Black Sheep interviews Michael Fassbender

Ain’t No Shame
An interview with Michael Fassbender, star of SHAME


Note: This article was originally published in Montreal's Hour Community.

It can be a bit jarring to go from watching an actor on screen one minute to seeing them sitting directly in front of you the next. It can even be somewhat awkward when you’ve just watched said actor engage in a multitude of sexually explicit encounters on film. When the actor you’re speaking with though is as effortlessly talented as Michael Fassbender is, you quickly realize there is no shame in it at all.

In SHAME, British filmmaker, Steve McQueen’s sophomore effort, Fassbender is naked within minutes of the film starting, so it seems only fitting to begin our conversation there as well. “It’s kinda embarrassing,” says the actor who has nothing at all to be embarrassed about. At this point, I laugh out loud and when Fassbender realizes I’m shocked that he was the least bit shy given how good he looks, he jokes, “Oh I see. You were having a gay old time then.” On that note, the Irish-German actor is clearly quite the charmer, even when fully clothed.

The 34-year-old Fassbender, who won the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival, plays Brandon in SHAME, a sex addict living in New York City. It would seem to me that if you’re going to tell a sex addict’s story on film, you’re going to need to see a little sex happen, but some people have argued that SHAME not only goes too far but that it relishes in its boundary pushing. “It’s ludicrous to me,” Fassbender explains, with only a hint of outrage. “You can take someone’s head off with a cheese cutter but heaven forbid should you show a penis.”

As much as it is about sex, SHAME isn’t really about sex at all; it’s about a person with an addiction. Brandon isn’t the easiest character to like either. He uses women whenever required and he is horribly unsupportive to his sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), but Fassbender was never concerned people wouldn’t come around to Brandon. “I knew people were going to like him because I liked him, because he was a guy that knew he was ill. He is a product of our time.”

Despite Brandon’s timeliness, the Motion Picture Association of America has slapped an NC-17 rating on the film, which prohibits anyone under 18 years of age from seeing it, regardless of whether they are accompanied by an adult or not. Ordinarily, this rating means box office death but SHAME wears its badge proudly and is doing well in limited release despite it. “It can be a good thing,” Fassbender says of the rating. “The most important thing is to get people talking about it. That creates curiosity and it only seems to put more bums in the seats in the end.”

A few cuts to the film could have brought the rating down to an R, to which Fassbender responds, “Good luck trying to convince Steve McQueen on that!” Fassbender and McQueen had previously worked together on McQueen’s debut feature, HUNGER, a 2008 film about the 1981 Irish Republican Army hunger strike, as led by Bobby Sands, whom Fassbender portrays in the film. (Incidentally, the two are scheduled to work together again on McQueen’s third feature, TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE, expected in 2014.) “He’s the only person I could have asked to do this,” McQueen tells me about casting Fassbender in Shame. “I don’t believe he’s an actor. He doesn’t act. What he does is a different thing altogether.”

Whatever it is he does, Fassbender will be doing it for quite some time if he keeps up this pace. Upcoming projects for the Best Actor Oscar frontrunner include work with some of today’s most famed directors, from David Cronenberg (A DANGEROUS METHOD) to Steven Soderbergh (HAYWIRE) to Ridley Scott (PROMETHEUS), which is exactly where Fassbender wants his career to be. “The way it is at the moment is pretty perfect for me. I get to work with great filmmakers and that’s as simple as it gets. I just want to mix it up and keep myself guessing.”

Best of Black Sheep: SHAME

SHAME
Written and by Abi Morgan and Steve McQueen 
Directed by Steve McQueen
Starring Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan


Brandon: Some people fuck up all the time.

Steve McQueen’s sophomore film, SHAME, begins with his returning star, Michael Fassbender, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling or into some far off space. He doesn’t move; he just lies there half covered by the blankets for some time. Something in his eyes suggests he can’t move just yet. He is trapped in those precious morning moments, where you become aware again of everything sleep managed to erase temporarily the night before. To get up, means having to face it all again and once you see what it is this particular man is trying to avoid, it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly why he would rather stay in bed.

Fassbender, who owes a great deal of his notoriety to McQueen after the two worked together on  McQueen’s first feature, the brilliant HUNGER, plays Brandon, a New Yorker with a fancy job and an even fancier apartment. He presents perfectly in every fashion but he is hiding a secret, one so big that it could threaten everything he has in his life. Brandon is a sex addict. Some scoff at the whole idea that someone can actually be addicted to sex, as if it is some sort of made up excuse people use to get off the hook for indiscretions. The way McQueen writes the affliction though, it becomes painfully obvious that sex addiction is in fact very real and likely pretty rampant. I wouldn’t call it a disease but it is certainly a learned behaviour that triggers the same pleasure and comfort responses in the brain that any addiction would. Brandon needs sex in his life and he gets more than a little antsy when he doesn’t get his fix.

SHAME does not judge nor does it invite us to judge Brandon. That said, we are not asked to sympathize either. We are simply given the opportunity to observe a man in some of his weaker, more vulnerable moments. Brandon is able to manage his needs fairly well when he has routine in his life but when his sister (Carey Mulligan) comes to stay with him, he is no longer able to keep his habits in the closet. Subsequently, we are witness to them all, in all their naked and sordid glory - this is a movie about sex addiction, after all; you should expect a fair amount of sex. Fassbender is brilliant and fearless as Brandon. As he processes what he’s doing and how it is affecting those around him and his self, Fassbender carries this weight in his entire body. (And I do mean, his entire body.) With SHAME, McQueen and Fassbender prove they aren’t afraid of anything and that HUNGER wasn’t a fluke. The only real shame would be if no one saw this film.

Black Sheep interviews Steve McQueen

THE SHAMING OF STEVE MCQUEEN
An interview with Steve McQueen, writer/director of SHAME

The other day, I joked to a friend that I had received shame in the mail. Of course, I was referring to my review copy of SHAME by Steve McQueen, but I preferred to remain cheekily ambiguous. It did get me thinking about how the title of the film might be more apt than originally imagined though. Sadly, SHAME, one of this critic’s top picks from last year, was scarcely seen in theatres. I had been out to see it twice and was deeply moved both instances but when the topic is sexual addiction and the content is widely publicized as explicit, the crowds do not always follow. There is at times an underlying sense of shame in seeing something so sexual amidst strangers. Perhaps now that the film is available for home consumption, privacy will make way for its genius to be appreciated. I’m just pleased it didn’t come wrapped in black plastic.

McQueen, a novice director whose mastery of the language of film is miles away from amateur, knows that the film is a hard sell but suspects that there are other levels to the depths of our shame. “He’s like us,” McQueen tells me of his protagonist, Brandon (Michael Fassbender), when we meet at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011. “We do not have self worth. If we did, the world would be a fantastic place but we keep on fucking up and trying to fix it.” The notion here is that those who cannot handle Brandon, don’t want to look at themselves. McQueen continues, “He’s trying, that’s what is so endearing about him. I’ve come to appreciate that people who have an affinity with Brandon is because they understand him and I think that’s important.”

Asking people to understand Brandon means asking them to accept sexual addiction as a legitimate affliction. This is something even McQueen had a hard time with before he sat down to write the screenplay for SHAME with co-writer, Abi Morgan (THE IRON LADY). “When I first heard of sexual addiction, I laughed of course, as you do. It’s like if we take a great drunk, makes everyone laugh. Well, when you realize it takes him two bottles of vodka to make it through the day, it ceases to be funny. When it comes to sex addiction, you realize this guy has to have sex, to a certain extent, every day and it then ceases to be titallating. Any emotional involvement, any emotional risk at all, it just fucks him up.”

SHAME is McQueen’s second film and also second working with Fassbender in the leading role. Their first pairing was McQueen’s award winning debut, HUNGER, where Fassbender played Irish Republic Army leader, Bobby Sands, during his time in prison. The two are slated to work together again on McQueen’s third feature, TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE, so what is it about McQueen that keeps Fassbender coming back for more? “The one thing that really impressed me when we were in Northern Ireland, doing HUNGER, was the passion that everybody came to the set with. Nobody wanted to let Steve down,” says Fassbender, before he takes a breath and continues to gush about his friend and colleague. “Steve leads by example. He is a very open, confident man. He’s not afraid to fall flat on his face, or rather he is afraid but not afraid to show that he’s afraid and show his vulnerabilities. That makes him a giant, very strong, so people follow him.”

McQueen is a concise man, both in his artistic expression and general conversation. When asked about the choice of New York City as location for SHAME, he says, “New York is the epicenter of excess.”

When asked about the lack of backstory for Brandon and his equally damaged sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), he says, “I didn’t want to be mysterious at all; I wanted to it be familiar.”

And when asked why he favors such long shots in his films, he says, “The content demands the form. Some times long is long but sometimes long is necessity.”

Our interview took place in under 10 minutes and he was able to answer almost ten questions in that time. His answers were sometimes curt and abrasive and other times flourished and detailed; it all depended on what was asked. What is unmistakably clear after meeting McQueen is that he certainly has no shame whatsoever for anything he has done in his career and nor should he. He makes art for art’s sake and what people think of his work, well he is just as efficient with that answer too. “Whether people like it or they don’t like it, either way, I don’t care. I just hope they’re very passionate about it.”

SHAME is now available to rent or own. Do not be ashamed to bring it into your home.

Black Sheep interviews Michael Fassbender

AIN'T NO SHAME
An interview with SHAME star, Michael Fassbender.

It can be a bit jarring to go from watching an actor on screen one minute to seeing them sitting directly in front of you the next. It can even be somewhat awkward when you’ve just watched said actor engage in a multitude of sexually explicit encounters on film. When the actor you’re speaking with though is as effortlessly talented as Michael Fassbender is, you quickly realize there is no shame in it at all.

In SHAME, British filmmaker, Steve McQueen’s sophomore effort, Fassbender is naked within minutes of the film starting, so it seems only fitting to begin our conversation there as well. “It’s kinda embarrassing,” says the actor who has nothing at all to be embarrassed about. At this point, I laugh out loud and when Fassbender realizes I’m shocked that he was the least bit shy given how good he looks, he jokes, “Oh I see. You were having a gay old time then.” On that note, the Irish-German actor is quite the charmer, even when fully clothed.

The 34-year-old Fassbender plays Brandon in SHAME, a sex addict living in New York City. It would seem to me that if you’re going to tell a sex addict’s story on film, you’re going to need to see a little sex happen but some people, let’s call them the more conservative film critics out there, have argued that Shame not only goes too far but that it relishes in its boundary pushing. “It’s ludicrous to me,” Fassbender explains, with only a hint of outrage. “You can take someone’s head off with a cheese cutter but heaven forbid should you show a penis.”

As much as it is about sex, SHAME isn’t really about sex at all; it’s about a person with an addiction. Brandon isn’t the easiest character to like either. He uses women whenever required and he is horribly unsupportive to his sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), but Fassbender was never concerned people wouldn’t come around to him. “I knew people were going to like him because I liked him, because he was a guy that knew he was ill. He is a product of our time.”

Despite Brandon’s timeliness, the Motion Picture Association of America has slapped an NC-17 rating on the film, which prohibits anyone under 18 years of age from seeing it, regardless of whether they are accompanied by an adult or not. Ordinarily, this rating means box office death but SHAME wears its badge proudly and is doing well in limited release despite it. “It can be a good thing,” Fassbender says of the rating. “The most important thing is to get people talking about it. That creates curiosity and it only seems to put more bums in the seats in the end.”

While Fassbender does see the controversy as a roundabout marketing push, he does not agree with the scrutiny itself. “Whatever rating people want to slap on it is kinda irrelevant. The fact is that I felt comfortable doing the scenes with Steve because I knew that it wouldn’t be exploitative. It’s real. It’s part of the story. It’s part of getting inside this guy’s head and where he’s coming from.”

A few cuts to the film could have brought the rating down to an R, to which Fassbender responds, “Good luck trying to convince Steve McQueen on that!” Fassbender and McQueen had previously worked together on McQueen’s debut feature, HUNGER, a 2008 film about the 1981 Irish Republican Army hunger strike, as led by Bobby Sands, whom Fassbender portrays in the film. (Incidentally, the two are scheduled to work together again on McQueen’s third feature, TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE, expected in 2014.) “He’s the only person I could have asked to do this,” McQueen tells me about casting Fassbender in SHAME. “I don’t believe he’s an actor. He doesn’t act. What he does is a different thing altogether.”

Whatever it is he does, Fassbender will be doing it for quite some time if he keeps up this pace. Upcoming projects for the Best Actor Oscar frontrunner include work with some of today’s most famed directors, from David Cronenberg (A DANGEROUS METHOD) to Steven Soderbergh (HAYWIRE) to Ridley Scott (PROMETHEUS), which is exactly where Fassbender wants his career to be. “The way it is at the moment is pretty perfect for me. I get to work with great filmmakers and that’s as simple as it gets. I just want to mix it up and keep myself guessing.”

And it would be an awful shame if he weren't allowed to continue doing just that.