Director Steve McQueen on prize-winning film Hunger

Nov 13, 2008
By Rodney Chester

STEVE McQueen remembers three things about 1981: the Brixton riots, Tottenham winning the FA Cup, and seeing the same man every night on the nine o'clock news.

"All I can remember is this photograph of Bobby Sands on TV with a number underneath his name," the filmmaker says.

At first he thought the numbers referred to the man's age, but when they kept changing he realised they indicated the number of days the man had been on hunger strike.

"At 11 years old, the idea that someone who doesn't eat is being heard -- the food not going in but the person getting louder -- stayed in my psyche."

McQueen grew up in west London, the son of West Indian migrants, but now lives in Amsterdam. He studied film in New York, but complained the school was full of rich kids with no talent.

He began with short art films and entered the public's awareness when he won the Turner Prize in 1999 for short films. In one, he rolled an oil drum along the streets of New York, and in another he recreated the famous Buster Keaton stunt in which a house falls on a man.

McQueen, a war artist, has exhibited paintings of British soldiers killed in Iraq and is lobbying for them to be issued as postage stamps. Now he's known for producing a work of art from the death of IRA prisoner Bobby Sands -- a film titled Hunger, which debuted at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

The film brutally depicts the events in Belfast's Maze Prison that led to the hunger strike. Irish-German actor Michael Fassbender, 31, starved himself for two months to portray the dying Sands.

The middle of the film is a gripping 22-minute scene in which Sands sits in a room alone with his priest (Liam Cunningham). They debate the morality of his decision and Sands explains why he's willing to die.

"It's just Liam and Michael getting on with it," McQueen says of the powerful scene that was shot in a single take.

Hunger won over the Cannes festival jury, which awarded McQueen the Camera d'Or prize for best debut feature. And it won over the audience.

"It was overwhelming," McQueen says of the debut screening. "It was phenomenal. We made a small film in Belfast. No one raised an eyebrow, no one cared, and all of a sudden we're standing on stage in front of 1000 people for a 20-minute standing ovation."

Hunger went on to win the Sydney Film Prize at the Sydney International Film Festival and picked up an award at the Toronto International Film Festival
Source: Herald Sun