Hunger from Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen premiered at the 2008 Cannes International Film Festival, scooping the Camera d'Or, and went on to take the Discovery Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film follows life in Belfast's Maze Prison with an interpretation of the highly emotive events surrounding the 1981 IRA hunger strike
What was it about this subject matter that attracted you?
It was to do with 1981, and Tottenham winning the FA Cup, the Brixton riots at the time, and Bobby Sands popping up on my TV screen with a number underneath his image. It stayed with me. The seed was planted. In some ways, I saw the beginning of the film being a stream. What I mean by that is you're floating down a stream and you're identifying what is around you, as far as the landscape goes. And then it becomes rapids and the ideal of your surroundings are fractured and disrupted. Then it becomes a waterfall with a lot of gravity. That was for me the structure of the movie, the flow.
The central scene between Bobby Sands and the priest is remarkable. Are you quite radical with your stylistic approach?
I'm talking like I've shot a thousand movies when I've only shot one. I'm not thinking of Spielberg, I'm not thinking of Scorsese, I'm not thinking of Fellini, I'm not thinking of Tarkovsky. I'm thinking about what's in front of me and the frame and the best way of translating that. Whatever that is, that's what we'll do - and I don't do storyboards.
When we wrote the script I thought of [filming it like] that immediately but that was the best way of doing it. I was interested in the whole notion of intimacy, the intimacy of the conversation. What often happens in films, the audience is involved in that conversation - there's a shot of you, then it reverses and then there's a shot of me. But I didn't want the audience involved in that. It's not their business. These guys are not talking to them, they're talking to each other. So it's just a two-shot of those two having a conversation. At the same time, the audience are involved because we're projecting that image.
You have a situation where the audience thinks it shouldn't be involved, so your attention is heightened and your focus is sharpened. You become the camera. Your eyes wander from Michael [Fassbender] to Liam [Cunningham]... you have that distance from them and that intimacy. You are intruding in a conversation you shouldn't be at, and that's the dynamic. So the conversation develops, like when you meet a person you don't know. It takes a certain time to get to a certain level of conversation - and you get a reward at the end.
Next page • "Liam and Michael, they're Mick Jagger and Keith Richards"
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