‘THE POWER OF ART’
McQueen: I value work, not all the awards
Best Picture Oscar winner and “12 Years a Slave” director Steve McQueen is about to add another honor to his list of accolades — he’ll receive the Director Tribute at the 30th annual IFP Gotham Awards, streaming Monday.
“It’s such an honor, especially coming from the Gotham Awards because New York is a place which has been extremely generous to me,” McQueen, 51, told the Daily News Friday.
“Since I’ve got all the family in New York, I’ve been coming there since ’77. My first memories of New York in the hot summer of ’ 77 — it was boiling bloody hot — was the blackout and Elvis dying,” he recounted with a laugh.
Unlike some filmmakers who languish after a first big hit, McQueen has been lauded for features before and after his 2013 blockbuster, including 2008’s “Hunger,” 2011’s “Shame” and 2018’s “Widows.”
Yet the critical acclaim and awards are just the cherry on top for McQueen. His ambitious anthology, “Small Axe,”” lit up small screens in November with its five films about the West Indian community inn Britain in the 1960s andd 1970s. The five films aree “Mangrove,” “Lovers Rock,” “Red, White andd Blue,” “Alex Wheatle”” and “Education.”
“I’m very grateful that I won these sort of awards, but for me, it’s never been about that,” said the London-born McQueen, who is of Grenadian and Trinidadian heritage. “I think when you’re a sort of scientist, you’re not thinking about getting an award for doing this thing with medicine, you’re thinking about, ‘How can I help to do this?’ ”
He said he approaches his craft similarly, focusing on “How can I best portray us as human beings within the environment we’re in right now or have some kind of reflection on us with this medium?”
“You just keep on making art, keep on sort of doing the thing that you have to do. That’s it. So it’s very easy in a way, to keep on working, because you know, you never master it,” McQueen said. “You’re chasing your own tail half the time.”
Independent Film Project Executive Director Jeffrey Sharp sees it differently.
“How many filmmakers — you can count them on one hand — their body of work, every film, is a masterpiece?” Sharp, who produced “Boys Don’t Cry” and “You Can Count on Me,” told The News.
McQueen was already working on “Small Axe” when he won the best picture Oscar in 2014 for “12 Years a Slave,” making him the first Black director to do so — six years before police killings of unarmed Black men and women like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor energized the Black Lives Matter movement.
More valuable to McQueen than the award recognition “Small Axe” is now receiving — it’s already been nominated for 10 — is the response viewers.
“Every day I get letters from people … from all parts of the world,” he said. “It’s kind of crazy. I’ve never had that before. So, there’s been a really cathartic response to the films and I’m humbled by it. I mean that’s the power of art. That can be the power of art, to revalue a history that had been forgotten.”