McQueen and Country

He has won the Turner Prize, been a war artist in Iraq, and is campaigning to put the heads of dead British soldiers on stamps. Now Steve McQueen has made a harrowing film about the starving to death of IRA a prisoner Bobby Sands, including a scene that moved him to tears on the set. Portraits by Jo Metson Scott.

The most visceral scene in Hunger, Steve McQueen talks about the scene, something happens to him. He becomes suddenly voluble, agitated to the point of inarticulacy. "We had to do five takes,' he says, shaking his head furiously as if trying to expunge the memory from his consciousness, 'and each time the actors were actually being beaten with the truncheons because, well, there was really no other way to do it and make it look convincing. At one point, I looked at the monitor, which I hardly ever do, and what I was seeing suddenly became real. It was real! Not film. Not fake. Real. I jumped up and started shouting: "No! No! Cut! We have to stop. Just cut, cut! Stop this now!"

As he tells me, his whole being seems to be grappling with the emotional fallout of that of that unsetting moment. He stares at his hands for a while. Then, after a few seconds, he says: 'See, the thing was, I was in control of his violence. I was in control of these men being beaten with batons. It was down to me. Me! I was in control of what was happening.' I ask him what happened next. Did they call it a day? 'No. No,' he says, animated again, 'I wanted to but the actors insisted on doing another take. We were really close. And we did another take. And we got it. By then, I was losing it. I just walked away. I had to get out of there. All this emotion just welled up inside me."

McQueen hurried off the set to the bemusement of his crew, one of whom followed him thinking he was dissatisfied with the shoot. "He realized I was upset and he left me alone,' says McQueen. "That's when I started sobbing. I just lost it. It got to me. The fucker got to me. I mean, I'm a big guy. I never even cried at my father funeral. But, suddenly, I was crying like a baby."

Why does he think that particular scene affected him so deeply? 'Don't you understanding?' he says, sounding suddenly impatient. "It was real/ And it was awful. You could feel the brutality Of what the prisoners had to go through. It was a glimpse of the awful, brutal reality of the H Block. It was like we had crossed a line and all of sudden we were dancing with ghosts."

In person, McQueen is a formidable presence, one those big, burly guys who can alter the atmosphere of a room by entering it. Which is exactly what he does when he strides into the ornate surroundings of an elaborately decorated lounge in the Soho Hotel in London, where I have been summoned to meet him. Initially, he seems a little awkward in his own skin, but that may just be a manifestation of the unease he feels when he has to explain himself.

At times, he comes across as defensive-going-on-combative and he occasionally struggles to find the right words, growing visibly impatient with himself when they won’t come. There is something slightly haughty and oddly vulnerable about him. You can see why he would be unsettled by the idea that his own emotional security could be breached in the pursuit of his art, which tends towards the formal, controlled and uncompromising.

A friend of mine from Northern Ireland, who seen Hunger, said McQueen had 'pulled off the impossible' by 'making an art him about the IRA'. When I mention the term 'art film', McQueen thows me a fierce look. 'I don't know what you mean by that,' he says. 'What I tried to do was make the strongest, most powerful film I could from the events and the story. It may not have the conventional narrative of most features films but that is my way of grappling with the subject. Art has absolutely nothing to do with it.'

"Hunger", despite, or maybe because of, its formal purity, is an unsetting film and does indeed dance with ghosts. It takes you inside one of the infamous H Blocks of the Maze. You remain there throughout apart from a few short interludes, one of which is also brutally shoking in its violence. The film utilizes the three-act structure of a Greek tragedy. The first part evokes the claustrophobic and violent atmosphere inside the prison block during the prolonged dirty protest that led up to the hunger strike. The second act is a long breathing space, which takes the form of a 22-minute real-time discussion between Sands and a Catholic priest (a beautifully pithed performance from Liam Cunningham) about the morality of self-starvation. Brilliantly written by Enda Walsh, it is compelling, despite its length. The third act observer Sands's 66-day dexcent into emaciation and eventual death. In the preview screening I attended, the audience left the theatre I utter silence.

"I always had this rhythm in my head, where the film was like a river and the landscape around it,' says McQueen, 'Then, all of sudden, you're on this rapid and the landscape is fractured, things are not exactly what they seem any more, then there's a kind of water-fall. So, essentially, you're being taken downstream, then your reality is being questioned, then the slow fall."

The film is defined by McQueen's uncompromising directorial style which, in its accrual of telling details - a jailer's grazed and swollen knuckles, a fly on a metal grille – and its poetic slowness, possesses cumulative power that, by the end, is almost overwhelmingly intense. 'I watched it with three friend and it was just a shattering experience,' says Danny Morrison, the writer and Republican activist from west Belfast, who acted as an intermediary between the hunger strikers and the leaders of Sinn Fein at the time, and visited Sands throughout his fast. "You really get an idea of the brutality of the state and the prison officers, a brutality that was dismissed at the time as Republican propaganda. I really hope people go and see it, because it ask a fundamental question that is being asked again in Guantanamo Bay: is it morally right to treat people in captivity as if they were not human?"

At its centre, Hunger featured an extraordinary performance by the young German-Irish actor Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands. Fassbender fasted for 10 weeks under medical supervision before the third part of the film was shot on a closed set. "He committed himself totally to the part, and I think it changed him somehow', says McQueen. 'He became very inward, very philosophizing about the meaning of life and shit. I was like, what the fuck is going on here?"

When Hunger won Camera d'Or for Best First Film at Cannes, Fassbender talked to Channel 4 News about the role and said: "Whatever your feeling about their political views and what they did was extraordinary. To starve yourself to death? I couldn't do it."

Some people may argue that Hunger never grapples with the wider context of the Troubles, nor does it engage with the killings and atrocities that were carried out in the name of Republicanism. It presumes a level of knowledge on the part of the audience that is rare in contemporary cinema – but this is both a strength of the film and a limitation. In the final part, in which the skeletal Sands falls into fitful reveries and remembrance, there are hallucinatory scenes of his childhood that struck me as the only false note in a film that otherwise eschews any kind of easy romanticism. Did he worry that his film could be construed as a homage to a certain strain of Republican fanaticism that calls for blood sacrifice and martyrdom from its followers?

"No, I never think of things like that,' he says. 'May be I'm weird but that's not what is on my mind when I look at a subject like this. I am thinking about what I am doing and how best to do it.' Did he, in making the film, identify with Sands and his cause? 'Well, I've obviously never been in a situation like that. I'm not an Irish nationalist; I'm not a black South African. I essentially identify with both sides in the Irish conflict. I show what prisoner officers did, but also what they went through. I can see why they did the job. It was incredibly well-paid and there was not much work about. And they were brutalised. Too. And many of them were murdered by the IRA. I show that, too.' He pauses again, struggling to find the words. "It's difficult, It's difficult, it's incredibly problematic, but I am an artist. I have no answers to the bigger political questions."

The historical context of McQueen’s film, which is never spelt out, is the IRA hunger strike of 1981 and the so-called dirty protest that preceded it. That protest was made in pursuit of special category status, the IRA's demand that its convicted members be allowed, among other things, to wear their own clothes instead of the standard prison uniform and not to do prison work.

The 'blanket men', as the protesting prisoners came to be campaign of passive resistance, refusing to wear prison uniforms, wash, or stop out, and smelling their excrement on the walls and doors of their cells.

Their demands were brushed aside by an intransigent Margaret Thatcher and their Sinn Fein representatives outside were censored in the media, with actors voicing their statements on the nightly TV news. Only a single 90-second snatch of film exists of conditions inside the H Blocks at the time, shot by an Ulster Television camera crew for a documentary that was subsequently banned by the government. It shows two prisoners, bedraggled and Christlike, wrapped in dirty blankets, shouting out their demands from a filthy, excrement encrusted cell. From that image, the artist Richard Hamilton created the first work of art based on the H Blocks, a painting called The Citizen, which he completed in 1983. Twenty-five years later, with several former IRA men now sitting in the Northern Ireland Assembly, McQueen has created second. "What initially brought me to the subject was the notion of what an individual is capable of doing just in order to be heard,' he says. 'I remember, as a kid, seeing Bobby Sands's image on the news every night and this number underneath, which, I later found out, corresponded to the number of days he had gone without food. That somehow stayed with me. People say: "Oh, it's a political film", but for me, it's essentially about what we, as humans, a capable of, morally, physically, psychologically. What we will inflict and what we can endure."

McQueen lives Amsterdam but he grew up in Ealing west London, the son of West Indian immigrants. His father worked for London Transport and his mother was a nurse. As a teenager, he says, he was encouraged to 'get a trade'. He did well at school and says his interest in art 'initially manifested itself solely in the idea of getting an education'.

He ended up at Goldsmiths, University of London, where, through unhappy with the theoretical thrust of the tutors, he obtained a first-class degree. 'I thought they had only one way of looking at things and I knew there was never only one way of looking at things', he says, sighing. He later attended New York University's film school, but was unhappier still. "I hated it,' he says. 'it was full of all these rich kids who could afford the fees. It was nothing to do with talent."

McQueen, you sense, it essentially an outsider, someone whose work possesses a formal rigout which seems to be his unique way of making sense of often-difficult subject matter. His early short films were formally experimental and thematically elusive. In Deadpan, the closest he has come to comedy, he paid homage to Buster Keaton by standing stock still while the gable wall of a building collapsed around him. In another, Drumroll, which earned him the Turner Prize nomination, he pushed an oil drum through New York, with three cameras attached to it, each recording the city streets in perpetual revolution, while his polite but stentorian voice shouted out 'Excuse me!' and 'Sorry!' at baffled pedestrians.

I ask him if his films emerge, however obliquely, out of self-exploration. Are they essentially about his own inner struggles? 'God, no!' he shouts, starling both myself and the two hotel guests sitting opposite us. "Don't even mention that in a newspaper. You cannot. I mean, come on! I'm not that selfish. I have never been interested in me. What I'm interested in is not I, it's we. Always. It's we: our history, our culture, whatever makes us who we are and informs how we act."

Though he won the Turner Prize in 1999, McQueen is best in this country as a campaigning was artist, having travelled to Iraq in 2003. He says his short time there was 'difficult and incredibly frustrating'. The outcome was a work called Queen and Country, in which he proposes that all the British servicemen who died in Iraq be commemorated on postage stamps. The campaign to convince the Post Office to make the work a reality continues space and McQueen tells me that, having elicited the support of most of the dead soldiers' families, he recently had a meeting with the Prime Minister to discuss the project.

'I even received a thumbs-up from the Daily Mail', he says, laughing. 'Millimetre by millimetre, inch by inch, we are getting closer. Seven out of 10 people in the UK want the stamps to be produced. It's hard to argue with that. Ultimately, too, it's a whole lot more effective than erecting some bronze statue in a corner of London.'

McQueen sees no contradiction between the role of war artist who wants to commemorate the deaths of British soldiers in Iraq and film-maker who, some might say, makes a hero of Bobby Sands, the romantic figurehead of a terrorist organization that waged a fitful guerrilla war on the British army with often deadly results.

'I go where my work leads me', he says, 'and try to explore the subject matter, as imaginatively as I can. What eas going on in the H Blocks was so big and yet it was swept under the carpet. People talk passionately about the abuses in Abu Ghraib, but the same thing was happening here in our own backyard. The hunger strike was one of the biggest political events in Britain in recent history. But it's already forgotten over here, swept aside. That's how Britain operates'.

There is a kind of controlled rage underpinning the film, generated by at the brutality that became a kind of normality in the H Block. That brutality undoubtedly fuelled the bloody war of attrition raging outside the prison walls. A French journalist who interviewed McQueen recently suggested his film should have been called 'Anger' rather than Hunger. You can see he was getting at.

"I'm essentially quite happy', he says, 'but, for some reason, I have done a lot of stuff that is dark. I don't know why that is and I don't question it. I don't really think you have a choice where you go as an artist. I mean, I would love to make a comedy, I really would.' Does he think that might happen? 'No,' he says, erupting, for the first time today, into hearty laughter. 'No, I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that one."