Last year Craig Brewer used the visage of an aging pimp to tell a story about dreams and redemption in his breakout hit, Hustle & Flow. With his latest film, Black Snake Moan, the Memphis-bred filmmaker again uses a provocative image -- a nymphomaniac in chains -- as a launching point to explore deeper issues of sexuality, race and religion in the deep South.

Samuel L. Jackson stars as Lazarus, a former bluesman turned God-fearing farmer who finds Rae (Christina Ricci), the town harlot, lying battered and beaten on the side of a road. Impelled by his conscience, Lazarus takes it upon himself to nurse Rae back to health and cure the wildly promiscuous girl of her "affliction."

It's a different kind of role for Ricci, who spends most of Black Snake Moan in various states of undress. Despite the presence of numerous cast and crewmembers, the self-proclaimed prude chose not to cover up between takes. "It was really necessary for the crew to be used to (the nudity) because I was playing someone who has no sense of her body and places no value on her body," explains Ricci. "Her body has never done anything but cause harm. She has no regard for herself so she wouldn’t care if she were clothed or not."

Sam Jackson didn't need much time to adjust to his co-star's lack of clothing. "After about an hour of looking at Christina in those little panties and that shirt you kind of get over it," says Jackson, "because that's what she had on every day and she didn't put on a robe between shots or hide herself. She just kind of hung out, so you got over it pretty quickly."

"When you’re playing someone like that, I think it’s inappropriate for you to have any kind of vanity," adds Ricci. "I needed to lose any sort of self-consciousness because sometimes you can see self-consciousness in a performance when somebody is naked and I really needed for that not to be there."

Naturally, it was a situation that required a tremendous amount of trust -- something that the two actors established well before they started shooting. "During the rehearsal period, Christina and I developed this really interesting bond that kind of allowed her to kind of go anywhere she wanted to and I'd support her," states Jackson.

"It was such a great feeling," Ricci adds. "It’s rare to have a partner like that in those scenes where you can just lose yourself because you know you’re in someone’s hands who cares about you and will take care of you."

With the character of Lazarus, Jackson looked to his family for inspiration. "He seems to be an amalgam of my grandfather and his brothers," says Jackson. "The guys that I worked with in the fields and talked to were people of the earth who drank hard when it was time to drink. 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," he adds.

Ricci saw her role as an opportunity to raise awareness about sexual abuse. "There are millions of women like Rae out there," she says. "The link between childhood sexual abuse and promiscuity in women and low self worth and post traumatic stress and low self esteem...has been well established."

Jackson was impressed by his co-star's willingness to tackle such a challenging role. "I think that Christina’s performance is one of the bravest performances I've seen that a young actress would take," he says. "I'm sure there are a lot of young women who wouldn’t touch this thing."

For Ricci, getting the performance right was a matter of duty. "I felt so strongly about Rae and about the experience that she and millions of others have survived," she explains, "I felt a huge moral responsibility to do this and to do it right and to give it really the attention and the weight that it deserved."

Black Snake Moan opens nationwide on March 2nd, 2007.

Check out ReelzChannel.com's Black Snake Moan page for clips from the movie and more.