Q&A: Craig Brewer
by Sarah Sundberg
March 2, 2007
You'd be forgiven for feeling slightly iffy about the premise for Craig Brewer's new film Black Snake Moan: in a backwoods town in Tennessee, Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson), an old bluesman whose wife has left him for his brother, finds Rae (Christina Ricci), a town slut with a history of sexual abuse, beaten, bloodied and half-naked by the roadside. He takes her in and cares for her wounds, but when she comes to, he chains her to his radiator to "cure" her of her sexual acting out. Ricci flails around in tiny underwear, screeching like a cat in heat, but eventually takes to the tough love.
You might say many things about Craig Brewer, but no one could possibly deny that the man has giant balls. He seems to rejoice in pushing buttons most would rather leave untouched, and toys with any baggage the audience might have in regard to sex, race or the South. The film teeters on the line between dead earnestness and high camp. Once you get beyond the hype, it's both surprisingly thoughtful and surprisingly sweet. Here Craig Brewer talks about wanting to be chained to a radiator at a time of emotional stress and why he never would have made Black Snake Moan if it weren't for Tom Cruise. — Sarah Sundberg
Black Snake Moan has the feel of a fable or parable. There is obviously the sex and the music, but there is also an almost religious quality with the strong theme of redemption, or grace.
Thank you! Yes. When I was trying to get Hustle and Flow going, I didn't have any money and had just had a baby. My wife and I were really struggling. I got flown out to L.A. and nothing was happening with the movie and I had a terrible anxiety attack. It messed with me because my dad died of a heart attack at 49. As cynical as I've been towards religion, I needed something else. More than anything I wished I had my dad. I needed someone older to say, "This craziness that you are going through is not unique to you." I needed to be yanked back. I needed something that was not going to move, something for me to be tethered to. That's what I started to explore with the image of a radiator with a chain around it. I'm not hiding under any sort of righteousness though. I am aware that there is this exploitative titillating element to a hot girl at the end of a chain.
I always felt that's what the blues is about. It's exorcism music, it allows you to go to those places where you are shouting and screaming about wanting to fuck, or wanting to fight. And at the end of the evening you are exhausted, but you are also free of it, a little bit. I've been into blues ever since I was thirteen and saw Risky Business with Tom Cruise going around that city with his black Ray-Bans, listening to Muddy Waters.
Tom Cruise was your introduction to the blues?
Tom Cruise, god bless him, is responsible in an odd way for Black Snake Moan. I live in Memphis, so I've seen all these people play and I know the musicians. They are old men and old women who come from a folk tradition. They will tell you a story about a rabbit and a raccoon going into a bar with gun holsters. I felt that, to really go here with that story, it had to be in that fable element.
My salvation really came with Son House, the bluesman. When I had cut the whole movie together I felt that I had that modern-day morality tale. But I needed a storyteller to open up the book. Scott Bomar, who did the music for Black Snake Moan and is my partner in all this, sent me footage of Son House, where he starts off with that line: "There ain't but one kind of blues, and that is what exists between male and female that's in love." I thought that was just so damn clear.
Are there any movies in particular that you were looking to when you made Black Snake Moan?
There were movies, but also books and plays. Tennessee Williams was a big influence. I think that he had an appropriate nod to the camp. He understood that you could have a scene where Stanley Kowalski is beating up on his pregnant wife and then he made sure that he was sobered up by running him under a shower and ripping his shirt so that when he is calling "Stella!" we see his sweaty rippling back, and not only does Stella want to have sex with him but we do too.
That to me is passion. I know that people want that kind of passion, and that I have wanted it. It's not necessarily pretty. Sometimes it goes terribly wrong, but it is definitely better than feeling nothing. I'm not saying that we need to use people, but sometimes those elements come into it and it's hard to just turn them off because you think it is wrong.
That scene in the movie where Lazarus goes to play at the juke joint and Rae dances — music becomes almost like a middle ground between religion and sex. It's very sexual, but it's not a hostile or threatening sexuality.
Many writers of the South have commented that their first sexual imagery that they really experienced was from church, seeing women singing in the choir. There is something about church, and I'm not necessarily saying religion — I mean church where I live — that doesn't fall too far away from what the juke joint had the night before. You're still singing, you're sweating, you've got to have human contact with the people around you. There is a continuity that almost rides that same exorcism.
There's a common theme in American literature and movies of a white woman leading a black man to a bad end. You are turning it on its head. Most people who see the movie, at least in America, are probably aware of that theme. On some level the viewer is waiting for something bad to happen.
It is so interesting that that exists without me even throwing any fuel on it. The very act of this old, big black man in a room with a young, small white woman, creates this terror or titillation in the audience where they feel like someone is going to come in through the door, or someone is going to drive around the corner when he is picking this bloody woman up off the side of the road. I've experienced a different narrative amongst the people of the South. The very strong African-American community in the South, when it comes below a certain socio-economic line, is not necessarily looking at the color of people's skin if they are in need. It's not uncommon to see young abandoned white kids in the country being taken in by black families.
It's not so much that I want to do a major flip, even though I think it does occur. Even the poster with the image of a black man with a white woman at the end of a chain is so radical that I'm sure people are wondering what the hell the movie is about. But really I saw this as a collision between two age groups; a younger generation needing an older generation to be a little bit firm with them and also be firm with their love, with their unconditional love.
As a white man making this film, were you worried about being accused of being racist or sexist?
No, because I really feel that I have my region in my corner. Blacks in my region are very proud of how I am representing them — even when they have problems with me representing them as pimps — because I am not dealing in caricatures. With Samuel L. Jackson's character, I am exploring Southern archetypes that border on the cartoonish, but I am coming from a place of earnest respect.
I've often wondered what the reasoning would be if people thought my movie was racist. It doesn't make sense to me that you would really believe at the end of Black Snake Moan that I have a hatred towards women, or that I believe that blacks are inferior to whites. I am interested in why people would feel that way, or why they are somehow offended by the very scenario of these two together. I would much rather it come to the surface than it fester in silence.
The tagline is "Everything is Hotter Down South." I don't know if it was the way the movie was marketed or if it was just the buzz around it. But before I saw it I thought it would be much more exploitative of stereotypes and exoticizing the South than it actually was.
I want to be a gut filmmaker rather than an intellectual filmmaker. I want people to come correct to this, I want people to have some fun, I want them to laugh, I want them to be shocked in places. I'd like a very big group of people to see the movie and get snuck up on and surprised by it. I think that is what movies should be. I don't think that A Streetcar Named Desire is just about that scene where Marlon Brando is bending Vivien Leigh back in this passionate embrace. You'd think that they were lovers from that poster, and that's not what it's about. So as much as I know that people are thinking, "Oh, it's an exploitative race-baiting movie" — fine, come on and see it. I think there is more there.
©2007 Sarah Sundberg and Nerve.com