Steve McQueen
Q&A with the director of Hunger
Mar 27, 2009 Steve McQueen
When a film director has shot a 17-minute debate between a prisoner and a Catholic priest in an epic single take, as English artist Steve McQueen did for the centerpiece of his feature-length debut Hunger, it’s only fitting that he would want to challenge you during a conversation. The scene, co-written by McQueen and award-winning Irish playwright Enda Walsh, is one of the most enthralling discussions ever captured on celluloid. But without the subtler details of Hunger etched in my memory, I was at a clear disadvantage during my interview with McQueen, who had me backpedaling after just a few minutes.
Hunger is a daunting film that portrays the troubling events leading up to the starvation and death of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in the Maze Prison outside of Belfast, Ireland in 1981. Though Hunger is expertly photographed and features an astounding performance from Michael Fassbender as Sands, viewing the film is at times a confounding experience and brutal on the senses. Aside from depictions of point-blank murder, hand-on-hand torture, body deterioration and the dispersion of human waste throughout a cellblock, there is little dialogue in the film’s first 30 minutes, which focuses on a prison guard and two inmates, neither of whom are clearly identified. An easy assumption is that one of them is Bobby Sands, but that’s not the case.
Born in London in 1969, McQueen was 11 years old when Sands’ final protest was television news. McQueen studied film for a year at NYU in 1993 before making a name for himself in the art world. In his 1997 back-and-white film Deadpan, he recreated a Buster Keaton stunt from Steamboat Bill, Jr. that involved a house collapsing around him. In 1999 McQueen won the prestigious Turner Prize for Drumroll, his 1998 work in which he mounted three cameras on an oil drum, rolled it through Manhattan and projected 22 minutes of the footage on three walls of an installation. At Cannes in 2008, Hunger earned McQueen the Camera d’Or, the festival’s award for first-time directors.
Though courteous and accommodating before and after the interview, McQueen went on the offensive when my questioning suggested that his narrative method caused puzzlement. He responded with: “What’s the question you really wanted to ask me?” A fast talker whose words have trouble keeping up with his thoughts, McQueen retracted a premature dismissal of one question once he comprehended it fully and other times broke into contrarian answers while questions still were being asked. I met with McQueen in Beverly Hills days before Hunger’s Academy Award qualifying run in December.
I wanted to ask about the amount of information that the film gives the viewer. When I say information, not only do I mean historical, but I also mean conventional storytelling components like character names. Did your prior film work set any kind of precedent for how much information you would give the viewer in Hunger?
It’s a situation where, if it works, that’s the only rule one has to go by. I don’t know about conventional. What does conventional give you? I don’t know. I don’t know what conventional is; I’m not thinking that way. I’m just making something which I think works, and it’s all about communicating with the audience. So it’s about setting ‘em up as far as the context of where we are, and then letting it go. It’s human beings in a certain situation, and how we present it is in a way of how one can communicate with who is on screen. What I mean by that is it’s all about what works. If it works, it works.
If a viewer’s sitting in a theater and asking, “Who’s that? What’s his name? What’s his significance?” should they just put that aside?
Not at all. Far from it. I think I answer all those questions in the movie. Is anyone confused about who’s who and what’s what in the movie?
I did not know that the boy watching over Bobby Sands on his deathbed was a 12-year-old Bobby. I thought maybe he was Bobby’s younger brother or a relative.
Until you heard the kids saying “Bobby, Bobby!” and you had the context of him running in the woods. Again, construction of a movie is about holding back and giving, and you get rewarded if you trust the director. That’s what the movie’s about. It’s all about how one can actually use film in a way that can engross people. Film’s only 115 years old. It’s still in its nappies. What we can do with a film and what we can actually communicate with a film is up for grabs.
Going back to the 12-year-old Bobby, I was wondering if that was a connection to your boyhood impressions of him, because he’s close to the same age as you were when Sands died.
I never thought of that, actually. I never thought of that at all. But it’s a good one. Possibly. Interesting. No one’s ever asked that question. No one’s ever said that to me before. That’s 10 points to you. Good question. Very good, I’ll use it.
The scene between Bobby and the priest, did that evolve strictly from the writing—
—From an idea I had. The whole idea of Connors and McEnroe in the Wimbledon final, two people doing the same thing but differently; one is a serve-volleyer, one’s a baseliner, and that confrontation, reasons to live and reasons to die, and having that conversation where it’s played out. And as far as information is concerned, all of it is there as well, to get more than you ever need in that. It’s overflowing, it’s coming out of your ears as such. And also, it’s where the tension is. It’s the ultimate conversation in life—the reasons to live and reasons to die.
Did shooting the long conversation with a static camera influence the writing of it, or was all the dialogue set beforehand?
Listen, it’s all about the idea. Once you have the idea, you go for it. Then you have to shoot it how it’s being dictated to you. You have to go in there with an idea of how you want the film to be. And it might change, that’s the idea. That was the first scene that I wrote, of course. [laughs] So other things we did in the beginning sort of came to that. But that, in some ways, was the bridge from the life to the death. That was the bridge into the last part of the film, the last 20 minutes or such. And you can break them up into 20-minute rolls if you want.
Could the shot have gone on longer? Was the length of the scene influenced by the length of the film roll?
Nah, no no. No. It was by total coincidence, for economic reasons as well. We used two-perf 35mm film stock, where it doubles the amount of time we have on the reel, ‘cause 10 minutes is one reel. When you use 2-perf, it maximizes the footage to 20 minutes. We’re only the second film in recent times using the Arri camera modified for 2-perf to shoot in Europe. And they did that to sort of help people shoot more on film, because people were interested in shooting in Hi-Def, so they were trying to make it cheaper for them to do that, by modifying these cameras for 2-perf. And it’s just a situation where the economy of means can help you, and that was it, really.
Did you imagine different setups for that scene?
Before going into that scene, you do think, “How can you shoot this conversation?” And then I came up with this idea because it was honest. It seemed simple but it’s truly sophisticated at the same time, because often in this case, if you and I are having a conversation and we’re shooting a film, there would be a camera on your shoulder shooting me, there would be a camera on my shoulder shooting you. You will not be having a conversation with me, you’ll be having a conversation with the audience, and I will be having a conversation with the audience as well. In this situation, what one needed was action and reaction. You needed that tension; you need to keep that three-dimensional triangle going on. So therefore, it’s similar to a tennis match. We’re not doing that necessarily, but there is that sort of dynamism, where you could be agreeing with Bobby one minute or agreeing with the priest another minute. The balance is there, and that geography is there too.
So there is that sort of duel, but at the same time, I liked the idea of doing that and also backlighting them so you can’t hardly ever see the fronts of their faces very well. I wanted a setup that was extremely intimate between those two characters, but at the same time pushing the audience back, the audience knowing that they shouldn’t be there, so it’s not clear for them. What happens is, their ears become very, very sharp, and their eyes become much more in tune. Their focus is heightened because also it’s the first time there’s been dialogue in the film. So everything is much more heightened. A part of your brain has been rested for a long time, and all of a sudden there’s a cascade, there’s an avalanche of words, and that’s what makes it a tense, focused and—in some ways—exhausting conversation. Because it’s happening in real time. There’s this time for it to be awkward at the beginning, and then there’s a sort of crescendo, and then you come down again, which is wonderful, because what we had before was film time, and this is real time. And the real time is given to this ultimate conversation about the reasons to live and the reasons to die. Everything’s scripted, it’s not improvised.
What was the atmosphere like on set when you yelled cut?
Amazing, because now it’s apparently the longest scene on film. I think the longest one before that was The Player. It’s 17-and-a-half minutes. When it was over, there was spontaneous applause. We did it in four takes. It was pretty amazing. Funny thing was, we were shooting next to a train station, so I didn’t even have the power to say “Action!” when I wanted because we had to wait until the train left the station, knowing that there’s too much noise in the room. What was wonderful about that was the actors didn’t know when I was going to say “Action!” So there was that tension. They didn’t know when it was going to happen, when we were actually going to go for it. And also, by the third take, the boom man had collapsed because he was holding it up. There was a beautiful tension in the room. Everything was vital; we didn’t have a lot of stock, so there wasn’t too much time to fuck up, excuse my language, to make a mistake. So there was that real tightrope energy in the room, and that obviously helped the performance because it is a very vital conversation. All that added to the atmosphere in the room.
There’s a scene when Bobby is on hunger strike and he suffers some spasms. He’s nearly immobile but the camera begins to move about freely. It’s quite a contrast, not only to the rest of the film, but also between camera and subject. What was the impetus for that move?
Pain. Cramp. It’s what you have when the muscles cramp. I think at that point he wanted to die, but you can’t decide when you die; your body decides when you die. For me, that scene was all about a balloon trapped in a room, trying to get out. The camera for me was a balloon trapped in a room, trying to get out. And it wasn’t ready to do that. It was bumping around in the room, but it couldn’t get out because it was staying in that room until it was time for it to leave, which wasn’t then. So it combined the camera movements with his pain and wanting it to end.
In respect to Michael Fassbender’s weight loss for the latter section of the film, was he asked to reach a specific weight, and was there debate about what would be appropriate?
Yes. 58 kilos.
Somehow you made a determination of what would be right.
The doctors did. They projected his body-mass index and what would be safe, and that’s what we did. He was under constant medical supervision.
Before making the film, you spoke to many people who were tied in some fashion to the events in the film. Have any of them seen Hunger, and how has the response been?
I hear they have and the reaction is overwhelmed. That’s what I hear; I’m not too sure if that’s true or not.
After researching and speaking to those people, was there an urge to share everything you had learned or a struggle to streamline what you wanted to share?
No. Everyone knows you can’t do everything. It’s a film. It’s not a documentary, and even documentaries don’t tell you everything. It’s about how you get over the best impression of an idea through film. Conventional or unconventional, it’s bullshit. It’s what works with the audience. That conversation never happened, for example, but to me it was a necessity to be in the movie because you had to understand what the stakes were, but also why someone would be for it and why someone would be against it. As film is concerned, it’s how you translate that to the audience in an experiential way. It’s the only way you can have it, because film for me is that way. Similar— Not as good as, of course— Music is the ultimate. But its’ kind of— It’s not even close, actually, film, but it’s as far as you can get, I suppose.
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