Body politics - Steve McQueen interview

Artist Steve McQueen tells Siobhan Synnot what drove him to make a film about hunger striker Bobby Sands

A MAN called Steve McQueen has made a prison film – but you wouldn't dream of cracking jokes about a Great Escape. The Turner Prize-winning artist is a funny serious man. In 1999 he beat conceptual artist Tracey Emin and her unmade bed to the award by restaging Buster Keaton's classic routine in which the silent comedian is left standing as a house collapses on top of him without hitting him. In Deadpan, McQueen re-enacts the moment repeatedly until finally the joke gives way to McQueen's lugubrious thousand-mile stare, a stoicism that you just can't laugh off.

In the run-up to the November US election, there have been any number of crudely assembled, politically slanted diatribes, but McQueen's Hunger stands out. An engrossing, provocative film, it covers the last months of Irish Republican Bobby Sands, who starved himself to death in 1981 as a protest against the British Government's intransigence over recognising convicted IRA members as political prisoners.

Talking to McQueen about it can be like a series of jump cuts; he often starts, backtracks, then refocuses. Was the German-Irish actor Michael Fassbender his first choice to play Bobby Sands?

"No," he says. "And yes. I found the people I wanted to work with through a series of auditions. Take Enda Walsh. I auditioned for a scriptwriter because my situation was like a musician who doesn't know how to write music but who has the orchestration and the melody in their head. I needed someone who can write music to translate it and bring out the feelings.

"I spoke to a lot of writers but Enda was the person I identified with. We had conversations where we ended each other's sentences. It was real first hand contact with Enda and with Michael. It was a real organic process; it wasn't about looking up people in a book to see what they had done before. I think that's the only way to work, rather than have a wish-list going 'wouldn't it be great to have Danny DeVito and Al Pacino'."

McQueen began making films as a student at London's Goldsmith's College. After graduation, he won a place at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York but steered clear of falling for Hollywood films – "You're learning their language of film and I wanted to find out my language of film."

Around the time he won the Turner Prize, he said he would make a feature film if he ever got an idea. Five years ago, Channel 4 called him up and asked if he'd thought of something yet. Yes, he said: he'd like to make a film about Bobby Sands.

"They didn't flinch, didn't blink," he says, even when he told them he was thinking of making it as a silent film. "A week later they came back and said, 'Ok, go ahead'. They gave me the money and left me alone."

McQueen was 12 in 1981 when Sands' protest came to attention, but his connection even then was not about causes, heroes and martyrs, but a slightly left-field fascination with imagery.

"My first memory was that my parents used to watch the nine o'clock news religiously, and I remember there was a photograph and underneath it was a number that increased every day. My parents may have told me what it was about, and that it was a hunger striker, a man not eating. I remember that the maths didn't add up, and that as a child I couldn't understand the idea of someone who didn't eat, but gets louder, Sands was somebody who doesn't eat, but could be heard.

"And in an interview between French new wave director Jean Luc Godard and the late film critic Pauline Kael, Godard said that people such as Sands are 'important because they're childish'.

"I didn't understand what that meant – it was Godard for crying out loud! But I had an image. A child gets told what sort of clothes he wears and what time he goes to bed. The only power a child has is refusing to eat. So maybe it's interesting for that."

The Sands story also had plenty of scope for McQueen's camera because images of that time were scant, as he discovered during the research process. "All the footage that exists adds up to 90 seconds on ITN which has two men saying we want political prisoner status, but it meant that the details in our film felt new, from the maggots that they woke up to next to their bodies, which then turned into bluebottles, to how they disposed of their urine. There were more details we couldn't put in the movie but all these details helped push the film forward."

McQueen and co-writer Walsh break the film into four uneven parts, much of it almost wordless, with first the introduction of a brutal prison guard (Stuart Graham) and his suburban home life, which is mundane except that it involves checking under his car for bombs and he lives in constant, justified fear of assassination.

A new prisoner (Brian Milligan) is taught the ways of Maze rebellion, which include smearing faeces on the wall, smuggling notes in orifices and bracing himself for beatings from prison guards. Sands enters the film relatively late in a 17-and-a-half minute scene in which he relates his ideals and plans to a sceptical priest, Father Moran (Liam Cunningham).

"Channel Four did step in there," says McQueen. "But I was adamant. We had a bit of an argy-bargy and then they agreed. Because they're scared. They've never seen a 17-and-a-half minute take. But I knew what I was doing."

In the final section, Fassbender shows in detail the gruesome effect on a man's body of refusing sustenance. The film is built out of shocking juxtapositions: serenity and squalor, a dialectic of high and low, sublime and sordid. The film has been criticised for being politically reticent, but McQueen says he was always more engaged by the internal battles of the situation.

"The prison officers were just as brutalised as the prisoners in a way, so for me it was about the human situation. Politics creates situations but it's left to the people to deal with it, whether they are prison officers or blanket prisoners. It's not about left and right or right and wrong, it's more about you and me."

• Hunger is on general release from Friday