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Michael Fassbender, Steve McQueen & Abi Morgan Talk Shame

The much-talked about film finally hits the UK.

With media buzzing over Shame since its premiere at festivals last year, Steve McQueen's film finally hits UK cinemas 13th January.

The follow-up to the artist and director's debut Hunger reunites him with star Michael Fassbender. The actor, who got his big break playing IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in McQueen's striking biopic, stars as a sex addict in the haunting and compelling character drama. Set in New York, Brandon enjoys a life of one night stands, escorts and pornography, until both the arrival of his troubled sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) and an awkward date with co-worker Marianne (Nicole Beharie) cause him to reflect on his life. Read our review here.

We attended the press conference at the London Film Festival, where McQueen and his writer Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady, The Hour) discussed the evolution of the project, and Fassbender recalled meeting real-life sex addicts.

Abi and Steve, how did this film come about?
Morgan: Steve and I met two and a half years ago. We initially met for an hour, with our watches set, thinking how long are we going to have to endure each other. Three and a half hours later we were still talking. That was the starting point. We talked about love stories really.
McQueen: We spoke about various topics. I wanted to put down the gun - I wanted to make a love story really. We talked about the internet, pornography and sex addiction. That was the seed really.
Morgan: My dad had died, and I talked about when, with only three days left to live, he flirted with a nurse. I thought it was incredible that he still had that life force. We talked about the sexual energy that you have as a human being.
McQueen: Also the accessibility of sexual content. When I was a kid the only time I got near to pornography was the top shelf of a newsagent. Now it's two clicks of a mouse. That's not saying sex addiction is a brand new thing, but the accessibility of pornography amplifies it even more.

Did the title come from the meetings and interviews you conducted?
Morgan: When you speak to someone suffering from this compulsion, the word "shame" is just in the room. It was very apparent from the people we met that was the centre of the compass. One of the reasons we went to New York was that we couldn't get anyone to talk to us over here. You can talk drugs, alcohol, gambling, but you can't talk about sex the same way. Shame, it was Steve who found it, who said this is the word. Steve spent a lot of time with these people and then quietly walking around the city together. That feeling of shame bubbles up in you.

With the title Shame, do you consider yourself a moralist?
McQueen: I do actually, but I'm not moral at all. Morality's like socialism - a great idea, but it doesn't bloody work. It's innate, growing up, telling our kids' fairy tales of good and bad. Around the world, Christianity, Judaism, Islam - morality is in our DNA. Are we moral? No. All we seem to do is break stuff and then try to fix it.



Steve and Michael, can you tell us about the decision to work together again?
McQueen: He wasn't so bad in Hunger so I thought I might as well ask him again... I don't know how to add to that - he's a good actor, isn't he?
Fassbender: It wasn't really a problem because Steve changed my life with Hunger. I didn't even need to read a script - it was just when and where?

Michael, could you talk about the research you did? Were you shocked by what you found?
Fassbender: Yeah, I suppose like everyone else it seems to be a grey area, this kind of sexual addiction. Because all of us were probably introduced to it through celebrity stories, and there's a certain public perception of self-indulgence in that world. What was interesting to discover was just how many people claim to suffer from it, and how it wasn't being treated as an official mental illness. What was very important to Brandon's character, and what Abi and Steve had really put at the core of the character, was this problem with dealing with intimacy and emotional content in any sort of relationship. So trying to find that was the hard part, because everything stemmed from that. I am very grateful to have met somebody at the time who was suffering from that. I think it's very difficult when you're talking to somebody like that and you're essentially trying to extract information out of them. So by asking them direct questions it's not really that effective - people tend to be on guard. So I just asked them to tell me stories, and from those stories I could get an idea of where certain motivations were born from a personality like that. How somebody suffering from the condition actually deals with it - how it manifests itself physically during an embrace when you just want to squirm your way out of it. That helped me get a physical life. It really helped meeting somebody.

Michael, was there any stage during filming where you thought you couldn't do this?
Fassbender: No, my imagination was much more deviant than anything that appeared in the script! [On getting embarrassed] Of course, unless you have exhibitionist tendencies, which is cool. But I don't feel that comfortable parading around naked in a room full of strangers. But it had to get done - it was an essential part of getting inside that character's psyche. There are various stages where you see exactly what's going on in his head. That's my job - I've got to facilitate these things, and forget about "Michael Fassbender" or whatever that image is. I'm there to tell a story. You just roll up your sleeves, even though I didn't have any on, and go for it.
McQueen: There's a lot of talk about this, but if you're an actor, you're like a dancer, in that you use your body. It's nothing... I don't understand all these questions about nudity, it's a nonsense. You're an actor, you're an artist - get on with it.
Fassbender: That's what he said to me every day!



I read Gwyneth Paltrow is making a film where she's playing a sex addict - does this reflect a desire to address the subject more generally?
Morgan: I think it reflects the fact that we've commodified sex, and that we've deconstructed the etiquette of dating now. How immediate and accessible it is. We're fascinated by the way we choose to interact sexually, be it through webcam, texting, Skyping - we have a different access point for sexual relationships. Maybe that's taken us further away from intimacy. You can see it as a hot subject in a way. I know little about the film, other than seeing photos of her looking sweaty in Central Park!

Steve and Abi, there are scenes that are quite sparse, but powerful - how much of that is at the writing stage?
McQueen: It's more atmosphere. One has to trust performers. Certain things cannot be, how can I say - they can be talked about, but they're difficult to write about. The ambience, the feeling, the emotion has to come from the performance, through the camera, through trust. I wanted to make New York, New York into blues. The lyrics are blues - it's not Liza Minelli, Frank Sinatra, it's a really sad song. This could be one of those times when Brandon is confronted by Sissy and she can have a direct communication and he can't get out. He's trapped and he has to listen. That can only happen in cinema - it can't happen in novels or plays. That's cinema. Sometimes it's scary for sure, but other times you just have to have a little faith in cinema.

You don't give a lot away about Brandon and Sissy's background.
McQueen: We wanted to make it familiar, rather than mysterious. When we come to the cinema we all bring our history, our baggage, and we sit down and we look at the movie. So we have some idea of what possibly could have happened. I didn't want to give you a long yarn about what happened to Sissy, what happened to Brandon, oh isn't it terrible. No, we all have an understanding of what possibly could've happened. There are tales in the film where the past comes into the present. You can have an idea. I want people to bring their own history.



Are you conscious of taking an artist's approach to your scenes?
McQueen: When I'm looking through the camera I'm not thinking of Goya, I'm thinking what's the best thing I can be doing at this present moment. Certain things are co-incidences, and certain things are... there are different textures, aesthetics with celluloid - I'm not thinking of paintings at all. I'm thinking of content, story and narrative. The best piece of advice, the best thing I ever heard about that, as far as images are concerned, was from a friend of mine Robby Müller, who worked with Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch. He said the camera should be like a cat jumping on to a table. Just enough amount of effort - that's enough. If the content I had wanted me to be a tapdancer, I'd be a tapdancer. If it needs me to jump out of an aircraft I'll jump out of an aircraft, sculpture, sculptor, film, film. The content tells you what it wants. The film gives us reality within our own reality.

Can you talk about your choice of long takes?
McQueen: It comes from the actor, and it comes from going to the locations, and the locations are sometimes not what you thought they would be. You adapt to the environment, and the actor and their needs. There was one great time with Michael, when we were shooting quite fast, and he said "you're putting me in this shot, and I don't want to do that". That was a wake-up call. Let's see how he moves, what his ritual is. Let's move the camera with that. It's almost like a dance in a way. It's Fred Astaire and the camera's Ginger Rogers.
Fassbender: I just keep going until I hear cut. I don't want to be flippant, but I work from the script a lot. I will have the thing prepared to do it in one, but to be in a position where I feel like I'm awake, free and aware on set, and not pre-empting too much. To just allow yourself to see what happens, literally. There are a thousand ways to do one thing.

How was the experience of directing your second film compared to your debut?
McQueen: I always feel like I'm an amateur. This is a continuation of Hunger really, it's one film as far as I'm concerned. It's about trying things out and hoping they work. What often people think doesn't work, does work, so it's a case of experimenting and collaborating with great people. Trying to do something that has some kind of meaning.

Both your films deal with extreme subjects - are there some limits you wouldn't cross?
McQueen: I don't know if it's tough - it's reality. It's just how things happen - Bobby Sands happened, people have sex addictions. I'm not here to provoke or scandalise, just to portray it. We present things that reflect us, and what we see is not particularly pretty. I'm not interested in pushing anything, just exploring things.

Our friends at Filmbeat have footage from a recent Cinema Showcase Q&A with McQueen and Fassbender: