The Human Body as Political Weapon: An Interview with Steve McQueen.
Telling the Bobby Sands story, with a focus on the raw physical experience of prison and the hunger strike, with the partisan politics replaced by a more humanist perspective.
Before receiving critical acclaim and festival awards last year for his debut feature film, Hungerâscheduled for a March 2009 theatrical release in the U.S.âBritish filmmaker Steve McQueen was best known for his museum and art-gallery installations and exhibitions of short films and videos. Many of the earlier filmsâBear (1993), Just Above My Head (1996), and Catch (1997)âare experimental in nature, minimalist in style, often silent, and characterized by unusual camera angles and points of view. The later works, more semi-documentary in format, explore historical and contemporary social issues, but in a resolutely nondidactic, nonexplanatory, abstract style that aims instead at conveying a participatory, sensory experience of their subjects, such as Caribsâ Leap (2002), on a seventeenth-century historical event in Grenada, Western Deep (2002), on South African gold miners, or Gravesend (2007), on coltan miners in the Congo.
Hunger, winner of the International Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Award and the CamĂ©ra d'Or Award for Best First Feature Film at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, impressively conflates those earlier filmsâ interests in innovative esthetics and social themes in an evocative re-creation of the 1981 Hunger Strike by Irish Republican Army prisoners at the British prison of Long Kesh, known as the H-Blocks, outside Belfast in Northern Ireland. This campaign, led by twenty-seven-year-old Bobby Sands, was the focus of worldwide media coverage, and, as McQueen explains in the following interview, made an indelible impression on him, as an eleven-year-old growing up in a West London neighborhood who was trying to understand the seemingly bizarre events.
After March 1976, when the British Governmentâs Northern Ireland Office instituted a new policy of âcriminalizationâ during the ongoing conflict known as the âTroubles,â the struggle of IRA prisoners for political status, to be recognized as prisoners of war and not as common criminals, intensified within the walls of Long Kesh. Their campaign began with the âblanket protest,â since they refused to wear a prison uniform and demanded the right to wear their own clothes. This escalated into the âno washâ and âdirtyâ protests, the latter of which involved the smearing of their excrement on the walls of their cells. The prisonersâ determined efforts to thwart prison discipline were met in turn by increasing harassment and physical attacks by the guards. As de facto political prisoners, the IRA inmates, who were generally despised by their captors as violent terrorists and murderers (although many of them, like Sands, had never killed anyone and had received unusually harsh sentences for relatively minor offenses) were routinely brutalized, almost as a means of retribution.
For viewers expecting a more conventional, expository narrative approach (such as Terry Georgeâs Some Motherâs Son or Les Blairâs H3), Hunger will be disappointing. Apart from a few basic facts about the âTroublesâ and the struggle between IRA prisoners and the British Government over political status, which are conveyed in some pre-title texts and a few overheard excerpts from radio newscasts and political speeches by Margaret Thatcher, the filmmakers are unconcerned about providing any detailed historical or political context for the events portrayed.
McQueen even refuses to describe Hunger as a âpoliticalâ film, preferring instead to characterize his approach as âhumanist.â Hunger is a decidedly nonpartisan work, not interested in scoring political points (unlike, for example, the tendentious approach of fellow British filmmaker Ken Loachâs 2006 historical treatise on the Anglo-Irish conflict, The Wind That Shakes the Barley), consciously attempting to avoid any âsimplistic notion of âhero, or 'martyrâ or 'victim.ââ McQueen has explained that his political aim with Hunger is âto provoke debate in the audience, to challenge our own morality.â This the film decidedly does, whether itâs to question the morality of a prison officer who routinely batters IRA inmates with his fists while they are restrained by guards, the morality of an IRA gunman who later assassinates that same prison officer with a bullet to the head, the morality of a riot-squad policeman who savagely beats defenseless prisoners with a wooden truncheon, or even the morality of starving oneself to death as a political tactic.
While Hunger will be attacked by some for romanticizing Sands as the filmâs âhero,â any dispassionate viewer will note that the film is eminently balanced in showing empathy for both prisoners and warders. While it never excuses or rationalizes the prison guardsâ inhumanity, it does imaginatively reveal the corrosive effectsâphysically, emotionally, and morallyâof their behavior on themselves.
While many of the filmâs historical references (e.g., the British Governmentâs duplicitous negotiations to end an earlier hunger strike, an ongoing IRA campaign outside the prison of assassinations of prison guards, etc.) and visual details (e.g., the close-up of the âUDA,â for Ulster Defence Association, tattooed on a guardâs knuckles) will resonate meaningfully for British and Irish viewers, they will mystify the average, uninformed moviegoer. The deliberate choice by McQueen and coscreenwriter Enda Walsh to forego more specific social and historical contextualization could nevertheless be seen as enabling more universal implications for a wider audience. Many viewers, even in Great Britain and Ireland, for example, will readily relate the atrocities in Hunger to more contemporary prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and GuantĂĄnamo Bay. As screenwriter Jorge Semprun once explained his and director Costa Gavrasâs decision to not specify the Greek context of the political assassination dramatized in Z, âLet us not try to reassure ourselves, this type of thing doesnât only happen elsewhere, it happens everywhere.â Or, as McQueen himself noted in a recent interview in Cahiers du cinĂ©ma about the power of cinema to provoke broader debate, âA film can perhaps be the point of departure for something much bigger.â
Ironically, for a film which otherwise utilizes dialog very sparely, at the center of the neatly delineated tripartite structure of Hunger is an extended scene featuring an absolute torrent of words, an encounter between Hunger Strike leader Bobby Sands and a Catholic Priest, Father Dominic Moran, which provocatively broaches many of the key religious, historical, and political issues involved in the Hunger Strike. This remarkable, twenty-two minute scene, most of which consists of one uninterrupted take, is powered by the performances of Michael Fassbender as Sands and veteran Irish actor Liam Cunningham as Father Moran (a fictional amalgamation of several real-life priests, including Father Denis Faul, a prison reform advocate and frequent visitor to Long Kesh, and Sandsâs neighborhood curate, Father Sean Rogan). Their conversation, which progresses from awkward small talk, to playful banter, to ideological challenge and counterchallenge, and, finally, to lacerating criticisms, is clearly the work of McQueenâs coscreenwriter, the Irish playwright Enda Walsh.
This thought-provoking exchange goes a long way, in fact, to compensate for the sketchiness of these issues elsewhere in the film. In their fierce battle of wills, we can appreciate the decision of Sandsâwho felt personally responsible for the failure of an earlier hunger strikeâto use his body, as the only weapon he has left, as a means of political protest against an intransigent British Government led by the âIron Lady,â the recently elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. We can simultaneously discern the validity of the arguments of the priest who, although he too supports the nationalist cause, sees the absence of any strategic political thinking in Sandâs stubborn, self-indulgent decision essentially to commit suicide.
Although, politically speaking, the film focuses on âthe body as site of political warfare,â as McQueen has commented, itâs also clear that his primary esthetic interest is âto show what it was like to see, hear, smell and touch in the H-block.â Hunger is indeed most remarkable, in purely cinematic termsâespecially through the all-encompassing visual perspective of its 2.35:1 wide-screen compositions and creative use of sound effects, ambient noise, and a minimalist musical scoreâfor conveying a visceral sense of what it must have been like, for both prisoners and warders, to live or work in the politically charged, savagely violent environment of Northern Irelandâs most notorious prison complex. While Hunger doesnât stint in its frank portrayal of the barbaric atmosphere within the H-Blockâincluding periodic beatings by the guards, the gruesome body cavity searches for contraband, and the vicious clubbings administered by a squad of riot police after a prisoner rebellion. The film is equally notable for its impressionistic detailsâthe long stretches of boredom, maggot-infested cells, a furtive nighttime attempt to masturbate without awakening oneâs cellmate, the ingenious smuggling of messages and other items during prisonersâ monitored meetings with wives, girlfriends or relatives, hallways awash in urine and cell walls covered in excrement that must be cleaned up by hazmat-suited prison workers, and the gentle medical ministrations of a hospital attendant during Sandsâs prolonged death watch.
In the last third of the filmâwhich portrays Sandsâs hunger strike, his gradual wasting away, as his body consumes itself, and the agonizing death throes of his final daysâHunger strives for a visual poetry of sorts in its cinematic rendering of his failing eyesight and hearing and delirious episodes in which he hallucinates images of himself as a twelve-year-old boy (a poignant visual echo of a childhood reminiscence related earlier in his conversation with the priest). Itâs in moments like these that the humanist vision of Hunger truly comes to the fore, making a more universal statement about the human tragedy so often created out of these bitter, bloody, and intransigent political conflicts.
We spoke with McQueen about Hunger, focusing on its unusual narrative approach and its striking cinematic qualities, in September 2008, when the filmmaker was in town for screenings of his film at the New York Film Festival.
Cineaste: In preparing your screenplay, which deals with an incredibly complex series of historical events, youâve explained that since you and your coscreenwriter, Enda Walsh, could not âtell everything,â you need only âtell enough.â A British or an Irish audience will be very familiar with these events, and will pick up on all the details and nuances, but were you concerned that a broader international audience might be somewhat clueless?
Steve McQueen: No, because as far as I was concerned it was about the essence, the essentials, and not to sort of tick off every box. One has to focus and narrow it down to get to the essence of it, and thatâs what I wanted to achieve. I think that by doing that more people can relate to it than by trying to convey the entire history of these past events.
Cineaste: What sort of research did you do for the film?
McQueen: I went to Northern Ireland two years before I met Enda, and did some research there. Later, when Enda came on board, we went back and did a week of intense interviews with hunger strikers and prison officers. You canât get that kind of information from any other source. I was interested in the information between the words. It was all about the details, such as guys waking up with maggots crawling on the floor underneath them, of how during the summer there were these horrible bluebottle flies all over the place, how it was freezing cold in the winter, or the details of living for four and a half years in a cell covered with excrement and awash with urine, and all the time surrounded by violence. You canât get that kind of information through books and I needed it and wanted it.
Cineaste: How did you conceive of the narrative structure?
McQueen: Itâs really a three-act structure. The only way I can describe it is that itâs almost like floating down a river on your back. Basically youâre initially taking in and familiarizing yourself with your surroundings. At a certain point it becomes a rapid, and your surroundings become fractured, the images become distorted. After that it becomes a waterfall, with a loss of gravity, through the slow death of Bobby Sands. Thatâs the way I wanted to structure it. Itâs a situation where one has to be led in by a prison guard and then led out by Bobby. While we were researching the film, we came across this comment by Godard that the only way one could film the Holocaust was through the eyes of a guard. Likewise, we wanted to find multiple viewpoints for our story in order to arrive at a better understanding of the situation, and not merely a stereotypical understanding.
Cineaste: One of the things that most impressed me about the film was the very spare use of dialog, and in particular the avoidance of using dialog for very obvious and clumsy plot exposition.
McQueen: I think viewers are much more intelligent than many screenwriters think. Thatâs why, when I decided I wanted to work with somebody, I didnât want to work with a screenwriter but with a theater writer. After many interviews, Enda Walsh was the one who came through because, for me at least, itâs less about the narrative than it is about the abstract, which would have contained some kind of, for lack of a better word, truth.
In most movies, as soon as things start, dialog emerges, and I wanted to have a movie where more or less the first forty minutes is in silence, so the viewersâ other senses would come to the fore. In that kind of optimum situation, the brain isnât overloaded or overworked, so when dialog does happen at a certain point, the viewer can focus on the dialog in a very sensual and focused way.
Cineaste: In this regard, one of the filmâs standout sequences is the long, single-take dialog scene between Bobby Sands and the Catholic priest, Father Dominic Moran. How long does that scene actually run?
McQueen: Itâs one seventeen-and-a-half minute take of Bobby and the priest before we cut to a close-up of Bobby. We shot the scene on an Arriflex camera modified for two-perf filmâyou know, like Sergio Leone used for his Spaghetti Westerns. Usually 35mm film is four perforations per frame, but Arriâbecause more people are shooting on hi-def video and they want to encourage more people to shoot on filmâmodified this camera for us. It doubles the amount of footage on a roll, twenty minutes instead of the usual ten minutes, so we were able to film the dialog scene in one continuous take.
Cineaste: How did you arrive at that esthetic choice?
McQueen: Well, if we filmed this conversation weâre having now, the camera would be shooting over your shoulder on me, followed by a reverse shot over my shoulder on you. In that case, you wouldnât appear to be talking to me but to the audience, and vice versa. What I wanted was a scene with two people who were having an intimate conversation with each other, where they were getting the action and reaction from each other. At the same time, we backlit them so their faces are virtually in shadow, so what happens is that the audienceâs ears become much more attuned, their eyes become much sharper, they lean in more because esthetically weâre pushing them away from a conversation about the reasons for choosing to die. When I first had the idea for the scene, I thought of it as like a Connors and McEnroe Wimbledon finals match, where both guys want the same thing but they play differentlyâone is a serve and volleyer and the other is a baseliner, so each has a way of how they want to win this.
Cineaste: How many takes did you do of the scene?
McQueen: We did four. It was amazing what happened in that room. Of course, the conversation itself was critical and essential to the story and the actors had rehearsed and rehearsed before that, but when the time finally came that they had to do it, the tension in the room really ratcheted up a couple of notches. The focus was intense, it was almost like a tightrope walkerâs situation, there was that amount of stress. But all that added to the performances in some way.
Cineaste: Was the character of the fictional priest based on Father Denis Faul, the Catholic priest at the HBlocks during the hunger strikes?
McQueen: Well, we met Faul before he died, but we also talked to several other priests, so the character was actually an amalgamation of a number of priests involved in the events.
Cineaste: He really makes a variety of very strong arguments against Sandsâs decision to go on a hunger strike to death.
McQueen: Oh, absolutely. I mean, we had to go all the way. Both of them are nationalists but one wants the people for the church and the other wants the people for a kind of socialism.
Cineaste: Although the film is likely to be attacked by the Tory press in the U.K. as a glorification of IRA terrorists and hunger strikers, any dispassionate viewer will see that the film has as much empathy for the physical and emotional trauma that the guards, as well as the inmates, are undergoing.
Cineaste: I was particularly impressed, in this regard, with the scene where you focus on a young, obviously nervous and presumably more inexperienced member of the riot squad sent in to the H-Blocks. After joining in the brutalization of the inmates, including a particularly vicious beating and kicking, this young policeman is last seen, shaking and in tears, hiding in a corner away from the continuing violence. How important was that scene for you and why?
McQueen: It was very important for me because it showed the basic humanity of the situation. Itâs vitally important that we can reveal ourselves not just as brutes but as human beings in reaction to what weâve done. Once you do something like that, itâs not like you can just sort of walk away and forget about it. It resonates. Itâs almost like the frustration of it allâhe has to get involved himself, he has to be one of the guysâŠ
Cineaste: He plays the role but then heâs repulsed by his actionsâŠ
McQueen: And by himself. So I felt that we needed to have this scene of him crying, after having kicked and beaten another person, in order to show these people as human beings, not as freaks.
Cineaste: Why did you decide to use the 2.35:1 aspect ratio, a widescreen format?
McQueen: It was Monetâs water lilies. I was in Japan and I saw his paintings, and I rang my cinematographer and said, âIt has to be this kind of frame, I see it now.â What happens in that wide-screen frame is narrative. What I mean by that is that itâs so wide that when you put one thing in the frame, youâve always got to put another thing in, and soon two and two becomes four. You always have to sort of put one thing in the frame with something else, so thereâs always this narrative going on within this full frame. There is also this linear situation, with the film going on at twenty-four frames per second and telling a story. But at the same time you can tell another narrative within frames, because the screen format is so wide that youâve always got two or three things within the frame, which is just beautiful.
Cineaste: The soundtrack of the film is quite unusual in that it doesnât use a traditional melodic underscore but instead either ambient noise or a sort of astringent minimalism, which, especially toward the end of the film, tends to undercut any easy or manipulative sentiment.
McQueen: Well, thatâs my kind of thing. I want people to make up their own minds. I donât like music that makes the viewer say, âOh, I should feel this now.â Itâs not my cup of tea. Besides, the film is very lean. I donât want it to seem decorative or something that needs to be filled.
Sound in itself is music, and is enough to actually drive the film forward. I want people to become more aware of themselves while theyâre watching the film, and therefore the sound becomes a necessity. The sound of the police truncheons hitting the shields, for example, is based on a drumbeat. Itâs a violent, aggressive situation, and that sound raises your heartbeat, and it becomes this forward narrative driveâboom, boom, boom!âand it puts you on edge. So itâs a question of how you play up the sound. Music sometimes can block a lot of things. Using sound can make people sensitive to themselves while theyâre watching the film, so it becomes a fuller experience, and more of a cinematic than a theatrical experience.
Cineaste: Films dealing with the IRA, such as Terry Georgeâs Some Motherâs Son or, more recently, Ken Loachâs The Wind that Shakes the Barley, tend to be attacked, especially by right-wing elements of the U.K. press, as âpro-IRAâ movies. Do you expect, as a British filmmaker, to be criticized for glorifying the hunger strikers?
McQueen: I donât know if they will attack the film. I hope they will see the humanity of the situation. For me itâs not about the politics. Whatâs interesting for me about this film is not just about what happened twenty-seven years ago, itâs also about whatâs happening now, to a certain extent, with GuantĂĄnamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. For me thatâs the main accomplishment. I think people, even those on the right, understand and realize that what happened in the HBlocks was particularly shameful. I also think that if they see that the people who are looking after or guarding the hunger strikers are portrayed in a right and proper manner, then theyâll understand the situation a little bit better.
Cineaste: One might say that the filmâs principal protagonists are Bobby Sands, as the leader of the IRA hunger strikers, and Margaret Thatcher, the âIron Lady,â as the leader of the British Government. It could be said that Hunger dramatizes the unstoppable force meeting the immoveable object.
McQueen: Yes, itâs two extremes.
Cineaste: Sandsâs position is conveyed primarily in the long dialog scene with the priest, whereas Thatcherâs position is conveyed in a few brief excerpts from radio broadcasts, including two of her speeches. Did you consider including some of her other more outrageous statements to heighten this conflict even more?
McQueen: No, I didnât think it was necessary. The two statements we useâabout the denial of political status for the prisoners and how the hunger strike was an appeal to pityâwere enough. I also liked how her voice almost came in like a vapor. And her voice, even without her image, is so strong, that itâs enough. The fact that sheâs heard in the movie only twice, and weâre having this conversation about it now, shows how strong and forceful and iconic that voice was.
Cineaste: There seems to be a very strong political component in much of your work, in whatever medium. Where does that come from?
McQueen: I suppose itâs corny to say, but if caring about people is political, then Iâm political. I am not interested in politics per se, Iâm interested in people. Politicians make situations but Iâm interested in how people respond to their situations. Thatâs what itâs all about really. I donât think Hunger is a political film, itâs a human film.
Cineaste: Well, itâs a political subject but you donât bring a partisan political position to it.
McQueen: One could say that Shakespeare is political, and absolutely he is. One could say that Van Gogh is political, and absolutely he is. As an artist itâs all about looking around you, at whatâs going on around you, trying to make some sense of it, and putting it in one or another shape or form.
Reading - Steve McQueen Interview
An insightful interview where McQueen discusses his film âHungerâ in depth, including sound and choice of aspect ratios etc.
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