Steve McQueen
Sir Steve Rodney McQueen CBE (born 9 October 1969) is an English film director, film producer, screenwriter, and video artist. Known for directing films that deal with intense subject matter, he has received several awards, including an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards, and a Golden Globe Award. He was honoured with the BFI Fellowship in 2016 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2020 for services to art and film. In 2014, he was included in Time magazine's annual Time 100 list of the "most influential people in the world". McQueen began his formal training studying painting at London's Chelsea College of Art and Design. He later pursued film at Goldsmiths College and briefly at New York University. Influenced by Jean Vigo, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, and Andy Warhol, McQueen started making short films. In 1999, McQueen was awarded the Turner Prize for the "range" and "emotional intensity" of his art. He made his feature-length directorial debut with the historical drama Hunger (2008), which focused on the 1981 Irish hunger strike, followed by the erotic, psychosexual drama Shame (2011), which explored sex addiction. He won the Academy Award for Best Picture, directing the historical drama 12 Years a Slave (2013). He also directed the contemporary crime thriller Widows (2018) and the World War II drama Blitz (2024). For television, he released Small Axe (2020), a collection of five anthology films "set within London's West Indian community from the late 1960s to the early '80s". He also directed the BBC documentary series Uprising (2021) and the documentary film Occupied City (2023). Description above from the Wikipedia article Steve McQueen (director), licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
| Known for | Directing |
|---|---|
| Born | 9 Oct 1969 |
| Place of birth | London, England, UK |
Favorite films
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… how Tokyo Story depicts the life of a family was extremely familiar … That happens sometimes: you see things through other people’s eyes, and it’s so intimate, so close. It’s like, how do they know?
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The music in this movie and the whole idea of the slow breakup of the couple played by Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot made a huge impression on me: as did its pace and way of looking and the use of time. It’s one of Godard’s best movies.
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It’s about the state of play: the haves, the have nots. It’s all about the game, and I think it’s so beautifully done.
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I love, love, love Gene Kelly. The exuberance. Even in the title. … Life is about singing in the rain, and this movie articulated that in such a spectacular way.
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It’s a meditation, and it’s undeniable on its own terms. You have to tune yourself into it, almost like a radio, into that frequency.
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It was one of the most exciting things I’d seen. When I saw it, we were living it. … it was electrifying.
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A film about time and regret. … I lost sense of time, and I was living within the film. It was fantastic.
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This movie is such a great example of what cinema can do. Going beyond entertainment and actually crossing over into the everyday. … I remember seeing the owner in the front row swigging back vodka. I was in tears.
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This was one of those movies that’s stuck with me from when I was young and getting into cinema. It was all about liberation and freedom.
