Tagline: Everything is hotter down south.
Calls me when I’m ailing… When I can’t find my home… Mm-mm… got no mama now… I calls it the Black Snake Moan. – Lazarus
There was a time when Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) played the blues; a time he got Bojo’s Juke Joint shakin’ back in the day. Now he lives them. Bitter and broken from a cheating wife and a shattered marriage, Lazarus’ soul is lost in spent dreams and betrayal’s contempt… Until Rae (Christina Ricci).
Half naked and beaten unconscious, Rae is left for dead on the side of the road when Lazarus discovers her. The God-fearing, middle-aged black man quickly learns that the young white woman he’s nursing back to health is none other than the town tramp from the small Tennessee town where they live.
Worse, she has a peculiar anxiety disorder. He realizes when the fever hits, Rae’s affliction has more to do with love lost than any found. Abused as a child and abandoned by her mother, Rae is used by just about every man in the phone book. She tethers her only hope to Ronnie (Justin Timberlake), but escape to a better life is short-lived when Ronnie ships off for boot camp. Desperation kicks in, as a drug-induced Rae reverts to surviving the only way she knows how, by giving any man what he wants to get what she needs … Until Lazarus.
Refusing to know her in the biblical sense, Lazarus decides to cure Rae of her wicked ways – and vent some unresolved male vengeance of his own. He chains her to his radiator, justifying his unorthodox methods with quoted scripture. Preacher R.L. (John Cothran) intervenes, but it is Lazarus and Rae who redeem themselves. Unleashing Rae emotionally, Lazarus unchains his heart, finding love again in Angela (S. Epatha Merkerson). By saving Rae, he frees himself.
The Moan of Love’s Torment
“There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to save my sick, sick soul…” – Angela
Fate can be a twisted sister when it comes to rescue, and when it comes to love’s torment, rescue can come in the pairing of the most disparate souls. Fate found that coupling in Lazarus and Rae.
“BLACK SNAKE MOAN is really about two very different people coming together to heal each other,” says Writer-Director Craig Brewer, “and it is a very strange set of circumstances that brings these two people together.”
It is an audacious story and a phenomenal script that had Producer John Singleton wondering, “how in the hell we were going to get this picture made.” Singleton, who received Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Director for his bold and controversial Boyz N The Hood, calls BLACK SNAKE MOAN “much more daring than Craig’s other picture (Hustle & Flow). It is certainly something people have never seen before.”
But it bares Brewer’s indelible trademark of traversing the raw metamorphosis of deeply wounded people, hungry for a better life. “We’re all wounded in some way. We all have our weaknesses, our anxieties, our foibles, and the way we get through life is by that connection, to actually be connected to someone else,” says Producer Stephanie Allain, who championed the making of both Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood and Brewer’s Hustle & Flow. “Craig’s work allows us to put ourselves into somebody else’s shoes. In the beginning, you may not relate to it. You may not want to relate to it. You may even feel a certain sense of judgment, hostility or negativity towards it, but by the end of the movie, you love these characters, and not only do you love them, you realize you are them. It really is all about the power of being connected to someone else,” she says, “and in this case it’s Rae’s connection to Lazarus.”
It is the story of Lazarus, who packed away his guitar playing, juke joint days, found religion and settled for the married life. “He put all his love into this woman and at the beginning of the story she’s leaving him,” says Brewer. She’s not just walking out the door; she’s leaving him for his younger brother Deke. “Lazarus is an older guy, and it is breaking him apart. After falling into sorrow and darkness, he reaches for that guitar that’s been under the bed for the past 10 years. He used to be a blues man back in the day. He used to play and be a real hard cat, but he put all of that behind him.”
“Lazarus had become a man of the land,” elaborates Samuel L. Jackson, an Academy Award and Golden Globe nominee (Pulp Fiction). “Going away from music, his life had become sedate and, in a way, boring; certainly boring enough for him to lose his wife to his brother. Then he finds this girl and tries to take a measure of control over her.”
It is Rae, “this wild girl, your town slut. That’s what many people would think of her,” continues Brewer, “but Rae is a girl suffering from intense anxiety. She has this past and this abuse that really takes hold of her sexually. It is easier for her to reach this tilt of emotion and physical exertion that makes it all go away.”
Just hours after Ronnie (Justin Timberlake), her true love, leaves for boot camp, Rae numbs her misery by binging on sex and drugs. She even hustles Ronnie’s best friend Gil (Michael Raymond-James). He beats and leaves her on the side of the road. Lazarus finds her, takes her home and nurses her back to health.
Aside from curing Rae of her wickedness, Lazarus is “really an old man who wants to say a few things to a woman who’s been running around on people,” says Brewer. “He’s got some deeply rooted male vengeance that he wants to unleash on her. At the same time, they find this connection with each other – a connection that goes far beyond this chain he’s put around her waist.”
The connection evolves through a test of wills. “No matter what she does to throw herself at him, he pushes her away,” adds Jackson. “She’s not used to being unable to use her sexuality to get what she wants. This guy frustrates her, but he takes care of her, nurtures her, and eventually frees her in another kind of way.”
When Rae emerges from her semi-psychotic state and realizes a man has wrapped a long heavy chain around her waist and locked it to his farmhouse radiator, she goes ballistic. “I think she’s probably thinking about all of the horror stories she’s heard about psycho-killers in the woods,” says Christina Ricci of her character. “She’s wondering, ‘what did I get myself into now?’.” But Rae has no sense of boundaries. “Most people would have a big problem with that chain around their waist for a long time,” quips Ricci.
“Rae has had a terrible life because of what has been done to her and what she has done to herself. Because of that, her thinking is pretty twisted,” she says. “Abuse and love always came in the same package, so for her that chain meant ‘oh, he loves me’. What’s strange is, he really does come to love her and she grows to love him, in the right way, not as you would think. The chain, ironically, becomes a metaphor for their lives together – a link no one can ever break.”
Until Lazarus, Ronnie was the only decent love Rae had ever encountered. He is the only dependable person in her life. “He has internal problems too,” notes Singleton, “but when they are together they form a unit and feel at peace with each other.”
“They are the small town dream,” says Justin Timberlake, the two-time Grammy Award winner who plays Ronnie. “They are young and in love, and they want to get out and start a new life together. They will probably never leave, and that is where their problems come from. Despite their issues, Ronnie is the only one who understands Rae’s weakness and how to help her deal with it.”
When Ronnie leaves, Rae’s self-control is threadbare. When Lazarus finds her, “he tries to take a measure of control,” says Jackson. It is Preacher R.L. (John Cothran) who helps Lazarus measure his self-control. Lifelong friends, “both of these men are spiritual in non-traditional ways. R.L. is a regular guy,” says Cothran. “Despite the fact that he wears a collar, has a congregation and totes a Bible a lot of the time, he knows that fundamentally he is exactly like Laz. These two guys suffer from the same things. In fact, when R.L. is talking to Rae he tells her, ‘I’m full of sin, just like the world is full of evil.’ So he knows exactly where he is. He’s not deluded.
Lazarus’ quest to take control of Rae leads him back to music. “It gives him a new sense of self,” relates Jackson. “The more he gets back to it, the more he becomes himself again. He finds his strength, confidence and compassion. He knows that music is part of the way for him to have a better life.”
The other part is love – and the trust of a good woman. He begins that slow dance with Angela (S. Epatha Merkerson). “She’s probably had a little thing for Laz for years,” says Merkerson, a Golden Globe and Emmy Award winner (Law and Order). “Angela knows who Laz was married to, and she didn’t agree with that woman. She knows Laz to be the good man that he is. She finds herself with an opportunity to show this man how she feels about him, and then she meets this young girl Rae who is a part of his life. She doesn’t quite understand what’s going on, but she decides to trust this man that she loves.”
Angela’s faith in love keeps her filled with hope. “She does require something from Laz and that is his honesty,” says Merkerson. “It’s not that she comes to him as an angel, but she comes to him with her own set of issues and her own background.” She also comes to him on common ground: A desire to sing the music of her soul. It may be gospel music, not the blues, but to Lazarus, Angela is his Angel of mercy. Resurrected, Lazarus realizes he could have it all – religion, the love of a good woman and the blues.
Licks On A Guitar
You know you home, old man. You just walked through the door. – Preacher R.L.
“‘What is it that I don’t have? /What is it that I need? /Am I going to hell? /Where’s my woman? /I gotta have that woman. /Where’s my man? /I gotta have that man.’ When you start really listening to the music, you feel you are listening to something that is truly at its irreducible essence: One man, one guitar and a whole lotta pain.”
“This,” Brewer emphasizes, “is about the blues.” “I’m not talking about singing “Mustang Sally” on a cruise ship with blue-haired ladies dancing. I’m talking about north Mississippi, blood and guts blues. This is not pretty music. This is music that comes from a raw, emotional state of need.”
In the film, vintage footage of 1930s blues legend and former Paramount Records recording artist Son House, makes it clear: “There’s only one kind of blues…that consists between male and female.”
That is what BLACK SNAKE MOAN is all about. “A lot of people ask me, ‘Why did you name this movie BLACK SNAKE MOAN?’ Well, there’s this song called ‘Black Snake Moan,’ by Blind Lemon Jefferson, and I think that it’s one of the most haunting, wicked blues songs of all time. A lot of his music is viewed with this sense of fear of the unknown. What’s in my room? What’s crawling around? Somebody, come help me.”
Memphis Producer and the film’s Music Supervisor Scott Bomar said, “Jefferson wrote the song about going blind, and there is a line in the song about ‘black snakes crawling over me.’
It was this darkness that was coming over him, and he called it a black snake.” “It proved the perfect metaphor for a pivotal scene in the film,” adds Brewer. “There is a moment in the movie where Lazarus and Rae are confronting their darkest secrets. Locked in a house in the country with no one around you and the right amount of thunderstorms on your back and moonshine in your mug, you’re just going to tap into something that’s really primal. That’s what that song is, and after it plays and they experience it, the two of them are never the same. They are tied to each other forever.”
It is from the spirit of that song that the film drew its title. “The only way to make BLACK SNAKE MOAN come about,” says Brewer, “was to immerse the cast in the world where that music breeds: Memphis.”
“I was in New York doing press for another film, and I happened to be in the Waldorf during the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame,” recalls Jackson. “I was standing there, watching U2, and all of a sudden a voice behind me says, ‘You know, you ought to play a blues musician in a movie and let me teach you how to play the guitar.’ I turned around and it was Felicia Collins, who plays guitar on the David Letterman show. I said, ‘Yeah, okay, if that ever happens, I’ll definitely do that.’ A couple of weeks later I talked to Craig and all of a sudden I had the job. They sent the guitar to New York. I called Felicia and started taking lessons. I had started Snakes on a Plane and when I got to Vancouver the prop man saw me with this guitar case. As it turns out, Luther the prop master was a master guitarist. So everyday at lunch he was in my trailer, beating me down on this guitar.”
Jackson’s traveling days were ahead of him. “We got Sam Jackson down into Mississippi, into Clarksdale and areas around Oxford,” tells Brewer. “We got him with people like Big Jack Johnson, Kenny Brown, Cedric Burnside and Sam Carr – all north Mississippi legends with their own particular sound.”
During one of the early trips through the Delta blues basin with Jackson and Brewer, “we visited all these studios and musicians in Mississippi,” says Bomar, who previously collaborated with Brewer on Hustle & Flow. “Every stop we made, the musicians would sit down with Sam and show him licks on the guitar, teach him songs. It was that trip that really brought everything together. We had Sam’s input as to what songs he liked. We started to fine tune it and figure out what Lazarus was going to perform.”
Jackson credits his two previous and “extremely good teachers” with prepping him for his Delta tour. “We went through several different places, and I actually got to sit down and play with Big Jack Johnson. Apparently, I was just supposed to play the guitar. Bizarre set up.”
It proved to be a magic moment for the director. “The great thing that I’ve learned about Samuel L. Jackson is he is strong enough to allow himself to be taught by great people,” says Brewer. “Sam goes into Big Jack Johnson’s house and Big Jack just puts a guitar in his hands. A half-hour in and there’s Sam – never played this song before – and he’s doing it. He’s doing it well, to the point where Big Jack Johnson was like, ‘Man, get outta my house.’ That’s a big deal. That started the journey. Sam got that guitar in his hands, and he just never put it down.”
The producers and director credit Bomar for bringing all of the critical blues elements together on BLACK SNAKE MOAN. Allain, Singleton and Brewer say it was Bomar who pulled together the music that drove HUSTLE & FLOW, a film that took home the Academy Award for Best Song. “Craig was really insistent that Scott do the music,” Allain adds. “He was so right because Scott is basically responsible for bringing together these legends, like Skip Pitts and Willy Hall, who call themselves the Bo-Keys. He’s put together an incredible roster of blues musicians who are playing on the soundtrack and also as characters in the movie.”
With the blues, Bomar was entirely in his element. “When I was in high school, I would go down to Holy Springs, Mississippi to Junior Kimbrough’s Juke Joint. Every Sunday night they would crank up the music in this shack off the highway, in the middle of nowhere, about 45 minutes south of Memphis,” he recalls. “Being able to experience that was one of the biggest influences on music in my life. There’s just really nothing like it. Junior Kimbrough would play with his sons and R.L. Burnside would perform with his sons. One of the primary inspirations for Lazarus and his music in the film is R.L. Burnside. R.L. performed his entire life and for most of his life he performed at these little jukes out in the country. He’d play for whiskey or a few dollars. He died during pre-production,” Bomar says, “but, for Craig, his music was the big inspiration for Laz and his music. In the film, Laz performs a song called ‘Alice Mae,’ which is an R.L. Burnside song. Alice Mae is R.L.’s wife.” Although R.L. is gone, two of his longstanding band members perform in the film. “We have R.L.’s grandson, Cedric Burnside, playing drums and R.L.’s guitar player, Kenny Brown,” says Bomar. “Over time, Kenny and Cedric became R.L. Burnside’s backup band, toured the country, played on Letterman and made a lot of great records. That’s who we have to back up Samuel L. Jackson for the juke joint scene.”
It is the scene where Lazarus gets his mojo back, the scene where Preacher R.L. welcomes Lazarus back into the juke joint fold. “Rae is once again completely rejected by her mom and very depressed,” tells Brewer.
“Laz knows a way to make her feel better; he takes her to the juke joint. He gets on stage and plays. She ends up dancing and feeling warm, accepted and safe, which is something Rae doesn’t feel very often.”
The scene is typical of the scene that plays out just about every Friday and Saturday night around Memphis. “They go down to the local juke, plug their electric guitar into an amp, blare it really loud and bring it to you raw,” Brewer says. “When we filmed this juke joint scene, we had all these extras, and they knew – they knew how to dance to this. They knew this music was supposed to affect them, how they were supposed to move. They were old people, young people, fat people, skinny people, but they all had this beauty. They just danced.”
More than the Mesopotamia of Music
“Here alone with a beaten, half naked white woman…I been toe to toe with the law in this town, for no more than being black and nearby.” – Lazarus
“Memphis is very much a character in a Craig Brewer movie. At first glance it’s a little rough around the edges,” says Allain, “a little dangerous, a little scary. Once you’re here and you’re in the rhythm of it, you understand that it’s a town that’s born out of music, born out of a black and white collision of music and that there’s this incredible creative energy that’s seething through. It’s already the Mesopotamia of music: The crossroads of blues, rap and R&B and all the Stax legends, Elvis, BB King and Isaac Hayes – just so much here. It’s a very real city, where black and white sit side by side and listen to the same music and enjoy the same food.”
But it is also a city of the Deep South. “We have a long history in this country of bad things happening to black men because of white women. This is danger. This is danger of the first order,” says Cothran. “Many, many black men have been killed for being in the proximity of this, let alone involved in this. With the proximity of a half-naked white woman, beaten up, the first things that any black man feels are steeped in American history. He realizes he is walking on precarious and dangerous turf, so he has got to be careful. Craig is writing about things we need to talk about – coming from a place of wanting to illuminate things that need to have light shed on them. There are a lot of dark places in all of us in this country. If a film like this can shed a little light, then we’re all going to be better off.”
Because of the subject matter, Director of Photography Amelia Vincent, who also shot Hustle & Flow, says she and Brewer decided to shoot the film in a “classically formal fashion, where everything is very deliberate and the framing is very precise. You want the audience to take in everything – every choice that Craig Brewer as a director has made – is a serious choice,” she explains. “There’s nothing random about what’s happening in the frame. You have a girl in white underpants running around on a chain outside a house. If that was not shot with a certain amount of deliberate technical precision and a classical approach, then the audience could avoid acknowledging the seriousness of the material. The color tone is informed by what is in rural Tennessee, so you see a lot of faded browns and a lot of green farmland.”
“The choice to shoot in wide screen format,” Vincent says, “really comes from what is in the frame, whether it’s a guitar, or a girl lying on a couch, or a chain being pulled between two people. The wide screen format made us look at a lot of westerns. The Misfits and The Searchers were a big part of our research. In terms of framing, it is nice to take a formal western approach. Instead of shooting over somebody’s holster, we just shot over the guitar to Rae on the couch.”
Singleton, the first African-American director to rise to the ranks of Hollywood’s top-tier filmmakers, with his explosive black exploitation film Boyz N The Hood, praised Brewer for “doing some really challenging things with the actors, the camera and the way in which he is telling the story.”
Singleton knew the subject matter of BLACK SNAKE MOAN would be provocative and evocative. “This story takes us to places where people are really uncomfortable” on many levels, he says. But he was never uncomfortable with it in the hands of this storyteller. “Craig was the first person I’ve had as a protégé, and it’s really fun for me being a director to watch Craig grow as a director and see him blossom with this movie. This movie started with our collaboration on Hustle & Flow. In the process of getting Hustle made, Craig said that he had just written a new script.” Singleton read it and pushed to get it green lit before Hustle & Flow. was even released.
Allain had been encouraging Brewer to keep working on BLACK SNAKE MOAN even when it appeared Hustle & Flow. would not be made. She was convinced it would take off, and she credits Singleton for being a catalyst in making that happen. The two have made five movies together. “The fact is John shared my excitement over Craig and wanted to help usher in this new voice. He put up all of his money and gave us the creative freedom as a financier to realize Craig’s dream,” Allain says. “John is an incredible talent and his energy and his excitement for the filmmaking process is very contagious. “
The story for BLACK SNAKE MOAN came to Brewer one evening. He carded out the entire movie that night, but he didn’t have a title in mind at the time. When Hustle & Flow. won the coveted Audience Award at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, Brewer seized the opportunity to get this film made. “We just knew that if there was ever a time to get this rather challenging movie up and going, now would be the time,” Brewer remembers. “We put the pedal to the metal; we got the right cast members and started making the movie.”
Nail It To The Wall
Instinct. For Singleton, casting “Laz” was as simple as that. “I don’t think anybody, but Sam, could play Lazarus. My first instinct when I read the script was this is a great movie. Sam Jackson. It’s Sam,” says Singleton. “Once he got involved, one of the things I asked Sam was ‘Can you sing and play guitar?’ He said, ‘I can act. Anybody can sing the blues if they got some soul in them.’ ”
And with that, Jackson began his transformation as the haunted Delta blues man. When Christina Ricci auditioned for the role of Rae “it was mind blowing,” remembers Allain. “I was in tears. There was really no doubt once she came in and sat down and gave us her version of Rae. She is who we wanted.”
Brewer puts it this way: “If there was a train that had Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Faye Dunaway and Julie Christie traveling by, they’d be like, ‘Hop on, gal, you’re one of us.’ She’s fearless. Something happens when she sinks into a role, and it’s magic. It really is. No one could play Rae but Christina.”
For Ricci, it was the power of the script that put her at ease in the role. “I loved it. I got it immediately,” Ricci says. “I thought it was just so honest and really showed no judgment towards things that we as a society judge left and right.”
Brewer remembers her first day of rehearsal. “We brought out the various chains and she picked up one chain and said, ‘this is the chain that I’m gonna be chained up with.’ We said, ‘Okay, we’ll make a plastic version.’ She said, ‘No, I’m never going to wear that plastic one.’ I remember her walking around in this room with this chain and this lock around her, and I said ‘Christina you’re just gonna kill yourself.’ I remember her coming back from a take and her hands would be blistered and her feet were bleeding from running on the rocks and the pavement, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. She’s an amazing artist.”
Ricci recalls how Brewer “wanted to know certain technical points and breakdowns for my fits, so we outlined those, but I don’t like to think about things a lot. I’m kind of a subconscious actor. In the back of my mind I’m always preparing for these things. The moment I have to do it, it just comes out.”
That is what happened in the scene when she picks up Lazarus’ guitar and begins to sing “This Little Light of Mine.” “I didn’t know Sam knew how to play it. So Sam starts playing and Christina comes in with this soft Southern accent and starts singing – it is beautiful. She did this little choreography with her hands pointing to Heaven and it was really sweet,” Brewer says. “It was as if Rae had gone to Sunday school when she was six and this somehow stuck in her DNA. Life put her through the wringer, but somehow this managed to resurface, to bubble up. When I saw her sing, it just tore me up.”
As with Jackson, Singleton had the actor in mind for the second male lead. He met Justin Timberlake in Memphis during the filming of Hustle & Flow.. Timberlake was in town for the 50th Anniversary of Rock and Roll at Sun Studios. “I went to seek him out,” Singleton recalls. “I said, ‘Hey listen, there’s this guy I’ve got to introduce you to and we’re here making a movie. His name is Craig Brewer, and he’s from Memphis like you.’ ”
Timberlake remembers Singleton explaining the gist of the movie. “Then I read the script and obviously loved how it took chances – it really takes chances,” he recalls. “I’m reading about these characters, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Where in the world do these people come from?’
And I’m from Memphis, like Craig. As the movie progresses and you get into the meat of the second and third act, you start to say to yourself, ‘Oh, I’ve been there before. I know someone who’s been there before.’ I wanted to find places where it was strong for Ronnie in the midst of all that weakness; find those places where he fought it instead of giving into it.”
Timberlake and Singleton made the critical connection in that first meeting. Allain didn’t need to be convinced. “I’m a Justin Timberlake fan,” she says. “I have his albums. I know all the words. I dance to them. I imitate his dance moves. I love Justin. We started talking about Justin because he’s a Memphis native. I know he just started to act. Then he showed up day one and did his close up and tears are streaming down his face on take four. I was like, ‘This guy is incredible.’ ”
Singleton is keenly aware of the reaction to the latest trend of pop stars jumping into films. “The beautiful thing about Justin is that he’s not just some guy who’s come out of music, who is trying acting as a thing to do. I think he’s really serious about it as a craft, and I love his performance in this picture,” he says. “Justin really gets the nuances. He’s not dealing in broad strokes.”
Brewer saw sensitivity in Justin and a “deep sense of being misunderstood. I think that he knew what I was trying to do with Ronnie. We know Ronnies in our life,” he says. “We knew Ronnie, and he’s killing it. He’s doing great. I’m so proud of Justin. I really am. I see these scenes and I say, ‘Man, I can’t wait until people see this.’ ”
Preacher R.L. is the calming force in the movie. He and Angela bring a sense of balance and hope to Rae’s and Lazarus’ crumbling worlds when others abandon them and their dreams of a better life disintegrate. Angela, played by S. Epatha Merkerson and Preacher R.L., played by John Cothran, “are the audience’s way into the movie,” says Allain. “They’re the ones who have the sense and the sensibility to look at Lazarus and look at Rae and not judge them, but love them. Through their eyes, hopefully, the audience will find their way into accepting Lazarus’ very unusual remedy.”
Merkerson was determined to land the role of Angela. “I read the script and when I found out they weren’t coming to New York, I flew myself out to LA because I really wanted to do this movie,” she says. “I’m a huge Craig Brewer fan and a huge Sam Jackson fan. I flew myself out, and got the job.”
For Cothran, “it’s been fun to play a character that’s close to some people who are very special in my life, uncles and neighbors and people like that.” He’s the kind of guy who deeply cares, the kind of guy who knows how to be enough of a loving irritant to his lifelong friend to get him back on stage.”
Allain believes that talent, like the audiences of Brewer’s films, are drawn to his flawed but fascinating characters because of a deep sympathy he carries for each of them. With empathy for their plight, his characters wrestle against all odds not to let their music die in them. “Craig couches everything in love and respect for his characters,” she says, “and that’s what I think you feel.’’
Respect is the thread of Brewer’s and Allain’s work together, she says, “and the basis of all the work we want to do. Respect for everybody. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done. It matters who you want to be and who you can become. Often times in movies the heroes have no flaws or seem bigger than us or better then us, more powerful and richer, more secure and beautiful, but the truth is I think people want to go to movies so that they can see themselves in these characters. It is through them that they go on their own journeys.”
Production notes provided by Paramount Classics.
Black Snake Moan
Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci, John Cothran Jr., Justin Timberlake, S. Epatha Merkerson, Brandon Raines, Michael Raymond-James
Directed by: Craig Brewer
Screenplay by: Craig Brewer
Release Date: March 2nd, 2007
MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, language, some violence and drug use.
Studio: Paramount Classics
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $9,396,870 (86.2%)
Foreign: $1,506,976 (13.8%)
Total: $10,903,846 (Worldwide)