Coming Soon: Hunger

Nov 1, 2008
By Karen McLauchlan

THERE are several remarkable features to the movie HUNGER, over and above the fact that it won the Camera D’Or at The Cannes Film Festival this year and top prize at the Sydney Film Festival.

It lasts for only 95 minutes yet it is half an hour before the primary subject of the movie, IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, makes an appearance.

Thereafter, what is possibly the longest single, unbroken scene in a movie takes place between Sands and his priest, played by Liam Cunningham. Set in a visiting room at the Maze Prison, where Sands is being held, it lasts for 24 riveting minutes.

It is only in the final 20 minutes of the movie that audiences will see the effects of Sands’ hunger striking. The extraordinary weight loss suffered/achieved by actor Michael Fassbender to prepare himself to play Sands in his final act of protest against a British government which refused to recognise him and his fellow IRA inmates as political prisoners, is remarkable.

The likeable, quietly-spoken Fassbender, who was born in Germany but raised in Ireland, is keen not to make too much of his weight loss, which turned his body alarmingly skeletal.

“It may take attention away from the movie, at a crucial time,” he says. “Of course I lost weight - the production had to close down while I did it - but I never want it to become gimmicky. It was just an essential part of the preparation, in order to play this particular character at a particular time in his life.”

Nevertheless, it is worth recording that Fassbender lost three stones by reducing his daily calorie intake to virtually nothing. Well, a meagre 600 calories, to be precise. He worried those around him with what he did and it wasn’t recommended by medical experts, but the actor was never going to be dissuaded.

Although Michael’s weight loss has grabbed most attention, ahead of the film’s British release, it is, of course, the subject matter too which has caused rumblings of discontent.

The IRA are held up as martyrs, the warders presented as brutish thugs and the British as fools who have, in the words of one of the characters, “been ruining the world for centuries.”

Michael tries to distance himself from any political fallout from the movie.

“It is not a political film, it doesn’t preach, it gives you a passage of a story, a human story, and is essentially about one man’s attempts to bring attention to a particular cause.

“In a sense, the cause is irrelevant. It’s about one man having the discipline and determination to go on hunger strike in order to try to effect change.”

The film has had the remarkable effect of boosting Fassbender’s career even before it opens in the UK. He’s lined up for the lead role of Heathcliff in a movie version of Wuthering Heights and there is also talk of him playing George Carter in a movie version of The Sweeney, alongside the great Ray Winstone.

Source: Evening Gazette