The Cannes Film Festival holds a special place in Steve McQueen’s heart, because it’s where his directorial debut Hunger made its way into the world back in 2008. He remembers the 15-minute rapturous applause of an audience who had just discovered a promising new director, taking the stage with star Michael Fassbender afterwards for a Q&A—and the conversation the next day around the festival, which was all about why the film wasn’t in the Competition lineup.
“That’s another story. One day I will tell that story. Not now,” McQueen tells me as we sit down in a corner booth at a bustling restaurant in Cannes.
McQueen, who went on to make 2011’s Shame (also starring Fassbender), 2014 Oscar best picture winner Twelve Years a Slave, and 2018’s Widows, has a different story to tell today: about his first documentary, a four-hour exploration of the past and present set in Amsterdam. The film, which played out of Competition at the festival, is based on his wife Bianca Stigter‘s book, Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945, which meticulously chronicled the Dutch city’s occupation by the Nazis.
For the documentary, McQueen filmed slice-of-life moments in modern-day Amsterdam, and paired them with voiceover that describes the atrocities committed in those exact locations by the Nazis. It’s an uncomfortable juxtaposition — and that’s exactly what McQueen was going for. “I thought that it would be a radical idea to do that, to make a picture without archive footage. Just the present day, being illustrated by the past,” says McQueen. “For me, Occupied City is not a history lesson. It’s an experience.”
McQueen’s film is radical in many ways, not only for being a documentary without the traditional talking heads or archival footage, but also because of its 262-minute running time (with an intermission). “I want to push things because the form isn’t done,” he says. “Everyone says, ‘this is a documentary. This is how you’re doing a feature film.’ Well, no.”
Occupied City isn’t the first time McQueen has pushed the boundaries of how a film is defined. His last Cannes contribution was in 2020, when two of the films in his Small Axe series were included in the line-up. (The festival had to shift to a virtual program due to COVID-19.) The five-film series, which aired on BBC One and Amazon Prime, landed a Golden Globe nomination for limited or anthology series but also appeared on the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s award for best picture. At the time, McQueen stated that it was always intended for TV. But when I talk to him now, he calls them films. It’s clear McQueen won’t be boxed in by these sorts of labels. “Well, that’s not my debate, that’s your debate,” he tells me, looking me square in the eye. “I make this stuff.”
For Occupied City, McQueen actually captured 36 hours of footage as he filmed every setting featured in the book starting in 2019. But then he had to cut it down to four hours. “It was a process. It was a long process, but it was wonderful to have all these things at your disposal you could grab here and there, there was nothing I didn’t have to work with,” he says. “So it was a lot of work, but it was defiant. It was wonderful.”
He made the film to be shown in theaters (it’s being distributed by A24), and when I ask him if he’s concerned at all that the run time will scare people off, he’s unconcerned. “I didn’t make this to be long. I made it to be right,” he says. “As an artist, you’re just trying to do the best thing for the subject matter. The subject that is asking for a certain kind of length, or some kind of how it wants to be presented.” He admits that at first, he wondered if A24 would be okay with the lengthy running time, but they never had an issue with it. “People maybe have expectations of me. I’m happy to defy them. You have to push yourself in ways which are not neat and tidy, or not what people want from you or expect.”
He’s also aware that it can be demanding to absorb both the present day visuals and the horrific stories being told. He doesn’t expect audiences to take in both at every moment — that’s part of the experience. “Sometimes you are in it and it’s too much information, and you’re just looking and you’re not listening. Sometimes you’re listening, and you’re not looking at the images,” he says. “It’s just going to classical concerts. You’re not holding it all in the head. It’s ungraspable.”
McQueen, who has had a home with his wife in Amsterdam for 27 years (they split time between there and London), says he didn’t have any trouble gaining access to people’s homes. Many of the residents allow him to capture intimate moments from their lives, from quiet days at home to COVID weddings in empty hotel rooms over Zoom. “I think when we’re talking about the second World War, people are very open,” says McQueen. “That’s why when you walk in the streets of Amsterdam you look in people’s houses, see them cooking and washing up and doing things because the people are sort of like, what have you got to hide? There’s nothing to hide.”
The film also captures modern day Amsterdam during the COVID-19 lockdown, including the anti-vaccination protests. But McQueen says he wasn’t necessarily trying to draw a parallel between a city under siege in the 1940s and the same city being locked down today; he was simply capturing the present moment in time. “One is not necessarily to illustrate the other,” he says. “But life does that. You can look at the military police there and think of the Nazi occupation, but at the same time you might not. So it’s one of those things where it’s a situation where life is a weird thing where you could drift in and out.”
McQueen, who is currently in post on his next feature film—Blitz, a WWII-set drama—has a lot of thoughtful answers about Occupied City, speaking about it with a fast cadence and a sort of frenetic energy. But toward the end of the conversation, I mention that it seems brave to make a movie that breaks from the traditional format of a documentary. That there’s a risk to it. He seems stumped in how to respond, other than telling me he wouldn’t use the word brave. He pauses, quietly thinking it over for a couple minutes. “It’s not done. It’s just not done. Things are not done yet,” he says. “Our responsibility is not to be comfortable, but to push. You have to throw yourself off kilter.” For McQueen, it’s not brave. He simply has no other choice.
Rebecca Ford
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