How Steve McQueen Became Hollywood’s Favorite Artist

Matthew Dentler, head of features at Apple TV+, appeared to be more personally invested in the picture than your typical movie studio head at a company with a $3.6 trillion market cap. He started discussing the project with McQueen “a couple years ago” and through the process they would text and call each other, bouncing off ideas. Dentler was at McQueen’s opening at Marian Goodman last September in LA. He’s hoping there’s time for a day trip during his next New York visit so he can make it up to Beacon to see Bass.

“Obviously, we’re proud of the film, it’s been a rewarding experience to work with him and the team on this film—but I think also what’s been fun is getting to become friends with Steve,” Dentler said.

The first trailer for Blitz dropped the same day that Dia’s Chelsea galleries opened for the season with three McQueen artworks, and there was a party for members that night. McQueen completed Bounty, a new installation of a few dozen photos of flowers in Grenada, quickly. He had gone to the island in July. In the same gallery was something much older: Exodus, which McQueen told me was technically his first film, even if he sat on it and didn’t show it until the late ’90s. I had heard about the piece. Apparently it came about when, during an amble through London carrying a camera, the young McQueen spotted two West Indian men in smart bowler hats carrying potted palm fronds and followed them, losing them only when they got on a double-decker bus. Was that true?

“Yeah, that’s basically it,” McQueen said, staring at his first video playing on a loop on a ’90s-era block TV. “I just saw these guys and started following them around.”

Most of the crowd that night gravitated toward Sunshine State, which had debuted in slightly grander form two years earlier at the HangarBicocca. In Chelsea it was a two-channel video installation projected on both sides, starting with two depictions of a smoldering sun that cuts to parallel scenes from The Jazz Singer, Hollywood’s first film with synchronized sound, about a cantor’s son from the Lower East Side who starts singing jazz and eventually finds Broadway fame. But when Al Jolson’s character starts applying the blackface that he wears onstage, his face disappears, and McQueen’s voice wafts through the room.

“My father was called Philbert, a very Victorian name, and one of the last things he told before he died was a story…” McQueen says, the plummy disembodied voice hanging over the film.

The story he tells is this: When he was a young man, Philbert McQueen traveled from Grenada to Florida on a job picking oranges, and one night after work McQueen’s father went to a bar with two other workers. When they walked in, everyone froze. The bartender told them he didn’t serve Black men. He didn’t use that phrase. One of the orange workers hit the bartender over the head with a bottle, and they fled into the night as the patrons chased after. McQueen’s father hid in a ditch, heard two gunshots, and stayed until morning, terrified, when he returned to work by himself.

Michael Fassbender and director Steve McQueen on the set of Shame, 2011.From Fox Searchlight/Everett Collection

“He never spoke to me about it before, until when he was going to pass,” McQueen had told me back at the Crosby Street Hotel.

In the gallery, Matthew Barney listened, mouth agape. Louise Lawler sat with the gallery director Philipp Kaiser, who works at Marian Goodman, and Swofford, McQueen’s agent at CAA, was standing with Stigter as Joan Jonas stared deep into the monitor. After a few loops of the film, it was time to leave for dinner, and in the next room, McQueen was surrounded by the flowers of Bounty. The night before, there was a dinner too. The next day he had to fly to Milan, and in two weeks he’d be in London for the premiere—and in New York the next day for the film festival, and Los Angeles the day after that.

Eventually, I found McQueen staring at the minute-long Exodus. “I love work, I just don’t love all the promotion,” he said.

He turned away from the monitor to look at me.

“As I told you, I’m not good with small talk,” he said. “All I have is my work, my family, a few friends you can count on one hand. I’m not good with small talk. All this small talk, you just have to cut it off.”

For details, go to VF.com/credits.