An Artist-Turned-Filmmaker’s Take on the Maze Prison Protests Cannes Film Festival
By Joan Dupont
Steve McQueen is a powerhouse artist, winner of the 1999 Turner Prize for his video installations. “Hunger,” his first feature film, which opened Un Certain Regard here and is a strong contender for the Camera d’Or, tells the story of the convicted IRA terrorist Bobby Sands, imprisoned in the notorious Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. In 1981, Sands faced off against Margaret Thatcher’s government as the leader of a hunger strike. He was the first of 10 prisoners to die.
The story was branded in McQueen’s memory. “I was about 11 years old, and this guy called Bobby Sands appeared on the TV screen, with a prison number on him,” he says. “It was a real coming-of-age thing, an image that stuck in my psyche.
“Bobby Sands didn’t stay in my psyche, but that moment did. You tend to forget things: you grow up, you get pubic hair, you get taller and then you reconnect with certain things. So I’ve made a feature film about it.”
His film portrays the intense combat among the inmates, who demanded to be recognized as political prisoners, and their jailers. The men refused to wear their jail uniforms, and so they went naked, with towels wrapped around their loins.
McQueen, now 38, is a large, robust man who talks in pungent phrases. The world of cinema has been woven into his video past: one famous title was “Deadpan” (1997), in which he re-staged Buster Keaton’s stunt of the house collapsing all around him.
“Hunger” is a very physical film. It is about a hunger strike; it is also about what a man chooses to live for, what he chooses to die for. McQueen thinks that this question has resonance in today’s world.
The film stars Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands; Stuart Graham plays the warden, Raymond Lohan; and Liam Cunningham is the priest who attempts to dissuade Sands from his hunger strike.
McQueen would have liked to have had Samuel Beckett write the script, he says. He did get Enda Walsh, an award-winning writer, to collaborate with him on the screenplay. They structured the film in three parts.
The first focuses on the horrific conditions in the Maze Prison, and the second is composed of a stunning dialogue between Bobby Sands and his priest. The camera never flinches in a 17-minute take. The composition is lit from a distant window; the men are in profile, smoking.
The third part is the hunger strike.
“Hunger” opens on the warden, obsessively washing blood off of his broken knuckles. Raymond, who checks his car each morning to make sure the IRA hasn’t planted a bomb, has a tough time of it, as do the other officers and guards of the Maze. Not as tough, however, as the inmates, who are beaten and humiliated regularly.
McQueen says he is not taking sides: “I identify with Raymond just as much as I identify with Bobby Sands. I identify with him because it’s a situation where, no matter which side you’re on, you have to make choices. He was a man doing his job.”
That he identifies with all his characters endowed the actors and crew with rare energy. “I am the warden, and I am the prisoners. This film is not about right and wrong. It’s about a human and unique situation. People on the crew had relatives who were directly related to hunger strikers, to prison officers from that era. So there was a situation going on as we were filming. They were doing something physical about it: they were making the film.”
Hunger took five years to make, but only took three-and-a-half weeks to film “with a two-and-a-half month break for Mike to lose weight.” McQueen worked on several projects in between. “I went to the Congo, to South Africa. I wrote the script, but I also had to raise money for the film. Maybe next time it’ll be slightly easier.”
He describes the Maze as a prison within a prison within a prison, like nested Russian dolls. “It was also a battlefield.”
The prisoners decorated their walls with a frieze made of their excrement. They poured urine from their cells into the corridors, and every day the guards meticulously swept the urine back into their cells.
McQueen believes in the importance of these details. He researched every inch of the conflict and the intimacy of prison life, from the prisoners’ nakedness to their violent beatings. “I was interested in things that weren’t in the history books, in the information that fell between the cracks: what the weather was like. People didn’t know what really went on.”
There is a scene where the guards call in the police as backup: in one shot, a young recruit, his back to the others, is in tears at the brutality surrounding him.
And then, there is the amazing 17-minute shot, filmed from a distance, which has a Beckett-like feel.
“But I would say, it’s all cinema: the conversation between Michael and the priest may look like theater, but to me it was a way to get distance. I always zzzwanted the situation of two people having a conversation. I wanted to have that distance, but also that intimacy.
“It’s all about the idea,” the filmmaker says. “If the idea can translate best in wood, then great. If the idea’s best as a painting, then that’s great too. This idea happened to work as film because it translates best as narrative. Because in art, you’re trying to invent a form.”
This is a first film of great force, as if he had always instinctively known where to put the camera, how to frame. “With cinema, form is already there, and you try to subvert the form. People grow up in story form. People don’t necessarily grow up in art, and that’s the difference.”
He grew up, he says, in art. “I could draw. That was it. My first painting was of the library in my neighborhood. I got all my education through art – history, geography, math – everything.”
McQueen was born in London, where his mother was a hospital nurse. He had a Swiss girlfriend who enjoyed the cinema. “In England, going to the films on your own was a bit sad. It was a group thing to do. The doors opened, and I learned how people turned their thoughts into talent – in French, in Japanese, in American and Norwegian cinema – it was wonderful. It opened the door to the world.
“So I come from the art world, but I come, in some ways, groomed for this. I take my audience seriously because I take myself seriously. I don’t think they’re stupid, and therefore they don’t need to be spoon-fed. I offer them a buffet. I don’t offer them a plate with food already on it.”
The last scenes of “Hunger” show Sands on his hospital bed, wasting away. As he fades, he has a vision of himself as a boy, a cross-country runner.
“What I wanted was to show that freedom,” McQueen says. “It was the opposite to the situation that we see him restricted to his bed, immobile; he’s older, he’s weak. But you see the young, running boy in the countryside.”
Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.
(c) 2008 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.