Black Snake Moan director Craig Brewer

No, I was actually in Los Angeles at the Oscars when they won.

Yeah. I think because Terrence [Howard] and Three 6 were nominated for an Oscar. I actually got [CEO of Paramount Pictures] Brad Grey’s seats. He said “If it wasn’t for Hustle & Flow we wouldn’t even be at the Oscars.”

Yeah, but I got to be honest with you, when I found out we got nominated I knew we won.

I was so confident. I didn’t have some secret inside line. I knew that if that song got nominated that meant that the Academy members couldn’t get that song out of their heads.

Yeah and also, I saw all the other films and I heard the music and I really believe that It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp was a functional song. What I mean by that, it wasn’t ornamental, it was truly fundamental. I had so many people come up to me saying they didn’t like rap but they loved It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp. I keep telling them, “Well, you were there when we made it, you were there watching them create that song in the movie.” A lot of people who usually don’t give rap a chance, like it better having been there watching them make the song. It’s not over some montage. It’s not over the closing credits. You’re seeing some guy go, “Huh, it’s hard out here for a pimp.” Then you’re seeing some girl sing it over and over again and then it’s got a beat to it and then they play it. The audience shares in the joy of the song because they’re there watching it be put together. I know when I was first pitching the movie to people in Hollywood I kept saying, “This scene needs to be like the Requiem scene in Amadeus.” When he and Salieri are putting that Requiem together and you’re hearing one baseline and you hear the sopranos and the arpeggios with the violins coming in. I knew that no one had ever seen that in rap.

It’s definitely the way I wanted them to market it. I didn’t want some Regarding Henry poster. I didn’t want some meditative half lit face of Sam Jackson looking serious and forlorn. This is a movie I want people to have fun with as well as get the message that I’m trying to give. I really found myself inspired by the marketing of the movies that inspired this movie which would be Baby Doll by [Elia] Kazan and A Streetcar Named Desire. There is an obvious hot, sexual tone to those posters that have a respectful nod for camp. I don’t want people thinking that I’m actually doing a dark movie because it’s not really. It’s actually the most moral story that I’ve ever really told.

Totally. I told them “Please be inspired by Conan the Barbarian and Star Wars.” He is a protector. There are a lot of things in the poster that I actually like that nobody really catches onto. One is that she’s looking at you and seducing you but he’s not looking at you. Also there’s a pattern across his chest with the chain that forms a cross. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the criticism I get is people thinking that the movie’s too religious.

Right. But make no mistake, I am making a comment. I live in the red states. I welcome everybody to enjoy the movie and to come to it but in my heart, I’m making movies for the south. The radical concept I’m bringing up is that there’s a lot of people out there that call themselves Christians or children of God and I don’t think that they really act that way. I think that there’s a lot of judgment out there right now and there’s a lot of divisiveness and everyone’s pissing around their own religious territory. We’ve lost the Good Samaritan. We’ve lost seeing someone in need and unconditionally loving them and trying not to judge them.

I can tell you where to meet them in Memphis.

It’s funny because nymphomania doesn’t exist. A few people have asked me, “Have you done plenty of research on the state of nymphomania?” [laughs] I always go, “Well, let me first tell you that it’s a male fantasy that this girl can’t get enough sex.” I wanted to take that southern archetype of the out of control horny farmer’s daughter that if you just go over on that property she’s going to get you. There are examples of that in respected literature like Mayella in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The black man is essentially on trial for going into her house and helping her move a cabinet and then she pounced on him. I love the book and the movie. My dad told me that when he was growing up in the south that there was just intense fear of black male sexuality amongst white southerners. When Tom Robinson, the guy on trial in To Kill a Mockingbird, gets a guilty verdict it’s so obvious that he didn’t do anything wrong. I remember my dad saying “They’re not sending him to jail because they believe he attacked her. They’re sending him to jail because that white woman wanted him.” As a kid I remember thinking how wildly unjust that was. But with this movie coming out I’m seeing that that there’s this fear of that image.

I’m hoping that the people who cry misogyny with this movie are going to feel foolish about it a couple of years from now. The definition of misogyny is a hatred towards women. I would challenge anybody to come to the end of this movie and really believe that I have a hatred towards women or even hatred toward this particular woman. If you do anything that has a representation of race or gender and it starts stepping outside a common idea of what they want to represent that race or gender then you’re going to find that your character represents the whole race and gender. That gets a little tricky for narratives that have extreme characters. Especially in the south where it seems like all their characters are extreme. I always bring up A Streetcar Named Desire. I always think “Wow, they teach that in high schools and nobody cries misogyny.” Not only does Stanley Kowalski get drunk. But he goes into the room where his pregnant wife is dancing to music and with a closed fist punches her in the face and the head repeatedly. But when she gets whisked upstairs and he’s screaming her name “Stella, Stella, Stella” she goes downstairs and she fucks that man. We want her to fuck him and even we want to fuck him because he’s got this rippling back and his friends tried to sober him up by putting him in the shower so now he’s wet. There’s all this sexual charged passion that is in these stories that make people uncomfortable but I also think people covet it. I think everybody wants to have some passion in their life that defies all reason and all morals. Where it’s like, “Oh I’ve got to have that woman,” or “I’ve got to have that man” no matter how volatile at times your relationship may be, at least I’ve experienced that in my 13 years of marriage.

Oh yeah and even a lot of the same actors. Bojo the club owner in Black Snake Moan [played by Claude Phillips] is the junkie in Hustle & Flow that gives them the keyboard. The pawn shop owner that’s selling the microphone is also the guy at the bar that’s giving Justin Timberlake a hard time. So there is a Memphis and Mississippi collection of characters. I’m trying to make like John Ford movies to some extent where I have my own company of people.

Very much so but even more importantly they’re part of this series that I’m trying to do. I’m really exploring the music that I’ve been excited about from my region. That means rap, blues, the next one is country and then there’s the soul movie. They’re all part of a world and I could definitely see Rae taking a trip into Memphis and rolling around in the same bars and shake joints that Djay [the main character in Hustle & Flow] is bringing his women to. That’s more by way of the tone of the music. I don’t really try to put music on these stories as if they’re just an afterthought or a soundtrack. It’s really me saying I want to make a blues movie and what does that mean. That means I need to embrace more of a fabled tone. If you really listen to the blues, it’s this extreme world “I’m going to buy me a bulldog and chain it in my front yard and that’ll keep my woman from sneaking off at night.” R.L. Burnside singing, “I got an ass pocket of whiskey. I got a front pocket of gin. If you don’t open your door I’m going to kick that motherfucker in.” It’s sweaty and it’s sexy and it’s wrong. That means taboo and that means the blues.

The shirt is essentially a Civil War emblem. The Confederate flag going one way and the American flag another way and the crossed revolvers in the front. I’m creating the redneck fantasy down to the Daisy Dukes and the boots. The shirt was very inspired by Flashdance. It’s more cropped than Jennifer Beals had in the 80’s but I definitely wanted that off the shoulder thing where you think that at any moment if you just blow on Christina the whole thing would just fall down at any moment. But we’ve been fighting that war across our chest for a while and it’s not really racist, it’s really between class. It’s between people who have and people who don’t. Of my relatives in the south that claim that Confederate heritage, whether people agree with it or not, it is the one thing that they have to say, “Hey we’re a rebel” but it’s also another way of saying, “Hey we don’t have money and we need some respect.”

Yeah, that’s how it always starts. This one started even more strangely that way because I wrote this right after I wrote Hustle & Flow but before I shot Hustle & Flow. So it was actually a reaction to me trying to get Hustle & Flow made. I was experiencing these really terrible anxiety attacks I never had before. My Dad had died of a heart attack at 49 so when it first hit me I really thought I was having a heart attack. Everything was unsure with Hustle & Flow and it was a good three years of trying to get that movie made but a lot of people didn’t want to make it with me and they didn’t want to make it with Terrence. I didn’t have any money. I couldn’t keep a job because I was constantly being flown out to LA and sleeping on my producer’s couch and my friend’s couches. But these attacks were really humbling to me. I really began to question my mortality. I got damn scared and then I just started listening to the blues, which I’ve listened to since I was 12. But they say that music finds you sometimes in your life and I was hearing the fear in the music but I never listened to the fear. Now I was listening to what was being said by these guys. Then one night I saw this radiator with the chain wrapped around it in my head and this chain yanking against it and making this big sound and then I started trying to figure out what the story was. It’s like a detective thing with me. I’ll be listening to music in my car and these images will come into in my head and then I have to find out what the story is.

No, but I know what their stories are. I really want to do this music series first. If I want to go back I can do those. But everybody is always talking about how they wanted to make a black Godfather, as silly as that sounds. But they were always doing it with like drugs and thugs and violence. I was like, if you’re looking to do a black Godfather then do it with the music industry. No one has done the arc in a really compelling way of a person who started from nothing and then has to sell the music and sell himself and ultimately get to that place of fame where he may be more ho than pimp.

No, she’s got it better. She’s the muse. It seems like every movie that I do I’m basically exploring my relationship with me and my girl. But don’t worry, I’m not Sam Jackson, I’m the crazy girl on the end of the chain but I just can’t fit into those Daisy Dukes.

I found it like everybody else found it. A friend called me up and said, “Have you been on SuicideGirls?” What’s really great is that now it’s turned into a much more accessible website. I like to turn other girls onto it. I tell them that the women are real, but they’re aggressive, very self-empowered and sexy as all get out.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck