Black Snake Moan, the latest feature film from writer/director Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow), is a Southern melodrama starring Samuel L Jackson, Christina Ricci, and Justin Timberlake. Jackson plays a former blues man named Lazarus who feels beaten down after his wife leaves him. His life takes a strange and interesting turn when sex addict Rae (Christina Ricci) winds up in front of his house in bad condition. Instead of transporting her to the hospital, Lazarus decides to chain her up and try and cure her himself.
The Appeal of Playing Lazarus: Jackson loved this particular character because of his complexities and because of how he felt he knew this sort of man. “He seems to be an amalgam of my grandfather and his brother’s. The guys that I worked with in the fields and talked to, and people of the earth who drank hard when it was time to drink. They loved the blues and they sang and told stories and they did all this stuff. It's just an interesting way for me to pay homage to some men that developed me in that particular way that made me want to be a storyteller.”
Getting Into Character: “I'm an actor who shows up to rehearsal with a lot of stuff. I sit down and work out things about characters, and put together biographies and histories and all kinds of stuff. So by the time we got there and started the rehearsal period, it was very smart of [Craig Brewer] to just sit and watch me and Christina just kind of go though what we were going through and figure out how our relationship worked. [Christina’s character’s] never met anybody like me that she couldn't sexually manipulate, and I've never met anybody or understood what a sexual dysfunction like that was. I guess a country guy who's a farmer who was playing the blues for a while or been in clubs, you've probably ran into some pretty wild women in his day. But when people talk about nymphomania… I mean people talk about it, but how many people know that they've actually run into a real nymphomaniac or a sexually dysfunctional person? You don't know how to handle it or exactly what it is. To him she was just somebody who was possessed by the devil or evil. The only thing he knew to do is exorcise it.”
Some actors say they know a part’s right for them when the role scares them. Fear doesn’t have anything to do with how or why Jackson chooses his projects. “Fear? No, I'm always anxious to jump in there and kind of figure out who a person is, where they're coming from, and what they're doing. It’s part of the challenge and part of the, I guess, fascination of exploring the human condition for me to be able to safely walk into spaces that are dangerous and know it's a controlled environment, and not have to worry about being damaged by it in the end.
But finding or looking back and saying, ‘Have I seen anybody like that? Have I talked to anybody like this? What was their process or how did I perceive their process to be?’ Because it's all make believe. You make up anything you can to make the character fuller for me. Lazarus had a lot of stuff going on. He led a pretty wild life and gave that life up when he got married and became this farmer, which was not what that woman married. She married somebody who had a high-life, who's kind of lively. He bored her and she left and he had no understanding of that whatsoever because he viewed himself as a great provider, kept the house warm and kept you fed, but she needed more. He had no conception of that and didn’t understand that his music was what made him a person who was alive in a real sense. Once he got back to it, he got back to what made him feel better about himself.”
A Voice for the Blues: It’s actually Jackson singing in Black Snake Moan and his voice fits the genre. “Fortunately Mississippi Delta blues doesn’t necessarily need a silky smooth Luther Vandross type of voice. It's more about making sure the emotion of what you're saying is coming out then being a great singer. It helped a lot.”
On the Critical Choice His Character Makes: Lazarus makes the decision to try and help Christina Ricci’s character, Rae, rather than turn her over to a hospital. “Interestingly enough I understand the choice just because I understand the rural South,” explained Jackson. “I spent a lot of time in it when I was a kid and my grandfather's brothers were farmers. I spent time on the farm when I was a kid with them walking through the fields, and working and hanging out. But there are instances where you find yourself in a circumstance if you put her in your truck and take her to the hospital, there a lot more questions than if you keep her at your house and try to nurse her back to health. Hopefully, she'll walk away.
That choice that he made of keeping her there is [because he’s] sort of out of his mind in another kind of way at that point. He'd lost his woman that he had no control over and all of a sudden he has a woman and she's kind of out of control in that interesting sort of immoral way he pictured his wife. And he wanted to control her and fix her in another way. The only way he could think to do that was to put this chain on her and still give her some amount of freedom, and kind of pump this biblical medicine into her.
It's interesting… It's not in the film, but we shot a lot of stuff where he's reading the Bible to her at different times. Like when he puts her in the tub for the first time, he's sitting there on the floor and starts to read to her. She's in the tub. Then there's times when she's laying on the sofa and he's reading to her. There are times when she's eating and he's reading to her, but all that stuff is gone for some reason - but the time frame seems kind of off. I don't know how you see it, but in our cinematic minds when we shot it she was at his house for over a month. Now it looks like she's there a couple of days.”
