Steve McQueen
Imet Steve McQueen once. He was terrifying. It was an interview situation, and whenever the multiple-award-winning artist-turned-director didn’t like a question he’d brusquely shut me down and demand a new one, shouting, “Just hit me! Hit me with anything!” We met in-between the awards season trail for his 2011 sex addiction drama film
Shame and pre-production duties on his Oscar-magnet 12 Years a Slave. He explained, later that day, chummy and relaxed, that people misunderstand him. He’s simply passionate.
Yes, the 46-year-old from west London is big into passion. And the truth. And the need to be relevant. It comes, it would seem, directly from his creative background, as a fine arts student at Goldsmiths College and as the 1999 winner of the Turner Prize (he beat Tracey Emin’s bed!). He’s slippery too. Impossible to pin down. And if you overplay his arty beginnings he’ll dismiss it entirely and say that, actually, he always wanted to be a film-maker.
What is certain, however, is that he has brought more than “just” an artist’s perception to the world of movies (if it was that easy then Julian Schnabel and Sam Taylor-Johnson would be up there, too). From early in his knockout feature debut in 2008, Hunger, it became very clear that McQueen was using the camera with utter sincerity, even naïveté, as some sort of newfangled truth-telling device.
In that film, about the hunger strikes of 1981, he stared, and we stared, unflinchingly, while a prison corridor slowly, slowly, filled with urine. In Shame there was an unforgettable, and seemingly ruthless, close-up of Michael Fassbender’s despairing sex addict Brandon caught between an orgasm (he’s having a threesome) and a wincing plea to the watching audience for a quick and efficient mercy-killing. While in 12 Years a Slave, the whipping of Lupita Nyong’o’s innocent Patsey is carried out in almost surreally prolonged, yet appropriately punishing detail.
He’s timely, too, McQueen. He hates being called an “issues” filmmaker, and insists that he never “feeds” his audiences. And yet Shame arrived in the heat of discussions about the “pornification” of contemporary culture. While 12 Years
a Slave prefigured, by mere months, both the Black Lives Matter and the #OscarsSoWhite campaigns. On the downside, he doesn’t do humour. But you sense that he is simply not interested in gags. He is apparently juggling two potential upcoming projects — a biopic of Paul Robeson and a BBC drama about the lives of black Britons — neither of which seems particularly geared towards throwaway punchlines. Life is transient, he reminded me, earnestly, and with passion, at the end of our encounter. “And all that matters is what you leave behind. Everything you do should be as if it’s your last. There’s no point otherwise.”