postPerspective Update

Steve McQueen on Directing
Amazon’s Small Axe Anthology

By Iain Blair

British director/writer/producer Steve McQueen burst onto the international scene in 2013 when his harrowing 12 Years a Slave dominated awards season, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. Now McQueen is back with Small Axe, the BBC-produced anthology of five feature-length stories about London’s West Indian immigrant population and its struggles.

The series, streaming on Amazon Prime, comprises five titles — Mangrove, Lovers Rock, Alex Wheatle, Education and Red, White and Blue — all set from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, and all based on true stories except for the joyous, all-night party film Lovers Rock.

I spoke with McQueen, whose other features include Widows, Shame and Hunger, about making the anthology, his workflow and post for the project.

Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt is usually your go-to, but for this you used a new DP, Shabier Kirchner. How was that experience?
Sean wasn’t available, so I used it as an opportunity to find an up-and-coming talent. When I saw Shabier’s showreel and his style and work, I was impressed. I felt he’d be the perfect guy to shoot this.

He’s from Antigua, and he’s a sailor and a skater, so he has this amazing sense of balance in how he shoots, which you can really see at work in all the party scenes in Lovers Rock. But he’s also great at handling drama. We shot with ARRIs, and I wanted some of it to have the texture of 35mm and the feel and texture of the time and place, but not be too grainy.

I also didn’t want to shoot in a wide-screen aspect ratio if it was a more intimate piece, like Red, White and Blue, which we shot in 35mm. And then Shabier shot a mixture of 35mm, 16mm and digital for the others, and we used various frame ratios to get the look we wanted.