“I’m a Texas native, born and raised, and I’ve been visiting the Alamo and thinking about it since I was seven or eight years old,” says director John Lee Hancock, the director of Touchstone Pictures’/Imagine Entertainment’s exciting new action epic, “The Alamo.” “We’d play Alamo in the backyard; we’d fight over who got to be Davy Crockett, who got to be Bowie. In a lot of ways, The Alamo is synonymous with my childhood… the opportunity to go back and revisit that as an adult, with an adult’s eyes and a new respect for what happened there, was one that I couldn’t resist.
“It’s a tough thing, to separate the mythology of the Alamo from the new facts that historians have learned, but I’ve tried to embrace them both,” Hancock continues. “Like everybody, I’m captivated by the larger-than-life place the Alamo has taken in the story of the building of America, but at the same time, we’ve made a real effort to show, to the best of our knowledge, what it was really like to be there.”
“One of the most distinctive things about this movie is that it’s a character study,” states Oscar®- winning producer Mark Johnson. “The Alamo” marks the continuation of an association between Johnson and Hancock that began over a decade ago. “But, it’s a character study against a huge, epic background. It’s probably more character-driven than any previous version of the story. Beyond the siege and epic battle, it deals with a confluence of people who came together for different reasons, were actually fighting and defending the Alamo for different reasons. This heroism came from people who weren’t necessarily heroic characters. This convergence of events immortalized them forever.”
“I think that, as Americans, we’re drawn to underdogs, and these guys were the ultimate underdogs,” says Hancock. “When people decide to stay in a place even though it means certain death, it’s a heroic gesture.
“It’s also a story about second chances,” continues Hancock. “Many – most – of these men had been failures of one kind or another. The Alamo was a place where they got another chance at life, a chance to be reborn. I guess that they forgot that in order to be reborn, you have to die. Ultimately, these aren’t comic-book heroes; these are real guys, flawed guys, that still found something unexpected in themselves. I want the audience to feel their plight and ask themselves a question: ‘Would I have stayed?’
“There have been thirteen or fourteen Alamo movies and I’m sure each one has a cultural distinction based on the audience at the time,” the director continues. “It’s also been said of Wayne’s film that it’s important to the period because of the ideas he wanted to portray in terms of patriotism.” “I believe that this movie shows the fall of the Alamo and the aftermath in a completely different light,” says Johnson.
“I’m not sure I have an agenda,” Hancock continues. “It’s just that now is a good time to examine patriotism that’s not jingoistic, that’s not rallying around the flag just for the sake of rallying around the flag. It’s a story that’s been made thirteen times and I feel it’s never been told properly. They’ve never made the movie I wanted to make which, I think, tells the whole story. Why tell this story again? Because it’s a grand story.”
Movie Database
In Theaters
