Between '12 Years a Slave' and Anne Frank: Steve McQueen sits down with Haaretz

[Jefferson23]

Director of the Oscar favorite explains how it set about 'to tell a story that had never before been told cinematically.'

By Neta Alexander | Jan. 17, 2014 |

NEW YORK ? Between 1501 and 1866, about 11 million Africans were sold into slavery or born as slaves. “There were 101 slave narratives published between 1760 and 1865 ... But of that 101, the only one describing the experiences of a free Negro who was kidnapped and then escaped was Solomon Northup,” the historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. told Time magazine in October.

“12 Years a Slave,” the latest movie by British director Steve McQueen ?“Hunger,” 2008; “Shame,” 2011?, based on Northup’s book, just won the Golden Globe for Best Drama and has been nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Screenplay Adaptation. It is now playing in Israel. When I met McQueen, along with a small number of other journalists, a few weeks ago in New York, he was articulate and eager to discuss his most ambitious project to date. He spoke rapidly in reply to questions, as if there would not be enough time to fully explore the cultural and historical context of slavery and its aftermath.

“My mother was born in Grenada, in the place where the mother of Malcolm X was born,” McQueen related. “I have relatives from Trinidad, where many of the Black Power movement activists were born. That is part of my tradition, and that’s why I’d wanted to make a film about slavery for many years.”

He began by reading history books and slave memoirs, “but it was only after I’d already started to write the draft of a fictional screenplay that my wife ran across Northup’s book. From the instant I started to read it, it was clear to me that this was going to be my script. I was very surprised to discover that no one I knew had ever heard of the book, which tells such an amazing story and is so rich in details and nuances. I was filled with a tremendous desire to put this book on the screen. I thought it was a story that had to be told, precisely because so few people had been exposed to it before.”

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/.premium-1.569188#

[Jefferson23]

1. further:

McQueen noted that he was living in Amsterdam at the time. “I used to go by Anne Frank’s house almost every day,” he recalled. “Reading Northup’s book, I could not ignore the similarity. I felt that it was like Anne Frank, but a hundred years earlier. Like Anne Frank’s diary, ‘12 Years a Slave’ is about a person who tries to preserve humanity in a dark period characterized by a lack of humanity and by discrimination. In addition, Northup’s book is actually the only written testimony we have about someone who was sold into slavery and succeeded in being freed and even suing those who abducted and abused him.”

The film is disturbing and difficult to watch, not least because it evokes many Holocaust films. It contains long scenes in which McQueen documents in immense detail the emotional collapse of a young mother who is sold into slavery and whose two small children are taken from her, and the rape of a young black woman named Patsey ?an impressive debut performance by Lupita Nyong’o?, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar) by a sadistic white plantation owner ?Michael Fassbender, who played the lead role in both of McQueen’s previous features? and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar).

The autobiography by Northup, who had been a free man and a musician, was published in 1853. The book was little known outside the academic community engaged in the study of slavery. Northup describes how in April 1841 he was lured into going from New York to Washington to appear with two white men who styled themselves “circus artists.” The next day he woke up in an abandoned cellar on Pennsylvania Avenue, shackled to the wall with iron chains.

The “circus artists” turned out to be slave traders who abducted blacks from northern states and sold them in the South. For Northup, this was the beginning of a 12-year ordeal on plantations in Louisiana. Despite the impossible conditions, Northup was able, in an unprecedented feat at the time, to reacquire the papers attesting to the fact that he was a “free man” and be reunited with his wife and children.