Director Hancock fighting siege of bad press, rumors

John Lee Hancock set out to make the definitive Alamo movie, then realized that isn't possible. He is happy with the movie.

By Chris Garcia
American-Statesman Film Writer

Posted: April 9, 2004

In October 2002, three months before cameras started rolling on "The Alamo," director and co-writer John Lee Hancock told me he was going to make the definitive Alamo picture, "the very absolute best version of this movie so they'll never have to do it again." Now, after the film's release date was pushed from last Christmas to today, and following a swirl of negative rumors about why it was delayed, Hancock's resolve sounds shaken.

"I'm not sure I even know what definitive means," Hancock says. "There are a hundred different movies to be made of this."

These are the words of a man who's survived creating a historical epic of mammoth, sometimes troubled, proportions. With a $95 million budget, hundreds of extras, explosive battle sequences and a functional 53-acre standing set constructed on the Texas scrub, Hancock managed an undertaking that could crush lesser filmmakers. The release date change and premature murmurs that the movie was an oversized bomb compounded the pressure on Hancock, a native Texan whose only other feature as director is the Dennis Quaid baseball drama "The Rookie."

So it's no wonder Hancock seems irked and mildly defensive when discussing the project that consumed his life for 18 months. It doesn't help his mood when a pessimistic New York Times article about "The Alamo," which ran the day before our interview, is brought up.

Headlined "A Battle Disney May Never Forget," the March 24 story by Sharon Waxman calls the film "over budget and extensively recut" and says it is "laboring under the taint of skeptical industry talk." It sites producer Mark Johnson saying Hancock was "near tears" when he had to tell the actor Wes Studi that his role had been entirely chopped.

"The New York Times makes me look like a cry baby who went $30 million over budget," Hancock huffs, adding Waxman's figures are dead wrong. The movie's production came in $82,000 under budget, he says. (Hancock admits post-production went over budget, though he didn't say by how much.)

"I don't know how this stuff keeps getting trotted out," Hancock sighs. "It's amazing."

You can forgive the director for being touchy. It's been a long and arduous journey, including 27 drafts of the screenplay, harsh weather conditions while filming and damaging rumors circulated on the Web that the movie wasn't ready because the movie wasn't good.

From the first day of shooting in January 2003, Disney declared a Christmas Day release for the film. Even those unfamiliar with the business raised eyebrows at such a speedy turnaround for a project this big, especially when the shoot went over schedule, spilling into July.

"Totally unrealistic," Hancock calls the original release date. "I didn't even have as much time in post-production as I did on 'The Rookie,' and I shot a third as much film for that."

Historian Alan Huffines, on the horse, was at the set to help Dennis Quaid, right, and John Lee Hancock.

Still, the movie almost made the December deadline. "We were really close," says Hancock. "But with six (main) characters in an ensemble piece, it's like the guy spinning plates on 'The Ed Sullivan Show' — you've really got to keep them all going."

In the Times article, producer Johnson is quoted during the film's re-editing saying, "We've got to keep six characters alive, which is proving really difficult. We may have attempted to do too much."

Johnson, tanned and toothy, told me they couldn't finish the movie in time because: "We weren't sure what was the best version of the movie."

Late last year, three editors rearranged an early cut of the film that was said to be unfocused and run three hours.

Again, Hancock snaps. "Was there a longer cut of the movie? Yeah. Every single movie ever made in the history of Hollywood is longer when it starts than when it finishes. . . . I know the reasons we held it back. That's all that matters."

About the pruned footage of Studi, whose Cherokee character makes a treaty with Sam Houston (Quaid), Hancock says, "It's fantastic and I'll put it on the DVD."

If all that's not enough to worry about, legitimate and armchair historians will likely be vetting "The Alamo" with a flea comb for historical veracity. The production hired both a historical adviser and military adviser to preserve what's true in a story tangled in myth and legend.

"All we have are a couple of diaries," says Billy Bob Thornton, who plays Davy Crockett. "That's all we know about it. You can't go by what the history books tell us. American history classes are grossly patriotic."

The diaries, he says, are "the closest we're ever going to get."

The account of the Alamo is bound to myth and reality in such equal measures that Hancock decided to honor both.

"If you deny the mythology, which is essentially where our lore comes from, then you're going to deny a large part of your audience," he says. "And if you deny the entertainment necessity, you're really going to deprive yourself of an audience."

This means an embellishment here, an educated guess there, including a dubious scene in which Crockett fires a taunting bullet at Gen. Santa Anna from the walls of the Alamo well before the battle.

"It's probably false. But that's the Alamo," Hancock says. "You can never use the words 'definite' and 'Alamo' in the same sentence."

cgarcia@statesman.com; 445-3649