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  The Alamo Production NotesYou will never forget.
From director John Lee Hancock and Oscar- winning producers Mark Johnson and Ron Howard comes an epic motion picture event, the dramatic true story of one of the most momentous battles in American history. “The Alamo” is the tale of a handful of men who stood up for what they believed in and made the ultimate sacrifice against an overwhelming force.
In the spring of 1836, in the face of insurmountable odds, fewer than 200 ordinary men who believed in the future of Texas held the fort for 13 days against thousands of Mexican soldiers led by dictator General Antonio López de Santa Anna (Emilio Echevarria), ruler of Mexico.
Commanded by three men - the young, brash Lt. Col. William Travis (Patrick Wilson); the zealous, passionate James Bowie (Jason Patric); and the living legend David Crockett (Billy Bob Thornton) - the Texans would die for their beliefs, but their deeds at the Alamo would make history as General Sam Houston's (Dennis Quaid) emotional rallying call for Texas independence. The film is written by Leslie Bohem and Oscar winner Stephen Gaghan and John Lee Hancock.
“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.”
It's no overstatement to say that the events at the Alamo changed the course of American history. With any such story, it takes on an importance greater than any of its participants could have known. “I grew up on the Alamo; it was always one of my favorite stories,” says screenwriter Leslie Bohem. “What grabbed me was the exploration of a story that had appealed to me since I was eight years old, watching the John Wayne movie. Over the years, I knew from that movie of my youth and the books I had read back then that they weren't getting the whole story, which is so wonderfully rich and complicated.”
“Les had always wanted to do the Alamo story because he had read many of the more recent books and realized that the dozen-or-so movies that had come before really didn't have a lot of historical information about these characters that we now have,” says Hancock. “He wanted to de-mythologize in some way the whole story and make these characters flesh-and-blood. And, for me, it's all about the characters.”
“This story, where the threads of history and myth are so intertwined, has never gone out of fashion,” states veteran production designer Michael Corenblith, also a Texas native and son of a retired Texas history teacher. “This notion that freedom and liberty come with a price, a sacrifice, is one of the fundamental American truths.And we can't let the facts obscure the truth.”
“The story of the Alamo is a myth, really,” says Dennis Quaid, the Houston-bred star who plays Gen. Sam Houston. “What's more,myths can be truer than facts, in a way, because we feel them deeply inside us.”
“This is not history,” says the film's military advisor, Alan C. Huffines, author of the book Blood of Noble Men: The Alamo Siege and Battle. “This is a motion picture. But, what John Lee said is he never wanted to make an artistic decision based on ignorance. He always wanted to know the facts before making that decision. For someone doing an historical epic, that attitude is so important to have, so constructive, and saturates the entire film.”
For Hancock, another way to let the audience experience what it was like to be in San Antonio de Bexar in the spring of 1836 was to draw three distinct characters set against the epic backdrop that we know so well. These characters find themselves in Texas for wildly different reasons, but in the end, all are trying for a second chance at life. “Some of the people were there by accident,” notes Johnson. “Some were just trying to protect their land, and were forced to embrace ideals and a vision for the future of this country that they may not have had in mind to begin with. It was really important to John that each character, each moment, be true to what happened. At the same time, he has to tell a story, an exciting story, while not sacrificing what we have gathered to be the truth for the sake of storytelling. It's a really good story! It's exciting; it involves characters you care about and will also find sympathetic because they were real.”
“The way to make a myth human is by showing that these people had flaws,” says Quaid. “These people had flaws, but they did this heroic thing. You didn't have people coming to Texas back then who weren't flawed. This movie is based on the characters. A huge action movie with all these desperate battles that's character-driven at the same time.”
“There were all these different lives, all these different stories,” adds Patrick Wilson, who stars the fort's commander,William Barret Travis. “Some were put there. Some wanted to be there. Some were just passing through. And, by the end of it, these ordinary men in this extraordinary situation found themselves fighting for a cause that maybe they didn't believe in right away. It's a complex story about fighting for something you believe in.”
Hancock hopes his film “is stirring and emotional, like I felt when I visited the Alamo as a little boy. It's a telling of both the factual truth and the emotional truth. I don't intend for this to be a history lesson. At the same time, we tried to be as historically accurate as we could. I do feel the pressure and the specter of the actual story and history that occurred. Being a Texan, I feel the burden and responsibility to get it right. I hope I did my best to portray this story in a way that is historically accurate and thematically correct while being dramatically sound and moving and inspiring.”
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