Black Snake Moan: A journey into the dark south

12 May 2007

0Comments | Comment on this Article

This is where Lazarus (Samuel) steps in. After rescuing her from possible death, Lazarus, burdened by his own demons of loves and passions lost, decides to 'cure' her, by chaining Rae to his radiator until she sees the error of her ways. As time passes, Lazarus and Rae begin to understand each other, and consequently themselves, until they are both finally able to shake off the shackles of their bitter pasts.

For writer and director Craig Brewer, making the movie was an emotional journey which started way before the concept had even been born.

"I was on the plane and my hearing went out and I couldn't get any oxygen. My dad died of a heart attack when he was 49 and that was always on my mind," explains Brewer. "So the stewardess came over and tried to talk to me to see if I really was having a heart attack but she said that I was just having an anxiety attack."

After telling his wife Jodi about it, Brewer discovered she'd been experiencing similar things - her attacks happened in her car on the freeway. Jodi encouraged him to write about it, and shortly after, Brewer says the idea for the movie started to grow.

"I was listening to this bluesman Skip James one night and I had this vision of going through my grandfather's house in the woods," he says. "As I walked through the front door, this chain was attached to the radiator and it was moving around real fast. It was wrapped around the radiator and when it went taught, the radiator held but it kept clanking. From that night, I just started writing this tale."

'Black Snake Moan', originally a 1920s song, became a code word the couple's anxiety attacks, before lending itself as the title for the film.

For Samuel and Christina, dealing with the emotional intensity of their characters, and the interactions between them in the course of the movie, was where their journeys lay.

Christina admits that she was initially "intimidated" by the part and the idea of taking on such a sensitive issue. But after researching the character in greater depth, the 27-year-old actress says she felt immense "compassion" for Rae.

"I saw Rae as a girl in an intense amount of pain who has to take on the form of her own abuser because the abuser has left... That results in a desperate, frantic person who is out of control," Christina says. "But she is a survivor and she was doing amazingly well considering the circumstances."

However, the day before filming was due to start, fear hit again and Christina contemplated whether she could go through with it.

"I was going to be half naked for the next three months and doing these intense emotional scenes and crying. I will be living with her anxiety and fears and painful memories. And right before you jump, that can be foreboding and scary," she explains.

Panic over, Christina decided to give the project her absolute efforts, doing nothing but act and sleep for the duration of filming.

"This movie was so exhausting for me that when they dropped me off back at my place, I went right to bed," she says.

You could say getting into character had been such a complex endeavour, once she was there Christina didn't want to risk leaving, in case she couldn't get back in. The result was Christina lived in a "bubble of Rae's world" for three months, which worked out "great".

The actress was required to shed some weight for the role, which Christina readily did as she felt it a justifiable reflection of Rae's lack of care for her health, rather than a nod towards the much talked-about pressures for Hollywood starlets to be skinny.

But for someone who's admitted to having suffered from low body-image and a teenage eating disorder, did she feel any pressure bearing so much flesh?

"If I was playing myself, I would have been self-conscious," Christina reveals. "But for Rae, I had to have the attitude to never think of my body or care what it looked like. I left my self-consciousness at the door."

Christina's devotion didn't go unnoticed by her veteran co-star Samuel, 58, who said he'd never seen a "braver" performance.

"Christina took risks", he praises, noting that a great deal of trust was needed for their screen relationship to be convincing.

For Samuel, his greatest challenge was having to learn to play guitar well enough to make it look nautral.

Luckily he had "some good guitar teachers who worked diligently and worked long hours and were patient", including a prop man on the set of his previous movie 'Snakes On A Plane' who Samuel says was an "awesome" guitarist.

Lazarus' guitar was just as integral to the movie as Rae's complex history. The blues backdrop and deep-south Tennessee setting was just as important to Brewer - whose approach to filmmaking is inherently that of a true artist - as the leading cast, which is why the film was shot on location, rather than a studio.

"Being in a specific place can help you tell yourself something about it. As opposed to being in Toronto and pretending to be in the South, we were actually there and so we had the bugs, the mosquitoes, the flies and the heat," Samuel explains. "You can smell the food cooking around you and all of that puts you in the place. It is just something that flows the energy into you. To me, the energy of the South is something different than the energy of the East Coast. Everything kind of slows down in the South because of the heat. There is a familiarity to the people around you."

Brewer knew that his film belonged in the Deep South setting, and couldn't have worked anywhere else. 'Black Snake Moan' is built on intensity - which would be diluted if the surroundings were wrong. And as well as the heavy blues element, the location was vital to his decision to cast a black actor as one of his leads.

The 36-year-old writer-director recalls his first film, 'The Poor and the Hungry', which centred around one white and one black car thief. Brewer says when he first took the idea to Hollywood, producers were baffled as to why he didn't feel the need to explain this inter-racial relationship. "There is such a misconception about the south. We are very integrated. It is hard to do a movie about your passions, which are rap and blues music, and not have African-Americans as your protagonists," he explains.

Brewer went on to win five awards for 'The Poor and the Hungry' - not bad for a debut effort. His 2005 hit 'Hustle and Blow' bagged a whopping 17 awards, including an Oscar, three Black Movie Awards and the coveted Audience Award at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

The film's runaway success put Brewer on the map, but before it snowballed he and his wife could barely afford to pay their mortgage, and the filmmaker was forced to sell his lifelong collection of videos in a yard sale to buy a plane ticket to Los Angeles to attend a meeting to discuss the script.

"At one point, I thought I'd have to sell my soul", Brewer recalls. But he didn't. Instead, he stayed true to his artistic convictions and it paid off, big time.

Time will tell if the 'Black Snake Moan' journey ends in awards success, but it certainly sounds like it was a hell of a ride.

By Abi Jackson.

0Comments | Be the first to comment!