Steve McQueen: ‘I could never make American movies – they like happy endings’
Artist turned director Steve McQueen on New York, last year’s riots and why sex addiction is the subject of his latest film
Jason Solomons
The Observer, Sunday 8 January 2012
Steve McQueen photographed at Channel 4, London: ‘I’m not who people think I am.’ Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian
You’ve followed 2008’s Hunger with the searing drama Shame, which stars Michael Fassbender as a sex addict living in New York. Is being in film still exciting?
I’ve seen behind the curtain. It’s a bit Wizard of Oz-like. I admit I was excited about Cannes when Hunger launched there and then that was a success and I went to Hollywood for the first time and, my God, I was thrilled, you know, seeing the big letters: HOLLYWOOD. But after a few dinners with people and drinks parties, you realise it’s all about rolling up your sleeves. I got on the Paramount lot for the first time and, yes, I saw gladiators walking by and elephants and then you see the scaffolding and the trucks and it is all just work.
The myth-making has disappeared for you?
Well, it’s not what I make films for. So I wish I was still a punter, going to the cinema on a weekend. Dreams are nice, but now I’m a bit back down to earth with the whole world of film and dreams fade. I don’t want to be down on it but, if I’m honest, it’s very disappointing. Like when you realise there’s no Father Christmas.
Does that realisation cramp your work, then?
Wow, you’re getting existential on my ass so quickly. I don’t know. It’s all just false, isn’t it? I recently met some people who I looked up to and admired and I found out they were just normal – there are no gods out there.
Surely the art world is the same, full of big names and egos?
Oh no, film is way different. When you’re 20ft tall on a massive screen and you’re seeing people’s lives played out on it, it’s different from a nice painting. Film is important; it can be more than reportage or a novel – it creates images people have never seen before, never imagined they’d see, maybe because they needed someone else to imagine them.
Was Hollywood courting you?
I could never make American movies – they like happy endings. I made Shame in America, but it’s not a Hollywood movie. I’m about challenging people. Like, properly challenging them and their assumptions. Audiences make their minds up about people they see on screen, just like they do in real life. That’s what fascinates me in film. You see a character and have to think: is this person different to what I assumed he was when I first saw him?
Is that because you’re not quite what people would expect, especially living with a name like Steve McQueen?
Ha. Maybe, maybe. I’m certainly not who people think I am. I always do whatever I want to do and my films are personal to me. Hunger was about my youth, the loss of innocence when I realised what my country was doing, what was going on. Brandon in Shame is my response to being lost – I’ve not been there in the sense of sexual addiction, but I’ve been lost.
Your films may look a bit like life, but they’re very stylish, stylised even.
I worked with scriptwriter Abi Morgan on Shame and she’s brilliant, but she always knows where her stories and sentences are going. I don’t want that; I like to start a sentence and let it take me, let it flow, so it can go anywhere. That’s how I think things are in life, where we don’t have a script. So I don’t do storyboards. The characters and narrative dictate how I film a scene.
Why did you set Shame in New York?
I studied at NYU and many of my family used to live there. They’ve retired to Florida or the West Indies now, but when I first went there it was 1977 and I remember Elvis dying and the blackout and we all got these T-shirts saying: “Where were you when the lights went out?” I was in Brooklyn, seven years old. Uncles, aunts, they all left London and we used to spend summers with them. Everyone there is from somewhere. It’s all about immigrants, always a new wave of cab drivers – Haitian, then Pakistani, then Russian. It’s a city that can always reinvent itself and that’s what I wanted for my character, somewhere to hide.
Why make a film about sex addiction?
When you have everything, why would you want to blow it? That’s the question here. It could be drugs, drink, but here it’s sex and I chose sex because people don’t talk about it. Sex has a stigma that drugs or alcohol no longer have.
You got a NC-17 rating in the States and that’s said to be commercial suicide.
When I first heard mention of NC-17, I thought they were a rap band. I didn’t give a toss about that because I like the idea of doing something no one is actually talking about. It was the same with Hunger. Want, urge, need – these are the things that create drama.
When I first met you, you said the only things that interested you as movie subjects were set in 1981: the Brixton riots, Bobby Sands and Spurs winning the FA Cup.
Well, I’m doing a film about slavery next and that’ll piss off even more people in America. I’m a bit over Tottenham, for some reason. But I still hope to do something about the riots with the BBC. Sadly, I wasn’t here for the riots over the summer, but they even came to my mother’s street, in Ealing for God’s sake. I partly live in Amsterdam now, but I’m still a Londoner and something’s wrong. The chief of police admits to sweeteners from News Corp and gets a slap on the wrist. A kid steals £40 trainers and gets 10 months; it’s blatantly not fair. The rapper Smiley Culture stabbed himself? C’mon, please. There are too many unanswered questions. It’s not gangs – it’s individuals who are fed up and want to be in a better position, but they don’t know how to say it or change it.
Can art address these questions?
Art can’t fix anything. It can just observe and portray. What’s important is that it becomes an object, a thing you can see and talk about and refer to. A film is an object around which you can have a debate, more so than the incident itself. It’s someone’s view of an incident, an advanced starting point.
Shame is released on 13 January
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About this articleClose Steve McQueen: ‘I could never make American movies – they like happy endings’This article appeared on p5 of the The New Review section of the Observer on Sunday 8 January 2012. It was published on guardian.co.uk at 00.05 GMT on Sunday 8 January 2012. It was last modified at 00.08 GMT on Sunday 8 January 2012.