Steve McQueen

By Hopkin Easterbrook

Who is Steve McQueen?Steven Rodney "Steve" McQueen CBE (born 9 October 1969) is an English film director, producer, screenwriter, and video artist.

He directed award winning film, 12 Years a Slave.

He also won an academy award and a BAFTA for best film and Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama.

Steve McQueen is the first black film maker to win an Academy Award for Best Picture.

What Does Steve McQueen do?Bear (1993) was McQueen's first major film, presented at the Royal College of Art in London. Although not an overtly political piece, for many it raised questions about race, sexual attraction to men, and violence.

This started his film career as he would go on to make many more short films and release 3 feature films, titled “Hunger” (2008), “Shame” (2011) and his most successful to date, “12 Years a Slave”(2013).

Why Does Steve McQueen do it?He took A level art at Hammersmith and West London College, then studied art and design at Chelsea College of Arts and then fine art at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he first became interested in film. He left Goldsmiths and studied briefly at New York University's Tisch School in the United States. He found the approach there too stifling and insufficiently experimental, complaining that "they wouldn't let you throw the camera up in the air”. His artistic influences include Andy Warhol, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Jean Vigo, Buster Keaton, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson, and Billy Wilder.

How does Steve McQueen do it?His first major work was Bear (1993), in which two naked men (one of them McQueen) exchange a series of glances that might be taken to be flirtatious or threatening. Deadpan (1997) is a restaging of a Buster Keaton stunt in which a house collapses around McQueen, who is left unscathed because he is standing where there is a missing window.

As well as being in black-and-white, both these films are silent. The first of McQueen's films to use sound was also the first to use multiple images: Drumroll (1998). This was made with three cameras, two mounted to the sides, and one to the front of an oil drum which McQueen rolled through the streets of Manhattan. The resulting films are projected on three walls of an enclosed space.

Examples of His Work

Is he successful?Steve McQueen is very successful with countless awards for his film making, especially for his most recent ’12 Years a Slave’ which received 1 Academy Awards, 2 BAFTAS and 1 Golden Globe Award. And also picking up 9 nominations through out all competitions. Below are the financial details of ‘12 Years a Slave’

Steve McQueen’s stampsQueen and Country is a 2007 artwork by British artist Steve McQueen. The work is a set of 155 sheets of stamps, each sheet commemorating a soldier who lost their life in the Iraq War between 2003 and 2008. The work was a co-commission between the Manchester International Festival and the Imperial War Museum.

McQueen's intention was that the stamps would be issued by the Royal Mail for general use, however despite applying to the Royal Mail he was turned down several times. The Royal Mail has said that service personnel and their families would find pictures of the dead featuring on stamps "distressing and disrespectful”. However the stamps have received support from families, the general public and members of the armed forces.