THE HERO

THE ACCLAIMED BRITISH DIRECTOR BEHIND A HARROWING NEW DOC.

Listing Sir Steve McQueen’s accomplishments could fill an entire magazine. The Oscar/BAFTA/Turner-winning filmmaker and artist has had a pioneering career: Solomon Northup’s harrowing journey in 12 Years a Slave, stamps commemorating fallen soldiers, installations re-staging Buster Keaton stunts, TV episodes about a party in Ladbroke Grove, and an upcoming historical drama that sees Saoirse Ronan caught in the Blitz. His latest is Occupied City, an epic documentary adapted from his wife Bianca Stigter’s non-fiction book on the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam.

How was it making Occupied City about Amsterdam and then Blitz about the same period in London?

Coming from London, the Blitz was always promoted as ‘us against the world’ and heroic. But 27 years ago, when I first met Bianca and walked around Amsterdam, it was deafening that this place was occupied. I’d come across sculptures and ask what they were for: ‘And this one is to commemorate when a group of people were executed, and this one is where a German soldier shot someone dead.’ The films are confronting that contrast in a way. A city always has a lot of layers, and this history is not that long ago. The recent past is difficult to cope with, and so we end up in this cycle of trauma and amnesia.

Cinema often sugar-coats the past and is so bad at predicting the future…

Isn’t it crazy? If someone wrote a horror movie and the aliens are coming or whatever, that’s fine. But if Covid was a horror movie, and you wrote that people just wanted to go back to work and didn’t try to run away, they’d throw a script back in your face.

And if someone told you what we know now 10 years ago, they’d think you were mad…

Does your work pick out the perversion of that past?

I think ‘perversion’ is a very good word because these things are normalised. I don’t want them to be normal.

Be it movies or artwork, why do you shoot on film?

It is extremely important to shoot on film because it’s a ritual. I grew up shooting on Super 8, so the idea of ritual and preparation was so important. These stories are very precious, and capturing them has to be conducted in the same light. Having those conversations about how we’re going to shoot it… you’re predicting what will happen, which is weird. In some ways, it’s about finding it with the camera and the crew and everybody being in sync to both negotiate and capture the present.

‘WE DISCOVERED THE SLAVE PEN WHERE SOLOMON WAS… NO PLAQUE, NO SIGN, NOTHING’

Why does memorialising the easily forgotten often come up in your work?

Has it? Memorialising what? What other works?

Like in the film installation Ashes, you show this young man in Grenada and then after he’s murdered you return to give him a proper tombstone.

Absolutely. He was a beautiful guy, and he was buried in an unmarked grave. So going and giving him a grave that may be around for the next 200 years or so could pull on his memory. It’s a strange world. It’s like with the Holocaust or with slavery; it’s an abstract number, but it happened to a man, a woman, a child individually.

If you can get that sense across, you’re on the right path.

But it’s easier to forget?

Yes, and a good example is when we went to Washington and were invited to Obama’s White House. We discovered the slave pen where Solomon was, which is a sort of air base now, and the hotel he was kidnapped from. The buildings were there, but no plaque, no sign, nothing. So I feel that 12 Years a Slave and Occupied City are a little bit archaeological. There’s layers of history, layers of time, but whether it’s 1840 or 1940, we’re also always talking about the present day.

OCCUPIED CITY OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 9 FEBRUARY.