Shame: Steve McQueen interview The filmmaker and Turner-Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen has made what promises to be one of 2012's most controversial and talked about films. Michael Fassbender with McQueen on the set of Shame By David Gritten 7:00AM GMT 14 Jan 2012 5 Comments (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/8994878/Shame-Steve-McQueen- interview.html#disqus_thread) Steve McQueen tends to become diffident when talking about himself; he is emphatically not a man to blow his own trumpet. So let's blow it for him. This is someone who cut a swath through the British art world with his video installations, mainly silent and in black and white, projected on to spaces within galleries; he was only five years out of art school when he won a Turner Prize. And now, with his first two feature films, Hunger and the soon to be released Shame, he has indisputably become one of our most distinctive, compelling film directors. It is fascinating that he should flourish so notably with a range of creative work that has two distinct audiences – the art crowd and cinemagoers. But it is one of many subjects McQueen isn't inclined to elaborate upon. I ask him if his work as a video artist in the gallery world feels separate to him from his feature films. He pauses, then says, 'Naaah.' And again for emphasis: 'Naaaaah.' Another pause. 'It's one thing.' And do the strands of his work feed off each other? 'I think everything does.' A still longer pause. 'I don't see any difference at all.' His body language indicates the subject is closed. McQueen, now 42, was already an established darling of Britain's contemporary art scene when he won the Turner in 1999 for a series of his installations at the ICA. And these days he continues to be an active, leading figure in the art world. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2009, and tells me, almost reluctantly, that he has 'two big shows' scheduled to open over the next year or so – at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Schaulager museum in Basle. Yet since the release of Hunger in 2008, McQueen has become better known as someone who makes films for cinema. Hunger, a harrowing, assured account of the last weeks of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, who in 1981 fasted to death in the Maze Prison near Belfast, was the breakthrough film for its lead actor Michael Fassbender, now a global star; such was his devotion to his director that he deliberately lost an astonishing 30lb in weight while playing Sands. Hunger also marked the arrival of a notable talent in McQueen, who earned rave reviews. The setting for his follow-up film, the controversial and sexually explicit Shame, could scarcely be more different. Its central character, Brandon (Fassbender again), is a handsome, thirtysomething ad executive in New York who lives alone in a sleek, minimally furnished apartment. But he is a sex addict, and his affliction dominates his whole life. He accesses pornography on the internet and in magazines, hires prostitutes and picks up women in bars for instant sexual gratification that leaves him feeling empty and full of self-disgust. When his wayward, needy sister, a nightclub singer (Carey Mulligan), comes to stay and imposes herself on his life, Brandon's already shaky equilibrium crumbles. Shame, review (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/9010948/Shame-review.html) Michael Fassbender wins best actor (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/venice-film- festival/8755009/Michael-Fassbender-wins-best-actor-at-Venice-for-sex-addict-role.html) Jane Eyre: Michael Fassbender interview (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/8706510/Jane-Eyre-Michael-Fassbender- interview.html) Film preview of the year 2012 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culture-preview-of-the-year/8973054/Film- preview-of-the-year-2012.html) 100 reasons to be glad it's 2012 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culture-preview-of-the- year/8971427/100-reasons-to-be-glad-its-2012.html) I'm hesitant to suggest a connection between the two films, but McQueen supplies his own. 'In Shame, Brandon is an attractive man, he has a good job, he's well paid, has all the freedoms and all the possibilities you could want. And in this situation he puts himself into a prison. Obviously it's different from Bobby Sands, who's incarcerated in a maximum-security prison. Yet within that situation he finds his own freedom. It's the complete opposite. Both of them use their body to do that. One imprisons himself through sexual activity, while the other frees himself by abstaining from eating.' So did McQueen deliberately conceive Shame as the obverse side of Hunger? He shakes his head. 'When you're writing, you're not aware of it.' We meet in the expansive, glorious Art Deco restaurant at the American Hotel in Amsterdam. A heavy-set man with thick horn-rimmed glasses, he sits at a table, fingers intertwined, with a default expression somewhere between worried and stern. Why Amsterdam? It's where he lives with his long-time partner, the cultural critic Bianca Stigter, and their two children. When I first met McQueen in London three years ago, he told me smilingly, 'I fell in love with a lady there.' He's more closed down these days, and simply says of Amsterdam, 'It's not on the way to anywhere else, so no one comes here. So I'm never bothered. Which is great. And that's all I have to say about that.' Being interviewed is clearly not a joyous prospect for him. I remember watching McQueen in Cannes in 2008, when Hunger had its world premiere. He was at a round table of journalists from all countries, rapidly firing questions at him. He looked flustered and unhappy, and struggled to respond in facile, bite-sized quotes. Even six months later, when I faced him one-on-one at a quiet London club, his words seemed to run away from him, and he reached for a pencil and notepad to make little drawings, a visual aid to formulate his thoughts. These days, international films demand arduous, lengthy publicity commitments from their creators on their release, something that shocked him when it became apparent when Hunger first opened. At the time, he wrote in a first-person article, 'I had no idea when I started that you could be on the road with a movie for 18 months.' Still, he's happy enough to talk about Shame itself. The genesis of the film was a meeting between McQueen and its co-screenwriter Abi Morgan. Intrigued by Hunger, she sought him out. 'We met at a cafe,' McQueen recalls. 'She only had an hour, and I only had an hour. But we ended up talking for three and a half hours. We had a discussion that started off about the internet, then it went on to pornography, then we got on to sex addiction. 'Abi's amazing. It was a situation where she immediately felt like a friend I'd known for a long, long time. The second time we met, in a restaurant, we'd written the first 20 minutes of the script by the end of the conversation.' Morgan was even more enthusiastic on hearing that Fassbender and Mulligan would star in Shame: the chance to write for the two actors, she says, was 'a bit of a dream come true'. Shame is totally British, bankrolled by Film 4 and the now defunct UK Film Council, and produced by Iain Canning and Emile Sherman, who most recently brought us a very different film, The King's Speech. McQueen and Morgan are British, too, as is Mulligan, and while Fassbender is Irish, he calls Hackney home. So one would assume London, a metropolis in which sex addiction is not unknown, might be the obvious setting for the story. 'That was the whole idea,' McQueen says with a sigh. 'But for our research, Abi and I wanted to speak to experts in the field, and no one in London would talk to us. Then we heard about these two women in New York who had studied sex addiction, who introduced to us to a lot of people with this particular affliction. There was one guy, his wife was a very beautiful woman – but there were a thousand other people he'd rather sleep with. 'It goes back to the availability of sex. It's like there's more fatty food in supermarkets, so people get fat. There's greater accessibility to alcohol, so guess what? More people get pissed. That's how it is. Everyone wants to get lost a little bit these days – and understandably so.' In any case, several experts and addicts in America shared their experiences. 'I finally thought, why not shoot this in New York? So it was as if the wind blew us over the Atlantic. That's what this whole film has been about – having a sense of what's right and following it, nothing too pre-planned.' This attitude endears him to Fassbender, who says simply, 'I really consider Steve to be a genius. I know that's a word that gets bandied around, but when I met him, I knew it was a life-changing moment for me. 'He's a great leader. He inspires people. When we were making Hunger, he worked with such passion, I could see it so clearly on people's faces, the joy of coming to work every day.