"We're bound to each other"

In this interview and podcast, "Black Snake Moan" director Craig Brewer talks about the spirit of the South, the power of the blues and tackling tough issues in delicate times.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Samuel L. Jackson, Interviews, Arts & Entertainment, Memphis, Christina Ricci, Justin Timberlake, Craig Brewer, Salon Conversations

Feb. 28, 2007 |

Craig Brewer admits he's asking for trouble. In 2005 he made "Hustle & Flow," a movie about a pimp -- played by Terrence Howard -- that had the temerity to suggest that we might feel some sympathy for the guy. In Brewer's new movie, "Black Snake Moan," Samuel L. Jackson plays a God-fearing but messed-up bluesman-turned-farmer who takes a promiscuous young woman, played by Christina Ricci, into his home to help save her from the devil, or perhaps just from herself. And because she resists being saved, he chains her to a radiator.

The unapologetically lurid posters for "Black Snake Moan," showing a chained-up Ricci in a crop top and cut-off shorts, are designed to shock, and they seem to be doing the trick: When Salon's Andrew O'Hehir wrote about "Black Snake Moan" from Sundance, plenty of readers chimed in to denounce the movie for its misogyny, despite the fact that none of them had yet seen it.

But no matter what "Black Snake Moan" looks like, either from the trailers or from the poster, there's more to it than Ricci's skimpy outfits. This is a picture about the redemptive possibilities of the blues (Jackson does his own singing), and it also features Justin Timberlake, as Ricci's soldier boyfriend, in a nonsinging role. Salon met with Brewer, 35, in New York, where he talked about his hometown of Memphis, about making movies in the South, about how, when you need it the most, music sometimes miraculously finds you -- and about why he's the woman chained to the radiator.

In both "Black Snake Moan" and "Hustle & Flow," the South -- particularly Memphis -- is practically a character. Your parents' families are from Memphis, and you live there now. Tell us about what it's like for you to make a movie in the South, and how that experience might be different from that of someone who just jets in to film on location.

The first thing is the notion of regional filmmaking. For a lot of people, it's almost like saying "regional theater." They feel like, "Well, regional filmmaking isn't Hollywood filmmaking. Once you move up to the big leagues -- that's moviemaking."

But what regional filmmaking means to me is not only utilizing the actors of your area, the musicians and the artists, but probing what it means to be of that region. And for me, the thing about Memphis that I've always responded to is its music scene, from Sam Phillips recording Howlin' Wolf, Rufus Thomas, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Rich.

It's a maverick town. It's a town that doesn't have professionals. Jerry Lee Lewis can't really play the piano all that well. He plays it a certain way. You can't really give him a Bach piece and expect it to sound like Bach. It's going to sound like a Jerry Lee Lewis song, because the energy he uses to attack the keys is specific to himself.

Also, in the South, you do a lot with not much. And that makes what you're making more unique and more lasting and memorable. You look at Johnny Cash singing "I Walk the Line." They couldn't have drums on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, and he really wanted that song to cross over to the country charts. So he just took a dollar bill and wove it through the strings of his guitar. And it created that chk-chikka-chik-chikka-chik. You look at Ike Turner coming up from Clarksdale, Mississippi, in a jalopy filled with his band, and he's writing a song about a car that passed, called the Rocket 88. He gets pulled over by a cop, and the amplifier falls off his car and smashes on the pavement. He goes into Sun Studios, and there's Sam Phillips, this crazy white man from Mississippi. And Phillips says, "Aw, don't worry about that, Ike." He starts shoving newspaper inside the amplifier. They plug in the guitar and it has this raw, distorted sound. And now all amplifiers try to duplicate that sound.

There's something about that spirit, where we know, when we listen to music, when we make music, when we worship, when we go to football games. And especially when we eat. We're bound to each other more than people outside of the South give us credit for. I guess I respond to that kind of spirit. It makes me feel I can be creative and not be judged. I can be poor and not be ashamed.

I go to L.A. and people lease their cars. They don't want you to see that they can't afford a big, important place. The men in Memphis? I'll go to a concert one night, and I'll see somebody up on the stage, like a rock god, covered in sweat, women clawing at him. And the next morning he's serving me coffee, and there's no shame in it. That to me, that's the safety of regionalism. That's the safety of living in a place where, if your movie tanks with critics or at the box office, you just feel at home. Everybody knows you and still loves you.

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