The Brag

Shame
Sex In The City
By Dee Jefferson

Steve McQueen has a reputation for not suffering fools lightly; fiercely intelligent, and with a background in fine arts rather than the film industry, he can come across in interviews as a bit stand-offish. So when a journalist opens my Venice Film Festival round table interview by asking him if he ever thought about changing his name (“no really,” she pushes, “because of, you know, Steve McQueen!”) you can see the rest of the circle wince, ready for a detonation. It’s not as if this towering black British man, a Turner-prize-winning video artist, is going to be confused with the blonde-haired, blue-eyed American action star (who is, besides this, dead). “No, no…” the director says, nonplussed. “Next question?” And it seems almost miraculous that he goes on to give such a considered, open interview.

McQueen shot to cinematic prominence a few years back with his Cannes prize-winner Hunger – a stylishly executed, visually stunning and profoundly moving portrait of the last days of Irish hunger-striker Bobby Sands. He’s in Venice for the premiere of his follow-up, Shame, which pitches its tent at the other end of the cultural spectrum – decadent uptown New York – and tackles a very different kind of torment: sex addiction. Brandon (played by Irish-German actor Michael Fassbender, who also starred in Hunger) is attractive, successful and charming; underneath this veneer is a damaged soul, self-medicating with a joyless routine of sex and shame. When his equally damaged younger sister Sissy (played by Carey Mulligan) comes to stay, Brandon finds his balance thrown off, pushing him into crisis.

“Both [Bobby Sands and Brandon] are antiheroes,” says McQueen. “I was interested in that – and also interested in what’s going on with technology, and sex. It’s interesting how things are changing how we are introduced to sex. It’s all around us. I did an interview in the tent the other day and there were two girls walking around in white mini-skirts, selling beer. And that’s the norm, now, of course. And that’s obvious – but in some ways I wanted to investigate how it’s affecting us as individuals.”

McQueen and co-writer Abi Morgan researched sex addiction intensively. “Shame was the word that was cropping up all the time through interviewing people who had this kind of affliction,” says the director. “What would happen is they would go on a sort of ‘sexcapade’, and when they came out of it they experienced a wave of shame. And then what they would do to get out of the shame was do it all over again. I think we all have our own shame, in a way… and I wanted the movie to be almost like a silent dog whistle going off in the room – everyone knows but no-one’s actually going to talk about it…”

What: Shame
When: Opens February 9