STEVE McQUEEN doesn't look like a man cycling into controversy. It's a gorgeous autumnal afternoon in Amsterdam and McQueen, who has lived here for 12 years, is calmly weaving his way past jangling trams towards the patio of the suave American Hotel. When Hunger, McQueen's incandescent study of Bobby Sands' last weeks on earth, won the Caméra d'Or for best first feature at this year's Cannes Film Festival, more than a few critics noted how the film strived for balance.
Hunger might revolve around Sands and his fellow republican hunger strikers, but it still finds time to sympathise with the pressurised Maze prison guards. Still, to merely mention the hunger strike in Northern Ireland is to stir up controversy. As I watch McQueen, a burly man in his late 30s, shed his bicycle clips, I wonder if he has his defence prepared.
"I don't think any defence is required," he says confidently. "I am making a fictional film about something that truly happened to human beings. This is a film about people in extraordinary situations and how they make it ordinary. It shows how those people have to work things out through clinical decisions." Ah yes. But the very fact that he dares to point his camera at a version of Bobby Sands - played, in a performance swollen with uncomfortable degrees of empathy, by the stunning Michael Fassbender - will enrage many unionists. By choosing Sands as a subject, McQueen is, they might suggest, implicitly celebrating the prisoner's fatal protest.
"The movie is a journey through H Block," McQueen explains. "You are focusing on the things you find interesting. You follow prison officers. You follow a hunger striker. A prison officer's routine is just that: routine. But what happens to Bobby Sands is quite extraordinary. Obviously, as a storyteller, you follow that. I am not a nationalist. I am not a unionist. The human element overrides all that nonsense. Before you are Irish or British, you are a human being."
McQueen's inclusive comments make the film sound a tad wishy-washy, but nothing could be further from the truth. Though the piece does feature one long duologue between Sands and a conflicted priest, most of Hungercomprises virtually wordless depictions of the prisoners' terrible decline and the wardens' stoic dedication to grim, brutal habit. McQueen, who won the Turner Prize in 1999, has, to this point, been best known as a video artist, and he composes every shot with painstaking fastidiousness. Yet the picture is still a perfectly coherent whole.
Did his background permit him to defy the rules of conventional film-making? "I don't think it's quite that naive," he says. "I am steeped in watching films. I did go to film school for a while, but I hated it. If I had finished film school I might be more inhibited. Art to me has been about establishing a form and then communicating it. In film, the form is already established and you have to try and subvert it. As Godard said: 'a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order'."
FOR 90 PER CENT of our conversation, McQueen radiates warmth and bonhomie, but, every now and then, he prickles and reaches for the sarcasm stick. This happens - reasonably enough - when I ask about the perils of sharing a name with the other Steve McQueen. It happens again when I mention that I had read his dad worked for London Transport.
"Who told you that?" he says sharply. It appeared in an interview with the Guardianfrom 1999 (and - tsk, tsk! - was repeated in an Observerpiece earlier this month). Once again, his anger is understandable. McQueen's parents came to London from the West Indies in the early 1960s. Many of that generation did, indeed, work on the tubes and buses, but there were, of course, other jobs around for black people. "He was a builder," he says, wagging his head in resigned frustration. "Oh, whatever. Just put down that he worked for London Transport. What's it matter? I just find that sort of thing funny."
He admits that his dad would have preferred him to learn a trade, but his mum supported his decision to study art at Goldsmiths University in London. The institution was the alma mater of many of the assorted geniuses, showmen and hucksters that were to make up the Young British Artists (YBA) scene: Sam Taylor-Wood, Gillian Wearing and Damian Hirst all studied there.
"I wasn't really involved with that YBA thing," he says. "I was on the coat tails of what was going on. I fell in love with a woman and moved to Amsterdam 12 years ago, so I missed all that." The year that McQueen won The Turner Prize, press attention was focused on Tracey Emin and her notorious bed. Yet most critics who caught site of McQueen's spooky, insidious videos - the most famous replicated that Buster Keaton stunt in which a building's facade collapses on the deadpan comic - were unsurprised when he triumphed. "It was nice for my parents to see that their son had done well," he says sweetly.
It took another eight years for Hungerto come together, but the wait has certainly been worthwhile. Every aspect of the film is extraordinary. Fassbender, who was born in Germany and raised in Co Kerry, starved himself into gaunt transparency to play Sands. Liam Cunningham burns with outrage as the priest who tries to talk the prisoner out of his hunger strike. Enda Walsh's script for that key, central conversation is dense and poetic.
"I came back with the structure after I went to Belfast for the first time," he says. "I suppose I saw the thing as a river. In the first part you are floating on your back, taking in the environment. The second part is like a stretch of rapids - the environment fractures. The third part is like a waterfall - there is this terrible loss of gravity."
Although much of the film has an abstract quality, the historical and procedural details do feel authentic. Serious research has gone into the making of Hunger.
"I met some prison officers and some former hunger strikers," he says. "There is stuff which is not documented in history books - the things in between the words. People waking up with maggots all over their bodies: that stuff is not in the historical records. Imagine being a prison officer and working in piss and excrement for all those months and going home to your kid each night and trying to be normal. That's an extraordinary situation."
Well, quite. I wonder what sort of atmosphere there was on set. Did all that grimness seep into the gaps between takes? "I am, in a way, happy that we were unable to actually film in H Block," he says. "They wouldn't allow that. I think maybe the atmosphere on set would have been different. It would have been hard to shoot where all that went on. It was actually a pretty good atmosphere. But, when it was time for work, people were serious." That sincerity shows through. No more affecting film has been released this year. But there will still be whingers who regard the picture as terrorist propaganda. Are his loins girded? "I don't feel nerves," he says. "People will embrace the film or not. That's cool. It's just a film for crying out loud. That's all it is."
Hunger is on general release
