Steve McQueen on ‘Shame’
Where do you think the tipping point is between someone who is merely sexually promiscuous and somebody who is sexually addicted?
When I first heard about the idea of sex addiction, I laughed. It’s like being at a Christmas party when Mary or Jonathan is drunk and everyone says, ‘Oh, he’s a fantastic drunk, isn’t he?’ But when you realise that for Mary or Jonathan to get through a day they have to drink two bottles of vodka, it ceases to be funny. It’s a similar thing with sexual addiction. When you find out that in order to get through a day, someone is on the internet for 20 hours a day or more looking at pornography or having to have a sexual activity at least ten times a day, it’s incredible.
There’s been criticism in the US about the film’s attitude to women. The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum refers to the film’s ‘sexist complacencies and brutalities’.
He really did? Woah. OK, Brandon is a sex addict. He has problems with intimacy. So he has a view on what he wants from certain women, because he doesn’t want what certain other women want to offer him which is a sense of intimacy, of love. For Brandon, to be intimate means he’s lost control. That’s classic sex-addict behaviour. Sex for them is having control. There are things that can facilitate that: pornography, prostitutes or women out for a one-night stand. But intimacy threatens Brandon, and his is a very sad existence.
He attempts intimacy with Marianne [the co-worker played by Nicole Beharie, with whom Brandon tries to go on a date]. I wanted people to see him trying to engage, to open up, but he’s really incapable of it. He can’t put a sexual act with Marianne into a relationship. Therefore, what we do is cut to [Brandon having sex with] this [hired] woman on the glass. Saying this movie is about sexism is like saying Taxi Driver is a racist movie. And I’m surprised people haven’t said Taxi Driver is a racist movie.
The BFI Classics book on Taxi Driver goes into that issue in detail.
But why did they make the Harvey Keitel character a white guy? People understand that, just as they have to understand that Brandon has this affliction. Of course people don’t really accept sexual addiction, because they think that it’s just people being promiscuous. It’s a similar situation with Billy Wilder when he was making The Lost Weekend. Back then, people were not looking at alcoholism, they were just thinking drunks were stupid. Alcohol addiction wasn’t seen as a real disease.
You see the situation with Brandon in the nightclub and Sissy’s singing ‘New York, New York’ to him, and he’s heartbroken. He’s forced to sit down and listen. She’s performing and she can directly tell him how she feels. And she’s telling him where they’ve come from, and where they would like to go. So in that huge room, with so many people, they have an intimacy which is absolutely amazing, where he actually opens up. This is not a monster, this is not a person who is sexist. This is person who has a problem and in the film we look at that problem.
How did you decide on the song? ‘New York, New York’ is so well-known.
Brandon is imploding and Sissy has reacted her past in an explosive way. So I liked the idea of her being a soul jazz singer, because then she can express herself through her art. I didn’t know the original song actually came from Scorsese’s New York, New York. I thought it was a classic. Of course I saw it with Liza Minnelli performing it, but I never knew it was written for that movie. But you read the lyrics of ‘New York, New York’, it’s a blues. It’s not up-tempo – it’s not Sinatra swinging the microphone around. ‘These vagabond shoes are longing to stray’: the person is homeless and he sees the bright lights in the distance. What’s interesting about ‘New York, New York’ is that everyone has a relationship to that song. It’s extraordinarily familiar. But when you turn it into something which is intimate, it makes it even stronger.
You like to work with long takes and scenes that play out sometimes in a single shot with the actors moving around in a choreographic way. How did that style develop?
I don’t know. It’s just finding things out. It’s like walking into a room and all the lights have been switched off and I have to feel my way around and get the geography right. I’m tripping over, I’m bumping into things, but I’m finding out through touch, smell, other senses, what the layout of the room is.
You initially thought about making Shame in the UK, but it was difficult to find research examples.
I wanted to do it here, but we couldn’t get anyone to speak about sex addiction. The two experts in the field that myself and [screenwriter] Abi Morgan wanted to see were in New York. They introduced us to sex addicts. So I thought, ‘Why don’t I just make the film in New York?’ That was it. The wind carried us there. I never wanted to make a New York movie.
I just want to get back to this sexism thing. Of the two women that Brandon is more intimate with, Sissy’s damaged, but she’s willing to talk – she’s strong enough to talk about things, and of course Marianne is willing to take a chance. I would say that Marianne is the most healthy person in the film. Sissy of course is damaged, but she would desperately love to get better and she’s doing it in the way that she’s expressing herself. He’s the one who’s just closed.
To turn your earlier point about Taxi Driver back on you, this film is nearly all about white folks.
Yes, it’s all about white folks, but that’s not a turning back. I’m not making a racist movie, or a sexist movie. The majority of my art films have Black protagonists. So I’m free to do anything I can do. Rock ’n’ roll, blues, classical, whatever. My next picture is going to be predominantly Black people, and the one after. I grew up in a society where – fortunately, in Britain – I didn’t live in a segregated area. So I make movies about whatever I want to make movies about.
This whole idea of sex addiction in New York, the people I was introduced to in the research were mainly… well, one was maybe half Spanish, half-white American. My work is not deliberately made for white people. It’s just about the research and the way it presented itself. People didn’t want me to put Nicole Beharie (who is African American) in the movie. You go to a lot of offices in New York and the majority of people will be white and that’s it – that’s the environment. The people I’ve been introduced to as sex addicts are 99.9 per cent white – let’s just go with that. They didn’t want me to work with Nicole Beharie and I said ‘Why?’ And they said, ‘Because that wouldn’t happen – that wouldn’t exist.’ And I said, ‘What, I don’t exist?’
Shame was the best thing I could do right now – I can’t do any better right now. As an actor or as an artist, you know tomorrow you could get hit by a bus. When I’m working with an actor, it’s as if it’s the last performance they will ever do, and it’s got to be there. If we’re lucky enough to record that, then that’s it. It’s going to be the best thing that person can actually do.
You think of James Dean – what a legacy. Three movies – that’s it. It’s gotta be as if it’s the last movie you’re ever going to make.
Interview by Nick James, Sight and Sound, February 2012
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