Steve McQueen on Directing Shame

“Brandon is everyone.” Shame, Steve McQueen’s new film, opens later this week. It is a brutally frank portrait of a man’s struggle with addiction to sex. As McQueen explains here, it was shot in New York for the specific reason that no one in the UK would talk to him about sex addiction. No sex please.

And yet the film has a distinctly British flavour. McQueen co-wrote the script with Abi Morgan, the television scriptwriter who has branched out into film and theatre: she wrote the script for The Iron Lady, which opened last week, as well as the plays 27 and, opening this week at the Lyric Hammersmith with Siân Phillips, Lovesong. Carey Mulligan as Brandon’s nightclub-singing sister “gives her best performance to date” according to Demetrios Matheou, who gave advance word on Shame when he saw it at the 2011 Venice Film Festival.

And then there is the ever-rising star, Michael Fassbender, German by surname, Irish by upbringing. “It’s impossible to take your eyes off him,” reported Demetrios, “and not just when he shows a commendable lack of inhibition in its raunchier scenes.” It’s a second collaboration between actor Fassbender and director McQueen. In 2008 they made Hunger, a portrait of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. Sarah Kent reviews the film for theartsdesk on Thursday. Here in the meantime is an exclusive interview with McQueen, who begins with that bold claim: Brandon is everyone.