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Sweet Home Alabama

In this romantic comedy, America’s latest sweetheart - Reese Witherspoon - stars as an upwardly mobile New York fashion designer, Melanie Carmichael. As the film begins Melanie finds herself engaged to the city’s most eligible bachelor - but her past holds many secrets - including Jake, the redneck husband she married in high school.

Jake has always refused – and still refuses - to grant her a divorce, so he now stands in the way of her wedding. Determined to end their relationship once and for all, Melanie travels back home to Alabama, to confront her small town past, so she can get on with her big city future. Having begrudgingly returned she soon finds herself being wooed by two men, but which will she pick?

Meant For You

"Whether you like it or not, there is one person who’s meant for you," says Andy Tennant, the director of Sweet Home Alabama. "You can try to manufacture your own destiny, but love happens to you whether you want it to or not. I wanted to do a love story where the decision came down to a great guy or the right guy."

"Sweet Home Alabama deals with the very true-to-life quest of finding someone to spend the rest of your life with on a romantic level and the chaos that sometimes erupts from that," says Witherspoon. "The film is also about self-discovery and learning to be okay with yourself, which I think is something that everybody struggles with.

"I think that everybody can identify with wanting to be accepted and fit in, but not being able to because you are denying your true self" continues the actress. "And then suddenly when you’re just being yourself, everything seems to make sense again. In Sweet Home Alabama, we present that in a beautiful and romantic way, and it’s funny and enjoyable."

Small Town Life

"I lived in Alabama my whole life till I left for college," says the film's producer Stokely Chaffin. "I understand what it is to be driven crazy by small town life. I understand what it is to come back home and think you're better than everybody. And I understand - thankfully - what it is to make your peace with the place you left behind by falling in love with it all over again."

Co-Producer Neal Moritz was also eager to find a unique way of presenting this story. "The trap in making a romantic comedy today is that audiences feel like they’ve seen everything that can happen already – the boy and girl are going to get together in the end," he says. "So, in order to avoid these clichés, we’ve tried to put in a number of twists and turns, to give the audience a movie they haven’t seen before. They won’t have the feeling that they know the end of the movie before it begins."

Moritz has high praise for Tennant. "Andy is a true commander-in-chief," he notes. "From the day he signed on to do this movie, it’s been his vision that has really carried the movie from beginning to end. As a producer, all you can hope for is to toss the ball to somebody and let them run with it, which is exactly what Andy has done. He’s done a great job of taking his point of view and expressing that in a truly remarkable way. He’s very clear with the actors, and has a great handle on just how to work with each and every one of them."

Humour

Executive producer Wink Mordaunt cherishes her collaboration with Tennant. "I learn from working with him every day," she says. We’ve been business partners for about four and a half years, and this is our third movie together. It’s such a pleasure to watch him work with this kind of film." Another consistent observation by cast and filmmakers alike is the source of the comedy in the script for Sweet Home Alabama.

"The humor comes from Melanie’s reintroduction back into her life in the deep South after having seemingly shed all of those trappings while evolving into a hot fashion designer in New York City," adds Tennant. "Yet, with her new attitudes and improvements that she’s picked up in New York City – because she thinks she’s hotter than napalm – when she comes back home to Alabama to take care of some unfinished business, they all sort of cut her off at the knees and remind her of who she really is."

Wild about Witherspoon

Tennant is clearly wild about his cast. "Reese and I have known each other for years, and we’ve kept in touch," he says. "We had worked together some years ago. And as her career has blossomed, there was always this desire to find something else for us to do together, and Sweet Home Alabama sort of fell into our laps. It’s wonderful to have know Reese for over ten years, and seeing her now as a beautiful woman with a husband and two-year-old daughter, she’s still sparkly and funny as ever," Tennant continues.

"It's a bonus that she's beautiful, but Reese's real gift is her brain," adds Chaffin. "She is so funny because she's so smart. Her timing and her rhythm come from her being absolutely aware of everything that's going in a scene. To do what she does, first and foremost, takes a good brain. People need to know how smart she is!"

For Reese Witherspoon, the process of deciding to do Sweet Home Alabama emerged from a unique place. "This movie reminds me of similar things that I’ve dealt with in my own life, as far as having a Southern upbringing, moving out of the South to an urban city and then returning home with different experiences and perspectives," she says. "That notion was an element in the script that I found attractive when Andy presented this project to me.

Alabama

"It’s always been interesting to see how differently people behave due to their regional environment and what they’ve been exposed to. As you will see in the film, the attitude of New York is completely different than the one in Alabama. Melanie brings that new attitude back to the South with her and it’s fun to watch her interact bringing those diverse elements to the scene."

Josh Lucas also drew on his own Southern roots as he prepared to play Jake, Melanie’s estranged, backwoods husband. "I come from the South originally," he says. "I was born in Arkansas, and raised all over the South for about the first thirteen years of my life. So for me, when I read the script for Sweet Home Alabama, I immediately responded to this incredible energy that it captured about the essence of the South and about the differences between South and North. And now that I live in New York, that dichotomy, which was woven playfully and skillfully together in the script, appealed to me," says Lucas.

"Also, I was immediately in love with my character – and he was completely the antithesis of anything I’ve done before. I felt a kinship with him, a brotherhood. This character is such a gentle soul that I wanted to spend the next period of time playing him. Something else I loved about the script was its honesty, and the fact that the motivations of the characters come from very human and realistic reactions."

According to Lucas, "When Melanie and Jake split, it caused Jake to suffer a tremendous sense of self doubt. I think he spent the next, long period of his life finding a way to not only recapture himself, but also her love. In order to do that, he had to figure out how to not only make a living, but how to find his own confidence and his own power. My relationship with Reese in the film is interesting, because we battle throughout almost the entire movie – our relationship is very snide," says Lucas. "We had a lot of fun with each other playing within that energy and within that game."

Candice Bergen, who plays Kate, the mayor of New York City, says, "Andy and I met about the movie about six months before the filming began. I had seen Anna and the King, and thought it was just a wonderfully directed film. I was very moved by it. And I saw Ever After which I thought had incredible humor and style."

When Bergen originally met Tennant the first time, Kate was a socialite, and not the Mayor. "About six months later, when I was asked to do the film, she’d become the mayor and Reese had been cast. I had never met Reese, but I respected her and thought she was so incredibly talented. And Andy’s a sensational director. He’s got a great eye for comedy and wonderful instincts – and he’s very, very smart."

Some of the funniest scenes emerge from Kate’s reactions to Reese’s character. "Kate is aghast at her son Andrew’s choice of Melanie because she had such a specific alliance in mind for her son – someone who would be a real political asset, and Melanie was just not what she had in mind. So Kate, in trying to make the best of it, and turn it to her advantage, fails miserably and hysterically."

Bergen loves that the comedy is so situational: "The conflict and the contrast of not just the North and the South, but the fashion extremists from New York City – the models and designers, the fashion society – then mixed with real down-home trailer folk. What a contrast. It was great to see them on both grounds, and utterly hilarious."

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Location is everything, and of the New York City shoot, both producer Neal Moritz and director Andy Tennant echoed similar sentiments: "It was particularly important to us to show off New York City and Manhattan in all of its glory and magnificence. To that end, we shot on Fifth Avenue in front of Saks Fifth Avenue, in the NoLiTa section of The Village, in Washington Square Park, on Sutton Place, and ended up the week’s work on the plaza at Lincoln Center." But one New York location took on a special meaning for the filmmakers.

"When it came to the proposal scene, we really wanted to have one for the record books," says Tennant.

For the memorable scene, the filmmakers persuaded world-famous jeweler Tiffany & Co. to open their doors – something the boutique has afforded to few film crews in the past; only (memorably) Breakfast at Tiffany’s and (very briefly) When Harry Met Sally… have had scenes on the store’s main floor. In addition, Sweet Home Alabama represents Tiffany’s first filmed marriage proposal – a scene even the mighty Audrey Hepburn never got to do in the shop!

"That little blue Tiffany’s box has become synonymous with top-drawer," says Tennant. “Once we had thought of Tiffany’s, we knew that nothing else would do. They were a bit hesitant at first - they don’t open their doors for just anybody - but once we were able to show them that the scene was going to be something special and a lot of fun, they got on board. In fact, I used the staff from Tiffany’s in the scene – those aren’t actors, those are Tiffany’s jewelers."

A Golden Globe nominee, Reese Witherspoon is a native of Nashville. She first attracted the attention of audiences and critics alike with her feature film debut in Robert Mulligan’s coming-of-age drama The Man in the Moon.

Still only 26, she’s already demonstrated her wide range and charisma with an impressive assortment of accomplished performances in both comedy and drama – not least, the superb school satire Election. She received much critical acclaim and a Golden Globe nomination for 'Best Actress: Comedy or Musical' for last summer’s legal comedy, Legally Blonde, which also received a Golden Globe nomination. She could last be seen in this summer’s The Importance of Being Earnest in which she co-stared opposite Judi Dench and Rupert Everett.

Also a producer, Reese has her own film production company and several new projects in development - including two that she plans on starring in - Honey West and The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing.

The Hulk

Josh Lucas – who plays the main love interest, Jake was most recently seen in Ron Howard’s Academy Award-winning drama, A Beautiful Mind, in which he co-starred with Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, and Ed Harris. Lucas also recently completed production on Ang Lee’s much-anticipated comic book adaptation The Hulk for Universal, scheduled for release in June.

Sweet Home Alabama, directed by Andy Tennant from a screenplay by C. Jay Cox and a story by Douglas J. Eboch. Director Andy Tennant’s other feature film credits include Fools Rush In, starring Matthew Perry and Salma Hayek, and his feature directorial debut, It Takes Two.

Sweet Home Alabama is in cinemas now.

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