Acclaimed film Hunger is director Steve McQueen's harrowing account about the starving to death of IRA prisoner Bobby Sands. He talks to Sean O'Haganabout the emotional toll of dramatising the events in Maze Prison's infamous H Block
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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 of 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. 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, so-called after the prison's floorplan. 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 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 is an unsettling film and does indeed dance with ghosts. It takes you inside one of the infamous H Blocks of the Maze Prison. You remain there throughout apart from a few short interludes, one of which is also brutally shocking in its violence.
At its centre, Hunger features an extraordinary performance by 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. I was like, what the f*** is going on here?"
When Hunger won the Camera d'Or for Best First Film at Cannes, Fassbender 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.
Did McQueen 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 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.
The "blanket men", as the protesting prisoners came to be known, pursued a long and dogged campaign of passive resistance, refusing to wear prison uniforms, wash, or slop out, and smearing their excrement on the walls and doors of their cells.
Their demands were brushed aside by an intransigent Margaret Thatcher and their Sinn Fein representatives outside were censored in the media, with actors voicing their statements on the nightly TV news.
"What initially brought me to the subject was the notion of what an individual is capable of doing just in order to be heard," he says. "I remember, as a kid, seeing Bobby Sands' image on the news every night and this number underneath, which, I later found out, corresponded to the number of days he had gone without food. That somehow stayed with me.
"People say, 'oh, it's a political film', but, for me, it's essentially about what we, as humans, are capable of, morally, physically, psychologically. What we will inflict and what we can endure."
Though he won the Turner Prize in 1999, McQueen is best known as a campaigning war artist, having travelled to Iraq in 2003. He says his short time there was "difficult and incredibly frustrating". The outcome was a work called Queen and Country, in which he proposes that all the British servicemen who died in Iraq be commemorated on postage stamps.
The campaign to convince the Post Office to make the work a reality continues apace and McQueen tells me that, having elicited the support of most of the dead soldiers' families, he recently had a meeting with the Prime Minister to discuss the project.
"I even received a thumbs-up from the Daily Mail," he says, laughing.
"Millimetre by millimetre, inch by inch, we are getting closer. Seven out of 10 people in the UK want the stamps to be produced. It's hard to argue with that. Ultimately, too, it's a whole lot more effective than erecting some bronze statue in a corner of London."
McQueen sees no contradiction between the role of war artist who wants to commemorate the deaths of British soldiers in Iraq and film-maker who, some might say, makes a hero of Bobby Sands, the romantic figurehead of a terrorist organisation that waged a fitful guerrilla war on the British army with often deadly results.
"I go where my work leads me," he says, "and try to explore the subject matter as imaginatively as I can. What was going on in the H Blocks was so big and yet it was swept under the carpet. People talk passionately about the abuses in Abu Ghraib, but the same thing was happening here in our own backyard. The hunger strike was one of the biggest political events in Britain in recent history. But it's already forgotten over here, swept aside. That's how Britain operates."
There is a kind of controlled rage underpinning the film, generated by the brutality that became a kind of normality in the H Blocks. That brutality undoubtedly fuelled the bloody war of attrition raging outside the prison walls. A French journalist who interviewed McQueen recently suggested his film should have been called "Anger" rather than Hunger. You can see what he was getting at.
"I'm essentially quite happy," he says, "but, for some reason, I have done a lot of stuff that is dark. I don't know why that is and I don't question it. I don't really think you have a choice where you go as an artist. I mean, I would love to make a comedy, I really would." Does he think that might happen? "No," he says, erupting, for the first time today, into hearty laughter. "No, I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that one."
LOWDOWN
Who: Steve McQueen award-winning director of Hunger about IRA prisoner Bobby Sands
Where and when: Opens at cinemas from February 12that
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