoming the opposition of his own family, he will stand up for what he believes is the right thing to do. That solitude, and his struggles, the unbreakable position he adopts, the incredible capacity to think bigger and further [than] the limits of his own personal world, and the will of sharing the pain and the troubles of other ones, will make us realize that our dear Peejoe is made of the material and stuff of what heroes and real revolutionaries are made.

The principal story of this naïve tale is centered on his Aunt Lucille, a 40-year-old mother of seven kids, who after 13 years of spousal abuse takes the radical choice of killing her husband as the only alternative to a life of oppression and injustice, and decides to make a move in search of her dreams, which she thinks are somewhere close to the palm trees of Beverly Hills.

A woman, a boy, and the African-American community are struggling to survive in a hostile environment, but each one of them does so in a different way. They are used to different kinds of abusive behavior in an oppressive society, and the radical, desperate, though sometimes funny, search of Lucille Vincent for freedom will make us reflect about the American world of dreams and nightmares. My actor's side made me adopt and choose one of the roles in the movie as my own. The courageous and bold Peejoe was the one selected, and his determination, his courage, in an incredible and instinctive way to understand justice, freedom, love, life and death makes of him not only the person who will tell us the story from the distance of his memories, but one who is a representative of a time in which all patterns of behavior were changing and a whole way of
understanding life was falling apart. And I used him as my model and as my eyes to tell the story to you."

Synopsis by Lisa.

Related Information

Antonio's daughter, Stella, and step-daughter Dakota have small parts in the movie.

Oscar winner Rod Steiger, who plays the judge, said that Antonio is the best director he has ever worked for.

Antonio worked with Cathy Moriarty in The Mambo Kings.