Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave, Hunger, Widows and now Blitz - a tapestry of British life during the decisive moments of the Second World War - talks to Danny Leigh about his film-making career.
An artist and filmmaker, McQueen has never distinguished between his artwork and cinema practice. His films have evinced a formal audacity and his entire corpus has explored social, political, racial and cultural issues, past and present, locally and within a wider international context. Beyond their themes, his films also carry an emotional weight that makes them as involving as they are thought-provoking.
Some 15 years after he began making a series of acclaimed video artworks and gallery pieces, and nine years after winning the Turner Prize, McQueen made his feature directorial debut with the sparse, uncompromising drama Hunger (2008). His account of the final days of IRA political prisoner, MP and hunger striker Bobby Sands began his collaboration with Michael Fassbender, who played the protagonist in the filmmaker's subsequent film, Shame (2011), which looked at the destructive impact of sex addiction. In 2013, McQueen directed the Oscar®-winning 12 Years a Slave, based on the writings of Solomon Northup, a free African American sold into slavery in 1841.
Racial injustice was also the predominant theme of the filmmaker's anthology TV drama series Small Axe (2020), made in the same year he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and the documentary series Uprising (2021). Both received BAFTA awards. In 2018, McQueen directed a big screen version of the 1980s TV hit Widows, centring on a group of women who orchestrate a heist, relocating the action from London to Chicago. And in 2023 he collaborated with his partner Bianca Stigter on Occupied City, an expansive documentary adaptation of her book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945. His latest narrative feature, Blitz, opened the 68th BFI London Film Festival.
Holding still courtesy of Getty images.
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