University Press of Mississippi Steve McQueen: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series)

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.