Steve McQueen

Interviews

Geoffrey Lokke

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781496858832
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Steve McQueen: Interviews is the first collection of conversations with the acclaimed filmmaker, and one that spans his career to date. Included are McQueen's discussions with such artists, critics, curators, and public intellectuals as Donna De Salvo, Paul Gilroy, David Olusoga, Tricky, and Cornel West. In these conversations, McQueen (b. 1969) discusses some of his preoccupations and recurring themes throughout his oeuvre including nationalism, martyrdom, and violence; obsession and desire; and the intertwined histories of racism, surveillance, and carceral politics. Most interestingly, he also talks about his love for his fellow artists, past and present, including Miles Davis, Jean-Luc Godard, Prince, Yvonne Rainer, Paul Robeson, Jean Vigo, and Andy Warhol.

McQueen is one of the most celebrated British filmmakers of his generation, an artist as committed to avant-garde film and lyric forms of documentary as he is to producing landmark historical dramas. A deeply humane artist with a clear ethical drive, McQueen nevertheless explores the sublime sense of scale that cinema affords its viewers in his films.

While he remains best known for his feature film 12 Years a Slave—winner of three Academy Awards including Best Picture—McQueen has been a fixture of major contemporary museum and gallery exhibitions for decades, beginning with the short experimental works that garnered him the prestigious Turner Prize in 1999. His acclaimed installations include the diptychs Caribs' Leap/Western Deep and Gravesend/Unexploded, works that interrogate film form as they challenge documentary norms, not unlike his recent four-and-a-half-hour epic Occupied City that investigates the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Filmography
• Buster Keaton Routines as Art Installations? Don’t Laugh …
• Driven to Abstraction: Steve McQueen
• Interview Transcript: Tricky
• Interview with Steve McQueen
• Life in Film: Steve McQueen
• Steve McQueen, Director: Intimacy and Distance
• Steve McQueen on Film
• You Use Your Body to Die: An Interview with Steve McQueen
• Steve McQueen: Q&A with the Director of Hunger
• The Human Body as Political Weapon: An Interview with Steve McQueen
• Sex Addiction and the City: Steve McQueen on Shame
• Interview: Director Steve McQueen on 12 Years a Slave
• Steve McQueen and Donna De Salvo in Conversation
• Steve McQueen and Dr. Cornel West on Paul Robeson, Art, and Politics
• Steve McQueen on Widows, Viola Davis, the Politics of Chicago, and More
• Interview: Steve McQueen Q&A
• Every Story Has Already Been Told: Steve McQueen Interview and Portfolio
• Transcript: In Conversation with Steve McQueen
• “These Are the Untold Stories that Make up Our Nation”: Steve McQueen on Small Axe
• “Sometimes the Present Erases the Past, and Sometimes the Past Erases the Present”: Steve McQueen on His Cannes-Premiering Occupied City
• Interview with Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter about Their Documentary Occupied City
• Additional Resources
• Index
• About the Author