"We're bound to each other"

You've got a God-fearing but troubled black man chaining a promiscuous young white woman to his radiator. That imagery is pretty combustible, for reasons that have to do with both race and sex, and even though we live in supposedly enlightened times, people are bound to have trouble with it. Do you see people's potential discomfort as a liability, or is it really more of a tool? A way to shake people up?

Sure, I guess I view it as a tool. But I guess it's a liability to some. I remember the first time I read "To Kill a Mockingbird." My dad really wanted me to read it, and we had discussions about each chapter, and we finally got to the end. In the book, a black man is on trial for raping a white girl. And by the end of the trial it's so clear that this man was asked to come into her house to move a chifforobe, I mean just to move something -- and she attacked him. He didn't attack her. So when he gets a guilty verdict, I remember asking my dad, "How could he have gotten a guilty verdict? His hand couldn't even have done the bruises on her face. It's so obvious her dad did that. Why did this guy go to jail?"

I'll never forget what my dad said. He said, "Well, you gotta understand the South and you gotta understand white people's fear about black sexuality with their women. They sent that guy to jail not because he did anything wrong, but because she wanted him. He had to pay for that."

That's when I realized that that never goes away. I don't explore race or gender when these two characters [Rae and Lazarus] are together. Just them being in a room together does a lot. There's a moment where Ricci's character, in an incoherent state, lunges forward and kisses Sam on the lips. There is nothing sexual between these two in the whole movie, except that one kiss. And audiences flinch like it's a horror movie. Now that says a lot about that audience. They audibly shout when she lunges forward and kisses him.

So it's still very much in the ether, this tension and titillation with the whole thing. But nobody wants to talk about it ... So that's where we are. I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to change that. But I definitely don't want to not make a movie, and explore issues for myself, in my own region, where, by the way, we have blacks and whites who fuck with each other and do all kinds of stuff with each other -- and it's no big thing, and yet at the same time it's the thing.

I'm not writing from a place of progress. I'm not writing a movie that I want people to necessarily intellectualize. And I think that really messes with people who feel that they need to make a statement against this, and they don't quite know what it is they're against.

Because man alive, you look at this imagery on this poster, and I'm so obviously banging this drum. It's like, you really believe that I believe this? That women need to be chained up? Can we not think metaphorically once race and gender are introduced? ... Can we never go back to that time when people can be people and we can explore whatever the hell we want to? Of course we can, but there are going to be people who take exception to that.

In this country, especially, there are people who believe actors shouldn't sing and singers shouldn't act. Yet in France, actors like Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve make records that become huge hits. And singers can be amazing actors: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bette Midler, Dean Martin, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson. In "Black Snake Moan," you've got an actor, Samuel L. Jackson, singing, and a singer, Justin Timberlake, acting.

And in "Hustle & Flow," there are rappers who don't rap. All these artists are coming together and they're all just a little bit out of their comfort zone. So they all work a little harder. Also, perhaps I write a bit differently than other people. I don't think, "Oh, this would be a good story, and wouldn't it be cool if blues music were a part of it." The music is the cake; it's not the frosting.

I was having these bad anxiety attacks when we were trying to make "Hustle & Flow." We couldn't get it going, we didn't have any money, we'd just had a baby. I was selling furniture just to pay my mortgage.

They say that music finds you sometimes in life. I had known about blues all my life, I'd loved it and studied it. But it wasn't until those moments of absolute crippling fear -- I thought, I'm going to check out, just like my dad did, at 49. I had this image in my head, of a radiator with a chain around it, with that chain yanking up against this radiator. And I had to explore what that idea was.

So the actors kind of have to do the same thing. You discover your character through the music ... We took Sam down to Clarksdale, Mississippi. We got him with Big Jack Johnson, Kenny Brown, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Sam Carr. And he just soaked it up like a sponge. So one day he went into his trailer with his makeup artists. He came out, and he had the forehead of R.L. Burnside, he had the chops of Robert Belfour, he had the big, open-crown gold grill that Big Jack Johnson had, he had the moles of Junior Kimbrough. And to me, that's an artist who found his character by way of the music.

So I'm discouraged when people say actors shouldn't be singing, or singers shouldn't be acting. They're artists. And Ludacris of course should be in movies. Justin Timberlake should absolutely start his acting career. I think he's doing a great job, and now everyone's coming around to it.

Sometimes the blues are treated like a cliché, maybe especially among Northerners. People think, "Oh, it's just all about suffering and hard times."

They don't realize it's true exorcism music. These men of the Delta were not Uncle Toms. They were bad-asses in a time when you could get hung from a tree for speaking your mind. They were the first to sing about injustice and pain. And to sing about the injustice of the heart. I think they had fear in their heart, and they were the first to articulate that in a club, out loud, with everyone shouting back. And they began to take control of their fear instead of their fear controlling them.

It's call and response.

It's total call and response.

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