McQueen aims to change game
When British filmmaker Steve McQueen was 13 years old in 1983, he found himself spellbound by a TV crime series called Widows.
It was about four middle-aged London women, suddenly widowed by the deaths of their criminal husbands, who decide to finish the heist that their unlucky spouses had been attempting to pull off. The women not only had to work through the mechanics and risks of the caper, they also had to fight sexist assumptions that they weren’t up to the task.
The Oscar-winning McQueen, who recently turned 49, felt a strange kinship with their situation, decades before he began work on his film adaptation of the TV series.
“I loved watching them,” says McQueen, in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, where his version of Widows — starring Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki and Cynthia Erivo as the title’s bereaved and scheming wives — had its world premiere.
“These women sort of spoke to me because they were being deemed as not being capable, and being judged by their peers just like how I was being judged as a Black man, as a boy, at 13 years old. People wanted to set my compass to a certain direction and it wasn’t for me. (So) what happened watching that TV show was something that I could relate to. It had a really personal effect on me, and 35 years later I made this film about it, switching the location from London to Chicago.”
He’s happy to be back in Toronto. His 2013 Best Picture Oscar winner 12 Years a Slave played at TIFF, and so did his earlier films Hunger and Shame; we spoke on each occasion.
It was during a TIFF interview for 12 Years a Slave that McQueen’s frequent star Michael Fassbender described the artist-turned-director as “very demanding” but also a joy to work with because “he expects everything of everyone, not just the actors, but the crew as well and also himself.”
That certainly comes through as McQueen sit for another interview with me, our first since 12 Years a Slave, where he enjoys wrestling with terms like “genre” and “convention”:
Belated congratulations on your Oscar win for 12 Years a Slave! Have you gotten tired of talking about that movie yet?
Oh, no! I’m so happy about that picture! What I’m even more happy about that picture is how (many) great films came out of that. Moonlight wouldn’t have been made, Selma wouldn’t have been made, and I imagine Black Panther wouldn’t have been made if it wasn’t for 12 Years. Because what that movie proved was that a movie with Black lead actors could make money, not just in America but abroad. That was the main thing. The movie made $132 million abroad and that raised eyebrows. It gave possibilities. When we met a decade ago, you had your art-house film Hunger playing at TIFF. Now you’re back here with a big genre movie about a heist. Does it feel like a big change for your over the past decade?
Not at all. I just wanted to take fiction — in a way a farfetched one, because most of these movies are gangster movies or westerns — and steep it in reality, to steep it in our everyday existence, the environment we find ourselves in. Because there’s a cause and effect. And to see what these women were up against in their immediate surroundings, their immediate environment, this roller-coaster ride of a narrative, that for me was exciting. And the fact of taking this story from London to Chicago, what I wanted to do is I want to steep that fiction in the reality of a contemporary Western city — and it was very important that it was Chicago. Where there any other directors you looked to as model for this? For example, Spike Lee made a heist movie with Inside Man.
No! Look, heist movies are a convention, and whatever people say about a set of rules, there are no set of rules. Otherwise every picture would be the same. You want to break those rules. If every heist movie had the same convention, it would be boring. Maybe a lot of them do, because it’s Hollywood. I want to disrupt that convention. So there’s an essence of (the genre) but you have to move it the way you want it to be. Disrupt it. Change it. That’s how you get another convention, another genre. Everything’s up for grabs. Widows.
Without giving anything away about the plot of Widows, I just say you make the most interesting use of a dog I’ve seen any recent film. I kept wondering why Viola Davis’ character Veronica kept taking her dog with her everywhere she went. Did you think that the audience might be wondering about the dog?
I was thinking possibly the audience was. But that’s great because it’s also that the dog softens Veronica. Don’t forget, we know a lot more about her at a certain point in the film and why that companion is so important to her.
Everything is there for a reason. I think for a filmmaker it’s all about how things enter into our story and how things are revealed of their purpose. It’s the mechanics of the situation. The same with this movie; it’s about all this interweaving. We’re talking about race, we’re talking about politics, we’re talking about economics, we’re talking about gender, we’re talking about religion, we’re talking about policing, and we’re talking about gun crime. Has making Widows whetted your appetite to try other genres? Say sci-fi or westerns?
I don’t really care about genre. I care about good films. That’s it. I just hope it’s a good movie. My next one could be a minimalist black-and-white silent picture or a musical comedy.
I don’t know. 12 Years a Slave was meant to be an art-house picture, but it became commercial. I just think about movies being either being good or bad, that’s it.