McQueen and country: Steve McQueen's film about the starving to death of IRA prisoner Bobby Sands
The most visceral scene in Hunger, Steve McQueen's austere film about the IRA martyr Bobby Sands, shows a group of naked detainees being forced to run a gauntlet of baton-welding prison officers in full riot gear. It is a moment of sustained, ritualistic violence in a work that is characterised by its poetic tone and slow, cumulative power.
When 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 this, his whole being seems to be grappling with the emotional fallout of that unsettling 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 this 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 realised 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's funeral. But, suddenly, I was crying like a baby.'
Why does he think that particular scene affected him so deeply? 'Don't you understand?' 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 Blocks. It was like we had crossed a line and all of a sudden we were dancing with ghosts.'
In person, McQueen is a formidable presence, one of 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 has seen Hunger, said McQueen had 'pulled off the impossible' by 'making an art film 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 feature 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 unsettling 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 shocking in its violence. The film utilises 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 pitched performance from Liam Cunningham) about the morality of self-starvation. Brilliantly written by Enda Walsh, it is compelling, despite its length. The third act observes Sands's 66-day descent into emaciation and eventual death. In the preview screening I attended, the audience left the theatre in 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 a 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 waterfall. 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 a cumulative power that, by the end, is almost overwhelmingly intense.
'I watched it with three friends 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 asks a fundamental question that is being asked again in Guantánamo Bay: is it morally right to treat people in captivity as if they were not human?'
At its centre, Hunger features 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 philosophical. At one point, he became like Bob Marley in a way, philosophising about the meaning of life and shit. I was like, what the fuck is going on here?'
When Hunger won the Camera d'Or for Best First Film at Cannes, Fassbender talked to Channel 4 News about the role and said: 'Whatever your feelings about their political views and what they had done to get into that situation in prison, killings and atrocities, 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 remembrances, 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, or indeed any kind of political fanaticism that calls for blood sacrifice and martyrdom from its followers?
'No, I never think of things like that,' he says. 'Maybe 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...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
When 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 this, his whole being seems to be grappling with the emotional fallout of that unsettling 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 this 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 realised 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's funeral. But, suddenly, I was crying like a baby.'
Why does he think that particular scene affected him so deeply? 'Don't you understand?' 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 Blocks. It was like we had crossed a line and all of a sudden we were dancing with ghosts.'
In person, McQueen is a formidable presence, one of 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 has seen Hunger, said McQueen had 'pulled off the impossible' by 'making an art film 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 feature 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 unsettling 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 shocking in its violence. The film utilises 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 pitched performance from Liam Cunningham) about the morality of self-starvation. Brilliantly written by Enda Walsh, it is compelling, despite its length. The third act observes Sands's 66-day descent into emaciation and eventual death. In the preview screening I attended, the audience left the theatre in 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 a 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 waterfall. 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 a cumulative power that, by the end, is almost overwhelmingly intense.
'I watched it with three friends 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 asks a fundamental question that is being asked again in Guantánamo Bay: is it morally right to treat people in captivity as if they were not human?'
At its centre, Hunger features 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 philosophical. At one point, he became like Bob Marley in a way, philosophising about the meaning of life and shit. I was like, what the fuck is going on here?'
When Hunger won the Camera d'Or for Best First Film at Cannes, Fassbender talked to Channel 4 News about the role and said: 'Whatever your feelings about their political views and what they had done to get into that situation in prison, killings and atrocities, 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 remembrances, 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, or indeed any kind of political fanaticism that calls for blood sacrifice and martyrdom from its followers?
'No, I never think of things like that,' he says. 'Maybe 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...