Sex Addiction and the City: Steve McQueen on Shame

With 2008's Hunger, Steve McQueen proved himself to be one of the most distinctive voices in British filmmaking. The Skinny spoke to the director ahead of the release of his controversial new film Shame

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 06 Jan 2012

It’s never a good sign when your interviewee keeps their outdoor clothes on during the interview, especially when it takes place in a cosy bar, but I wasn’t about to tell Steve McQueen, the burly Turner Prize-winning artist and film-maker, that he won’t get the benefit of his tartan scarf/bomber jacket combo when he’s back in the windy Glasgow night. McQueen is in town to present his extraordinary new feature Shame to a BAFTA Scotland audience at the Grosvenor cinema on Ashton Lane, and the 42-year-old Londoner is not in the mood for a long drawn-out chat. His answers are short, sharp and never sugar coated.

Set in New York, which McQueen captures with the same seedy brilliance that Kubrick faked in his Big Apple-set, London-filmed Eyes Wide Shut, Shame follows Michael Fassbender’s Brandon, a well put-together young professional who seems to be living the high-life in his flash bachelor pad in the clouds. Not only is he impressing his sleazy boss with his performance at work, he also demonstrates impressive skirt-chasing skills outside of the office. Brandon isn’t a player making the most of single life, however: he’s an addict, and the blonde he flirts with at the end of the bar or eyes up on the subway is his next hit. If she’s not available there’s always call girls, webcam sex and a masturbation schedule that even a fourteen-year-old with a lock on his bedroom door and a high-speed broadband connection would think was overkill.

“I’m interested in human compulsion,” McQueen tells me when I ask about his choice of sex addiction as subject matter. “It’s funny how we are being sold things all the time: told what to wear, how to wear it, what to do and see. It’s kind of weird, isn’t it? We don’t have control over our lives. Similarly with addiction, the addiction dictates to you rather than you dictating to it, and sexual addiction was one of those things which I found fascinating because everyone has some relationship to sex – everyone.”

Brandon hides his problems behind a veneer of order and routine, and McQueen opens the film by immersing us in this routine. “He gets out of bed, wipes sleep from his eye, goes to the sink, gets a glass of water, puts the cappuccino machine on, pees, masturbates. It’s a rhythm, like T'ai chi,” explains McQueen, “and within that journey, the first eight and a half minutes of the movie, there’s only one sentence being said. Slowly. One word. You get an idea who Brandon is through those actions, we don’t need to give more information, any words.”

Indeed, I would argue that McQueen’s films are purer examples of visual storytelling than, say, The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius’ much feted silent movie pastiche that's currently frontrunner in the upcoming awards season pantomime. Not only are large stretches of Shame sans dialogue, the first act of McQueen's debut feature Hunger, which recreates the campaign by Republican inmates of Northern Ireland’s Maze prison to be classed as political prisoners, plays out with barely a word being uttered, leaving the camera to lead us through the brutal world of dirty protests and hunger strikes. McQueen also explored the notion of silent cinema as a video artist, from his wordless short film Bear, where two naked men (one played by the director) exchange ambiguous glances, to Deadpan, his 1997 film installation inspired by Buster Keaton.

When Shame’s dialogue does come, it’s mundane, everyday. “When we talk we talk a lot of shit,” says McQueen, who himself rarely minces his words. “It’s just to get through a situation or to make the person you’re with feel comfortable. What we really say is not what we really mean or feel, and often in movies, the first twenty-five minutes, every thing is about character – how they feel, where they’ve come from, their worst fears – but in reality that doesn’t happen. What I wanted to do in this film is through the present reveal the past.”

This description might suggest some British social realist approach, but McQueen – whose two feature films are characterised by extremely long takes, audacious tracking shots and unconventional film grammar – belongs, rather, to our nation’s lineage of baroque filmmakers such as Michael Powell, Nicolas Roeg, Peter Greenaway and contemporaries Lynne Ramsey and Andrea Arnold. McQueen, however, doesn’t appreciate being categorised as a visual stylist. “I don’t put my stencil onto a subject matter.” For him, it’s the emotions to be communicated or the architecture of the surroundings that drives the aesthetic: “[the scene] has to inform me what it wants and I have to serve the subject, the idea.”

The idea, however, is the least interesting aspect of Shame – the film’s treatment of addiction and its protagonist’s arc while battling his demons don’t tread any ground that hasn’t been explored elsewhere, from The Lost Weekend to Trainspotting. The film’s strengths lie in McQueen’s bold visuals and the ferocious performance from his go-to leading man, Fassbender – a working relationship that McQueen describes as “close, tight and very intense.”

There’s also a third element that makes Shame fizz: Carey Mulligan, who plays Brandon’s needy sister Sissy. With a Marilyn Monroe-esque effervescence, Sissy sashays into her sibling's closed existence and wreaks havoc. According to McQueen, Mulligan also caused her fair share of chaos on set. “People think of Carey as a sort of English rose, but she’s a tiger with teeth and claws – argumentative, disruptive, but all for the right reasons.” Why Sissy so majorly messes with Brandon’s mojo is unclear. Perhaps her presence unbalances the serial shagger’s equilibrium because she gives him something to care about beyond his own sexual gratification? From their first scene together, which sees Brandon burst in on his uninvited house-guest having a shower, there also seems to be a heavy charge of incestuous attraction between the pair. Brandon says at one point “they’re not bad people, they just come from a bad place,” and another of the film's strengths is that what this "bad place" might be is left open for the audience to interpret.

“[Brandon] could have given you some long yarn about what could have possibly happened to them, but that wasn’t interesting to me within the narrative form.” What is interesting is that these siblings are dealing with whatever they are dealing with in two completely different ways. “Brandon is imploding and Sissy is exploding, she’s the extrovert. That’s why I made her a singer – she wants to let it out.”

Let it out she does. In the film's most tender scene we see Brandon listen to Sissy sing a mesmerising version of New York, New York in a swanky cocktail bar. “Life is rather strange, isn’t it? Sometimes the only way you want to connect with someone else is not through the obvious channels,” says McQueen. “I like the idea that verse was the only way that Sissy can connect with her brother, Brandon, in the whole film; it's the only time that he actually listens.” Mulligan croons the Sinatra classic with an exquisite breathless vulnerability but at an excruciatingly slow pace, with McQueen holding the heartbreaking performance in close-up for several minutes. “She’s doing three things there: she’s singing to the audience in the cinema, she’s singing to the audience in her immediate surroundings, but also she’s singing about her past and her hopeful present to Brandon.”

As well as the song, the city of New York is also clearly significant to McQueen's film. “Your existence is framed by this huge city, whether it’s Brandon’s office, his apartment, a nightclub or whatever. It makes you feel quite small sometimes, insignificant, because you’re faced with this huge mess of a city and your perspective becomes, who are you within this metropolis?”

Is Shame McQueen's commentary on our modern way of life, then?

“I don’t know. It’s just these windows [a recurring image in the film is of Brandon seeing his reflection when looking out of various high-rise windows] seem to frame who we are, frame the person within the city. They have this huge space, but they feel trapped. That’s what this film’s really about: freedom.”

Shame is released 13 Jan by Momentum Pictures http://www.facebook.com/ShameUK