By There aren't many British directors whose every release is a genuine milestone, but Steve McQueen is one of those British directors. That's why we're proud to announce that we'll be in conversation with the Oscar-winning auteur at Esquire Townhouse @ Your House, in partnership with Breitling.
McQueen's art has encompassed minimalist film, sculpture and photography and in 1999 he won the Turner Prize for a short film based on a Buster Keaton stunt. Over the last decade McQueen's focus has expanded to mainstream cinema too. His 2008 film Hunger was his first feature and the first of his three collaborations with Michael Fassbender, which examined the hunger strike which Irish republican prisoners including Bobby Sands went on in 1981. They worked together again on Shame in 2011, about a man whose compulsive sexual behaviours threaten to destroy his life.
His international breakthrough came with 12 Years A Slave, based on the memoir of the violinist and abolitionist Solomon Northup who was kidnapped from freedom in 1840s New York and sold into slavery in the South. It earned McQueen an Oscar for Best Picture and a nomination for Best Director. His fourth film, the heist thriller Widows, came in 2018 to much acclaim.
His new project, Small Axe, is a series of five feature-length films for the BBC, each focusing on moments of Black British protest in the Sixties and Seventies and starring the likes of Letitia Wright and John Boyega.
"It’s not just the big things, it’s the small ones," McQueen told Esquire in our recent interview with him. "Everyone coming together makes something happen. Like throwing a pebble into a river. Huge reverberations."
Right now, the issues at the heart of these stories are more urgent than ever.
"These to me were stories that needed to be told," McQueen told Esquire. "Stories that shaped the landscape of Britain. That’s how big these stories were. The fire was in me to tell them, and as a film-maker, as an artist, without that fuel called passion, at least for me, there’s no reason to do anything."
Esquire Townhouse takes place between 15-17 October. To make sure you keep up to date with everything, sign up to our email below. You can also keep tabs on all the announcements, interviews and bonus content by following us on social media, and the hashtags #EsquireTownhouse and #SquadOnAMission.
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