By Fred Topel | Images property of Paramount Vintage.
Black Snake Moan
Samuel L. Jackson seems so badass he can handle anything. Cleaning up brains, running around New York, fighting snakes on a plane… In his latest movie, Black Snake Moan, he croons out some blues tunes, and doesn't sound half bad.
Jackson Plays Black Snake Moan
"Fortunately Mississippi delta blues doesn’t necessarily need a silky smooth Luther Vandross type of voice," said Jackson. "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."
He plays an aging bluesman trying to cure a young girl (Christina Ricci) of her nymphomania. We only see him strum the guitar incidentally. It's not the crux of the film, but Jackson had to master it.
"I learned to play. It was one of the things that I spent most of the time doing. Fortunately I had maybe six or seven months to work that out and had a really good guitar teacher in the beginning. Felicia Collins in NY while I was shooting Freedomland then when I left to do Snakes on A Plane in Vancouver, the prop master was an awesome guitarist so he spent a lot of time with me in my trailer every day. It actually became something I looked forward to doing every day. By the time we got to the film I was pretty fast out on it. I actually taught myself to play the songs in a very different way than Scott played them, because I’d watched him play them and I worked it out like this and he watched me play and said, 'I never thought of doing it that way.' Then I talked to all these old blues guys when we were doing our little road tour and most of them had taught themselves to play after 30 and they all had very different playing styles so I created something that was actually my own in terms of how I learned how to play and worked my way though the songs. According to Big Jack, that's really cool."
Considering that's only a function of the character's backstory, imagine what went into creating Lazarus, the man who chains a sex-crazed girl to his radiator. "Well, the complexity of who he is, 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 and 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."
From writer-director Craig Brewer, Lazarus became a total Samuel L. Jackson creation. "Once I got the script and I read it and then they went through all the machinations of 'that's not who you're supposed send the script to' and 'ok I'll go meet him' and whatever, 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 him 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 and what two people would have no idea of what kind of people they've encountered. She'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're actually run into a real nymphomaniac or a sexual 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."
Black Snake Moan opens March motherf*ckin' 2nd. Sorry, I had to say it.
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