It's Hard Out Here for Craig Brewer

Holly Golightly strove to overcome the “mean reds.” Down South, plenty of folks suffer the blues. But Memphis-based director Craig Brewer brands his own battle with despondence “the black snake moan.”

“I was hustling Hustle & Flow to various studios [that] weren’t saying yes or no,” Brewer recalls. “My wife Jodi was doing layout design for a tiny West Memphis [Arkansas] newspaper, and we didn’t have any money. Nothing was solid, but I had to fly out to Hollywood a lot, trying to get the script optioned. Jodi and I were going through an uncertain time, and while we loved each other, we were struggling separately. I ended up having this intense panic attack which we named ‘the black snake moan,’ because it was this fear that was never there before, something in our room that was creeping up on me.”

Trust Brewer to translate that fear into a film starring Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci and Justin Timberlake. Shot during summer 2004 in rural west Tennessee and north Mississippi, Black Snake Moan is a darkly modern tale of love, sex, betrayal and salvation in the Deep South.

“I began seeing this fable unfold, set to blues music,” says Brewer, who, with music supervisor Scott Bomar, employed regional musicians like Charlie Musselwhite, Big Jack Johnson, Kenny Brown, Cedric Burnside, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Jason Freeman, and Jim, Luther and Cody Dickinson to create music for the movie.

In Brewer’s mind, Jackson (who portrays Lazarus, a reformed bluesman), Ricci (cast as the sex-addicted Rae) and Timberlake (who plays her boyfriend Ronnie) represent racial and sexual archetypes in the contemporary South.

“There’s that certain element down here where we flirt around each other—the taboos of whites and blacks being together in a certain situation,” says Brewer, who explored similar themes in Hustle & Flow. “A lot of magic comes out of that situation, and a lot of misery, as well. I wanted to tell this story in a sexy, tactile way—and there wasn’t a better way to do that than through north Mississippi blues music. The rhythm down here personifies sin and salvation. You go out on Saturday night, you’re gonna get drunk and dance with the devil. The next day, you really do earnestly pray to God. You’re gonna sin again, but you truly want that salvation. The next week, you’re right back in that same place.”

“To get through the misery, you’ve gotta sing through it and move through it,” he muses. “That’s what the blues is.”