No compromises

The latest film by the Turner Prize-winning artist and now acclaimed film-maker Steve McQueen is an electrifying snapshot of the life of Brandon, a sex addict, played by Michael Fassbender. Shame (released this week) is McQueen’s second feature and follows his 2008 debut Hunger, about the Irish Republican hunger-striker Bobby Sands, which also stars Fassbender.

McQueen, 42, is west London-born and Amsterdam-based. Intense and passionate, he has a big and bearish presence, and though initially rather brusque, he is none the less in buoyant mood the day I talk to him at the Soho Hotel; the night before, Fassbender had won another award for his performance in Shame, this time from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association — only a few months after receiving best-actor honours at the Venice Film Festival. ‘I’m meeting him tonight,’ McQueen says. ‘He’s going to win a lot.’

After studying at Chelsea School of Art, McQueen attended Goldsmiths College, where he made his first short films. Although primarily known for his black-and-white art installation films, such as Deadpan (a restaging of a Buster Keaton stunt in which a house collapses around McQueen), which won the Turner Prize in 1999, his other work includes photography and sculpture. In 2009 McQueen represented Britain at the Venice Biennale with Giardini, a 40-minute film that minutely captured the life of the city’s municipal gardens.

McQueen’s eye for abstract poetic visuals has been brought to a new level in Shame. In it Fassbender gives an engrossing portrait of Brandon and the ferocious sexual appetite that consumes him. With the arrival of his exuberant but damaged lounge-singer sister Sissy, played by Carey Mulligan, emotional tensions reach boiling point: ‘We’re not bad people,’ Sissy tells her brother. ‘We just come from a bad place.’ Brandon is emotionally imprisoned by his addiction. ‘I liked the idea of somebody who had no control over themselves,’ explains McQueen.