The all-White nominees for this year’s Oscars: From top to bottom (L-R) are best actor nominees Bryan Cranston, Matt Damon, Michael Fassbender, Eddie Redmayne, and Leonardo DiCaprio; best actress Brie Larson, Saoirse Ronan, Charlotte Rampling, Jennifer Lawrence and Cate Blanchett; best supporting actor Mark Rylance, Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Sylvester Stallone and Mark Ruffalo; best supporting actress Alicia Vikander, Rachel McAdams, Rooney Mara, Kate Winslet and Jennifer Jason Leigh.
McQueen doesn’t have a film to promote, he can’t yet talk about his forthcoming projects for HBO or the BBC. He just wants to talk about the Oscar Problem: the fact that not a single non-white actor has been nominated at this year’s Academy Awards, for the second year running. Spike Lee has declined to attend this year’s ceremony, and since then the retributions, condemnations and the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag have turned into an unprecedented crisis for cinema’s most prestigious awards.
Civil rights activist Al Sharpton put it concisely: “Hollywood is like the Rocky Mountains: the higher up you get, the whiter it gets.” As the only black director to have ever won a best picture Oscar, McQueen feels a responsibility to speak up.
“Hopefully, when people look back at this in 20 years, it’ll be like seeing that David Bowie clip in 1983.” He is referring to a clip that has been widely circulated online since Bowie’s death, in which the singer politely assails his interviewer about MTV’s under-representation of black artists. “I don’t even want to wait 20 years,” McQueen continues. “Forgive me; I’m hoping in 12 months or so we can look back and say this was a watershed moment, and thank God we put that right.”
It’s familiar territory for the artist and filmmaker. In 2013, when 12 Years a Slave was in its awards-season limelight, The Hollywood Reporter put together a roundtable discussion featuring McQueen and six other (white, male) directors in the Oscar running that year, including Alexander Payne, Jason Reitman and Bennett Moneyball Miller. It is pretty excruciating. Particularly when the host asks, Alan Partridge-style: “You’re all men. Only one of you, Steve, is a minority. Why is that?” McQueen replies with an impassioned attack on Hollywood’s lack of diversity. “It’s shameful, it’s unbelievable. It’s bizarre!” When he has finished, the interviewer asks: “Anybody want to explain, take that on?” There’s an awkward pause. Then Reitman says: “I’m not stepping into that.”
“You are in it!” McQueen exclaims, recalling Reitman’s comment. “You are in it! Are you living in a different world from everyone else? I don’t think this is a “black” issue. I think this is our issue. If people want to categorise it as a black issue, that’s weird. Just like if I was talking about women in film. It’s my issue, too. It’s our issue. It’s about “we’.” He spells it out: “W.E; not M.E.”
Since the furore arose, the Academy has issued a series of apologias and pledges of reform, but McQueen essentially agrees with Lee’s comments that the Academy Awards is “not where the ‘real’ battle is”. He says: “One could talk about percentages of certain people who are Academy members and the demographics and so forth, but the real issue is movies being made. Decisions being made by heads of studios, TV companies and cable companies about what is and is not being made. That is the start. That is the root of the problem.”
It is not just actors and directors either; it is also “below the line” industry personnel. “It’s like Johannesburg in 1976, if you go behind the scenes,” he says. “I made two British movies (Hunger and Shame) and I never met one person of colour in any below-the-line situations. Not one. No black, no Asian, no-one. Like, hello? What’s going on here? Very odd.”
When it came to working in the US, making 12 Years a Slave, McQueen was adamant that he wouldn’t let the same thing happen again, particularly not on a film about slavery, of all things.
“I expressly said in a meeting, ‘Look, I can’t make this movie in a situation where I don’t see any black faces other than my own behind the camera. We need to employ certain people.’ I made that very clear and it was attended to.” Two African American assistant directors were duly hired.
Before we get down to business, McQueen conducts his own interview — Where am I from? How did I get into journalism? — as if he’s trying to find out where I’m coming from before he opens up. It’s unsurprising; despite being friendly and warm in person, he is often characterised as a somewhat prickly character. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, for example, Kirsty Young expressed surprise that he was so affable and giving, wondering aloud why she might have thought otherwise. “I’m a black man. I’m used to that,” McQueen replied.
We meet in a canal side cafe in Amsterdam, close to where he lives, where our allotted 45 minutes stretches to more than two hours. He doesn’t talk in concise, clipped soundbites; he often repeats himself, rephrases his answers when he’s thought of a better way of saying something, and is quick to apologise if countered, but keen to answer whatever questions I’ve got, often saying “hit me” when he’s ready for the next one.
“Oh, yes, absolutely. It’s all about opportunities and possibilities. It’s helped in a way that maybe the door opens, and people look at you differently, but I’ve always been on that same path anyway. Maybe someone else it would have changed more, but not me.”
So, doesn’t having won an Oscar give him access to those back rooms? The ones where “the real battle is”?
“You’ve gotta be Spielberg. You got to be Tarantino to have that muscle. And I’m nowhere near that stratosphere.” He has good relationships with a few production companies and studios now, but that’s not the same. “You can be very cosy with someone but, at the end of the day, it’s about the bottom line. They want hits. It don’t mean nothin’!”
If someone put McQueen in charge of a movie studio tomorrow, what would he do differently?
“Give people more opportunities to make interesting movies. Fantastic movies.”
The word “opportunity” comes up a lot. Yet McQueen is living proof of an artist who became successful despite a conspicuous lack of opportunities. His biography is oft-recounted. He grew up in a working-class family in west London. He showed no academic promise at school (he was dyslexic), and was dismissed as “manual labour” material at 13, as were many of his African-Caribbean classmates. The dice were loaded against him. How does he account for his own success?
“I could draw,” he replies. “Like a footballer can kick a ball, or a boxer, in some ways, it was just raw talent. No one helped me with it really. I just thought: ‘OK, this is what I can do.’ That basic thing I could do educated me. I didn’t get education in school, I got education in art.”
It’s a long journey from childhood talent to winning an Oscar, I suggest. There must have been more to it than that?
He pauses for a while, deep in thought.
“I just wanted it badly. I had to do it. I had to do it. I don’t know. I was very fortunate as well, but I took the opportunities I was given.” — Guardian