As his film anthology, Small Axe, premieres on the BBC, the artist and film-maker answers questions from celebrity admirers including Idris Elba, Viola Davis, David Lammy and more. Interview by Sean O’Hagan
- Steve McQueen guest edit: read his editor’s letter
- The director on the music that moves him
Judging by the enthusiastic reviews that have attended the previews and film festival screenings of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, it looks set to be the television event of the year. The five-film anthology, a hugely ambitious, unprecedented project for the BBC, reflects Black British experience from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Moving between the political and the personal, the dramatic and the ordinary, they are undercut by a desire to illuminate a part of recent British history and experience that remains relatively untold and thus undervalued.
“I just felt that, in terms of television drama, we are still missing,” McQueen tells me when we meet (remotely) to go through questions from some of his admirers in the world of culture, music and politics for this special issue of the New Review. “We are missing from the conversation. We are missing from the narrative. And to me that is weird. Not to see yourself or any aspects of ordinary life that reflect your experiences of growing up in Britain, that is just plain weird.”
