Steve McQueen: my hidden shame

Steve McQueen has known about slavery for as long as he can remember. To the son of West Indian parents, slavery’s history is the story of his very existence: “So there is a weight on your chest, on your back, from a very early age.” Yet he cannot recall having ever felt angry about it.

To McQueen, the notion sounds as bizarre as finding slavery funny. “Painful, sure. Hurt, absolutely. I don’t know if that can be seen as anger. Not to say that I’m not angry with injustice, of course and slavery is a huge injustice. But thinking about it that way? No.” From his baffled expression, you might think him literally unaware that anger is quite a common response.

Like many artists, McQueen experiences the world from a highly singular perspective. As a working-class boy growing up in 1980s suburbia, “there were no examples of artists who were like me. When did you ever see a black man doing what I wanted to do?”

His father kept telling him to get a trade; even when his son began to be successful.

He has never been interested in pleasing mainstream tastes, but no matter how uncompromising his work, it keeps becoming more and more popular. After winning the 1999 Turner prize with a video installation filmed from an old oil drum rolling through Manhattan, he was awarded an OBE, followed in 2011 by a CBE. His first feature film, Hunger, released in 2008, was a remorselessly gruelling portrayal of Bobby Sands starving himself to death in the Maze prison, and not an easy sell, but the critics went wild and McQueen won a Bafta. Shame, his second movie, could not have been a less sexy study of sex addiction, but took more than £10 million (Dh60 million) at the box office. The director shot his latest movie in just 35 days, with one camera and a budget of barely £10 million, and wasn’t even confident of finding a distributor brave enough to take it. 12 Years A Slave has already earned $40 million (Dh146 million) in US ticket sales, multiple Golden Globe nominations and countless predictions of an Academy Award that would make McQueen the first black feature film director to win an Oscar.

We meet for lunch in Amsterdam, where he decided to live 16 years ago, “because it’s not London, it’s not LA, it’s not New York”.

He lives there with his long-term partner, a Dutch film critic, and their two children, a son and a daughter. McQueen is more elegant than photos tend to suggest, and has the most amazingly fluid face. He is so engaged that you would never sense that this is probably the umpteenth time he has discussed his new film.

12 Years A Slave is based on a book McQueen’s wife came across while he was working on an idea about a free African-American from the north kidnapped into slavery in the deep south. Its author, Solomon Northup, had been exactly that: a prosperous black New York businessman, drugged by traffickers and sold into slavery, who escaped 12 years later and published a memoir detailing the horror of Louisiana plantation life. McQueen couldn’t believe his eyes. “It was identical to my idea. But every turn of the page was a revelation, because you think you know what slavery is, and you’re opening this book and thinking, my God. Every page was just, wow, really? It was such an eye-opener.”

McQueen’s film pitilessly documents the beatings, lynchings, rape and brutality of a slave-owning class half-demented by its own moral corruption, and routinely reduces audiences to tears.

“There’s been a kind of amnesia,” he says, “or not wanting to focus on this, because of it being so painful…People do not want to engage.”

Only it turns out that they do. At screenings all over the US, QA sessions have become “more like town hall meetings, because people have got so much to say. It’s been incredible.”

While thrilled by the film’s reach, however, McQueen has been thrown by the unintended consequence of success: at 44, he finds himself the new darling of Hollywood. Benedict Cumberbatch co-stars alongside Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Brad Pitt appears, too, having been quick to come on board as a producer. Even Madonna was all over McQueen at the New York premiere — though she spent the entire film texting, which he says made him laugh.

McQueen is a famously abrasive interviewee. The most obvious theme in all three films is incarceration, physical and psychological, so I ask if he knew anyone in jail while he was growing up. He says not. Does he have any idea where the preoccupation with imprisonment comes from? “You’re the journalist, that’s your job. I just get on with it.”

McQueen was born in west London to Grenadian parents, grew up in leafy Ealing and went to a multicultural school where he was one of the cool kids, on account of being big and good at football.

“It was fun, we laughed all day, I didn’t do any homework ever, we just laughed.”

By the age of 13, one class of academically gifted kids had been creamed off for special attention. Then there was 3C1 class: “For, like, OK, normal kids.” And then there was 3C2: “For manual labour, more plumbers and builders, stuff like that.” McQueen was put in 3C2. At first, he says mildly, “I don’t know why. Maybe I deserved to be,” and seems about to drop the subject. Moments later: “That inequality …It really upsets me.”

hurtful

When he went back to present some achievement awards 15 years later, the new head admitted to him that the school had been institutionally racist. This did not come as news to McQueen. “It was horrible. It was disgusting, the system, it was absolutely disgusting. It’s divisive and it was hurtful. It was awful. School was painful because I just think that loads of people, so many beautiful people, didn’t achieve what they could achieve because no one believed in them, or gave them a chance, or invested any time in them. A lot of beautiful boys, talented people, were put by the wayside. School was scary for me because no one cared, and I wasn’t good at it because no one cared. At 13 years old, you are marked, you are dead, that’s your future.”

He doesn’t want to think about what his future would have held had he not been able to draw. But his talent for drawing saved him, and when he stayed on to take A-level art, he got to know the kids who had been the school geeks in the higher sets. “And I realised they were just so cool.” They would all watch Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective and talk about it, and suddenly McQueen was having conversations he’d never imagined. After a few false starts at local colleges, he applied to Chelsea College of Arts, didn’t have the grades, but got in on the strength of his portfolio.

Is there anything else important in his life? He thinks hard, and comes up with nothing. “Well, my work just takes up a lot. I mean, I don’t ‘go to work’, I don’t have a studio, it’s just happening all the time, at the kitchen table, hovering, in bed. I wouldn’t call it my work. I’d call it my life.”

It’s that fusion that makes his life interesting to anyone who follows his work. But McQueen seems uncomfortable with self-examination, so I’m surprised when he calls a few days later to say, “I thought we hadn’t really finished the conversation last time. An hour and a half isn’t long enough to get there — and I want to get there, wherever it is, I don’t know.”

It’s true, he agrees, that he doesn’t like talking about his childhood.

“I tend to not think too much about that. But I thought the school stuff was interesting. It was a very early stage of my life to see the discrimination against black and working-class people, and I needed more time to think about that. It takes time.”

Then his voice becomes slightly strained. “I’ve never said this before, ever. But I was dyslexic. And I’ve hidden it, because I was so ashamed. I thought it meant I was stupid.” He pauses. “Also, I had a lazy eye. So I had a patch… So it was a terrible start. And people make judgments very quick. So you’re put to one side very quickly.”

It’s the second time McQueen has mentioned shame. The first was when he talked about learning about slavery.

His reluctance to revisit past wounds seems to have led to a blanket embargo on curiosity about himself, which I think has leaked into his work because, despite having made three films about human survival in states of extremity, none has even begun to unravel why people behave as they do. Instead, his films just show what people do — in unflinching detail. For McQueen, the visual artist, showing what they look like is what matters.

When I ask what new ideas or emotions he thinks the film offers, he admits: ““I don’t know. I was just interested in telling the truth by visualising it. Visualisation of this narrative hasn’t been done like this before, and I think that’s the thing. I mean, some images have never been seen before. I needed to see them. It’s very important. I think that’s why cinema’s so powerful.”

*12 Years A Slave is currently showing in the UAE