SHAME: Meet Steve McQueen

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Meet the film’s brilliant director, Steve McQueen;

his career is sure to be long and successful

In addition to his brilliant, tumultuous drama, Shame, writer/director Steve McQueen has given us Hunger, a 2008 critic darling.  But who is this acclaimed newcomer, known for clamming up whenever he is asked to talk about himself?

Both of McQueen’s feature films star Michael Fassbender. In Hunger Fassbender is Bobby Sands, the Irish Republican activist who led the 1981 Irish hunger strike and no wash protest to try to earn Republican prisoners political status. The film premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival to high praise.  Similarly, Shame was embraced by the critics when it premiered at the Venice film festival but that’s where the similarities end. The controversial and sexually explicit Shame centers, again, on Fassbender; this time as Brandon, a New York executive battling sex addiction.

And while we cannot rely on McQueen to sing his own praises, Fassbender has a high opinion of him; he recently told The Telegraph:

“I really consider Steve to be a genius. I know that's a word that gets bandied around, but when I met him, I knew it was a life-changing moment for me. He's a great leader. He inspires people. When we were making Hunger, he worked with such passion, I could see it so clearly on people's faces, the joy of coming to work every day. In New York, shooting Shame, I saw the same thing again. People want to do their very best for him. They don't want to let him down.”

McQueen was born and raised in West London. He was a popular footballer in high school, but found he loved art and then film in college. He came to America to study at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts but found their approach less experimental than he desired, later telling the BBC News "they wouldn't let you throw the camera up in the air.”

Most notably, perhaps, McQueen won the Turner Prize in 1999. The Turner Prize, an annual award given to artists under 50, is primarily associated with conceptual art and has become the UK’s most publicized art award. When McQueen was announced it’s fifth winner, it became clear that he was to be a force in media.

McQueen’s next sure-t0-be-masterpiece, Twelve Years a Slave, focuses on a man living in New York during the mid-1800s, who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Deep South.

It should come as a surprise to no one that Fassbender has already signed on to star, as well as another actor who’s got a little notoriety in the business… Brad Pitt. Fassbender has said that he hopes to have a “Martin Scorsese/Robert De Niro-like relationship” with the director, and McQueen seems to share that desire. As for Pitt, he is rumored to only have a small role in the film but he had no doubts about taking the project on. “McQueen,” Pitt told TodayOnline, “is the real deal.”

Disclaimer: I was sent product from the above company in return for my honest opinion and review. No other compensation was received.