Matthew Dentler, Apple TV+’s head of features, appears to have more personal investment in the picture than your typical studio head at a 3.6k market cap company billion USD. He began discussing the project with McQueen “a few years ago” and throughout the process they would text and call each other, coming up with ideas. Dentler was at McQueen’s opening at Marian Goodman last September in LA. He hopes to have time for a day trip during his next visit to New York so he can go to Beacon to see Bass.
“Obviously, we’re proud of the movie, it was a rewarding experience working with him and the team on this movie—but I also think what was fun was becoming friends with Steve,” Dentler speak.
First trailer because quick sale on the same day Dia’s Chelsea gallery opens for the season with three works of McQueen art, and there’s a party for members that night. McQueen is done bonus, a new installation of a few dozen flower photos in Grenada, quickly. He arrived on the island in July. In the same gallery there is something much older: Migration, which McQueen told me was technically his first film, even if he saw it and didn’t screen it until the late ’90s. I had heard about this work. Apparently it happened when, on a stroll through London carrying a camera, young McQueen spotted two West Indian men in smart bowler hats carrying potted palms and followed them, only to lose them as they boarded a double-decker bus. Is that true?
“Yeah, that’s basically it,” McQueen said, staring at his first video playing on loop on a block TV from the ’90s. “I just saw these guys and started following follow them around.”
Most of the crowd that night headed towards sunny state, had debuted in slightly grander form two years earlier at HangarBicocca. In Chelsea, it’s a two-channel video installation projected on both sides, starting with two depictions of smoldering sun that cuts to parallel scenes from Jazz singer, The first Hollywood film to feature synchronized sound, it tells the story of a singer’s son from the Lower East Side who begins singing jazz and eventually becomes famous on Broadway. But when Al Jolson’s character starts wearing blackface on stage, his face disappears and McQueen’s voice echoes throughout the room.
“My father’s name was Philbert, a very Victorian name, and one of the last things he told before he died was a story…” McQueen says, his disembodied voice echoing throughout the film.
The story he tells is as follows: As a young man, Philbert McQueen went from Grenada to Florida to pick oranges, and one night after work, McQueen’s father went to a bar with two other workers. When they entered, everyone was stunned. The bartender told them he did not serve black men. He didn’t use that phrase. One of the orange workers hit the bartender in the head with a bottle, and they fled into the night as patrons chased them. McQueen’s father hid in a ditch, heard two gunshots and remained until morning, terrified when he returned to work alone.
Michael Fassbender and director Steve McQueen on set Humiliation2011.From the Fox Searchlight/Everett Collection
“He never told me about it before, until he was about to die,” McQueen told me while at the Crosby Street Hotel.
In the gallery, Matthew Barney listened, mouth agape. Louise Lawler sat with gallery director Philipp Kaiser, who works at Marian Goodman, and Swofford, McQueen’s representative at CAA, was standing with Stigter as Joan Jonas stared at the screen. After a few rounds of film, it was time to go to dinner, and in the next room, McQueen was surrounded by wildflowers. Bonus. There was also a dinner the night before. The next day he had to fly to Milan, and in two weeks he would be in London for the film’s premiere – and in New York the next day for the film festival, and Los Angeles the day after that.
Finally, I saw McQueen staring at the book for a minute. Migration. “I love my job, I just don’t love it all promotion,he said.
He looked away from the screen to look at me.
“Like I told you, I’m not good at small talk,” he said. “All I have is my job, my family and a few friends you can count on. I’m not good at small talk. All this small talk, you just cut it out.”
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