In May, the Dia Art Foundation hosted a 600-person lunch at its museum in the Hudson Valley hamlet of Beacon, New York. There are a number of permanent installations at the site, a sprawling former Nabisco packaging factory—Richard Serra’s massive steel whorls, Donald Judd’s plywood boxes, Andy Warhol’s 100-plus canvas masterwork Shadows. The lunch was the vernissage for newly installed exhibitions of artists inducted into the exclusive coterie. The largest new commission, which took over the 160,000-square-foot space’s basement, is by Steve McQueen, the British artist and film director’s first collaboration with the arts organization. Minutes before guests were to arrive, McQueen stood in the middle of his massive installation, titled Bass.

McQueen, 55, is one of the world’s great artists working with the medium of film. His videos can be single-channel, sub-10-minute miracles in black and white like Five Easy Pieces, in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. His work Drumroll consists entirely of the footage caught by cameras jerry-rigged into an oil drum rolling through the streets of midtown Manhattan—it won McQueen the Turner Prize, the highest award for a British artist. In 2023, the Serpentine Galleries put on view McQueen’s Grenfell, shot from a helicopter that slowly advances on the remains of Grenfell Tower, an apartment building where a fire killed 72 people in 2017. He has participated in nearly every major contemporary art exhibition on the globe— the quinquennial Documenta in Kassel, and biennales in Gwangju, São Paulo, Sharjah, and Johannesburg—and represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2009. In 2022, he was knighted. McQueen’s fine art films are not available to watch on demand; they do not exist on the internet—they are virtually impossible to see unless they are put on view in an art context and if the artist installs the projection himself.

But McQueen is also known for his feature films, which are screened in movie theaters where you can buy sodas and popcorn, movies you can rent for a few dollars and watch on your phone right now. He’s the exceedingly rare visual artist to be completely comfortable in both the rarefied air of the Tate Modern and the grind of an Oscar campaign. In 2008, his Bobby Sands biopic, Hunger, starring Michael Fassbender, won the Caméra d’Or for best first feature at Cannes. He followed in 2011 with Shame, a gritty New York City–based look at sex addiction, also starring Fassbender. Two years later came 12 Years a Slave, about a free Black man who is kidnapped and sold into slavery. McQueen became the first Black filmmaker to win the Academy Award for best picture. He’s once again in the Oscar hunt this year with Blitz, a searing family drama starring Saoirse Ronan set in World War II London.

In many ways McQueen is in an unprecedented position. Hollywood and the art world have a fickle relationship—they’re two often-colliding maelstroms with distinct goals and different political systems, both with sticky inferiority complexes. And yet, with affection, both scenes claim McQueen as their own.

At Dia Beacon in May, many of the art world’s elite were led into the depths of the basement, where they were fully immersed in McQueen’s installation, which turned out to be a departure. A series of lights overhead strobed and slowly changed color, the throbbing low end of a free-jazz score physically manifesting through the room in the ripple of a frilly summer dress here or there.

“I mean, I really thought, and we all thought, he would be doing a film,” said Donna De Salvo, a curator at Dia who recruited McQueen.

For more than an hour, the artist stood at the center of the installation, completely removed from the pomp of a luncheon attended by some of America’s most powerful museum directors, nattily attired European art dealers, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, whose wife is on the Dia board. He stared at the work on the cement ceiling with an intense focus.

“You’re playing it like an orchestra, Steve,” said a passing-by Beth Swofford, McQueen’s movie agent at CAA, who is also a major collector of contemporary art in Los Angeles. McQueen gave a weak smile. A little while later, he tensed up as Stefania Bortolami, founder of the namesake Tribeca gallery, came up to say hello very briefly.

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When lunch started upstairs, McQueen was at a table with Dia director Jessica Morgan, the actor Frances McDormand, the artists Joan Jonas and Theaster Gates, and the billionaire pharmaceutical heiress Maja Oeri, who founded the Schaulager museum in Switzerland—it has the largest holding of McQueen’s work in private hands. She’s generally considered his great patron, and Bass will travel to the Schaulager in 2025.

McQueen appeared not exactly anxious, but maybe slightly bored. He wanted to return to the basement.

A few weeks later, McQueen told me the initial idea for Bass had come from the musician Quincy Jones, who said something to him while they were both working on a project at The Shed in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards: “The electric bass changed music.” That ate away at McQueen. Perhaps because it came from the man who produced Thriller, perhaps because it’s something McQueen already knew.

“It’s amplifying the sonic subsound, and the whole idea of the speakers and bass and this sort of visceral vibration for your body,” McQueen told me.

We were speaking over breakfast at the Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo. It was mostly empty and McQueen, in town for a few days, was wearing a blazer over a T-shirt. He drank cappuccinos, extra hot, no food. I asked him about the slight aversion to art-world schmoozing he had seemed to exhibit upstate.

“I never had that situation where I’m hanging out with artists,” he said. “It’s like, you know, hanging out with another butcher. You chop meat that way, I chop meat this way.… My job is to make work. I’ll just say I’m not interested in the fucking lifestyle.”

We started talking about how former factory spaces make for really great museums. Two years earlier, I had seen McQueen’s epic survey at the Pirelli HangarBicocca, the complex with gigantic exhibition spaces where components for locomotives and farm machinery were once manufactured on the outskirts of Milan. In 2019, McQueen had a show at the Tate Modern, a repurposed 20th-century power station. “I’m from London, and London was all about converting spaces,” he said.

“It’s always been a mixture, it’s always been a conversation, a certain kind of overlapping histories, always,” McQueen said, speaking in starts and stops, never exactly explaining or decoding his work, but also rather naturally—and maybe a little miraculously—tying the primordial low end he filled a room with in Bass to the legacy of wartime London portrayed in Blitz.

“There were a lot of bombed-out buildings which were never actually fixed or left for ruins—and people’s warehouse parties.”

The journey from visual artist to Hollywood filmmaker is historically treacherous. Warhol spent years making slapdash films at The Factory, yearning to be taken seriously by moviegoers, mostly to no avail. Three decades later, a number of Pictures Generation artists got the chance to helm proper films. Cindy Sherman made Office Killer, Robert Longo made Johnny Mnemonic, David Salle made Search and Destroy—all now essentially forgotten, even as their directors got more and more famous as artists. The most successful artist turned director prior to McQueen is certainly the painter Julian Schnabel, who launched his film career with a biopic of his late friend, the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and then went on to direct Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Unlike all those predecessors, McQueen’s primary artistic medium was the moving image from the start. At one point he just started making narrative-driven films starring Hollywood actors as well. He maintains the same Amsterdam studio and workplace to create them. He lives in the city with his wife, the critic and director Bianca Stigter, and their two children. McQueen’s films brim with the same raw qualities that make his artwork so immediate. The simplest shot or setup can be explosive, whether it’s two naked Black men exchanging flirts and taunts while wrestling (his breakthrough artwork Bear) or just the eyeball of Charlotte Rampling, quivering and blinking for nearly six minutes (Charlotte). His presence as a Black filmmaker with no one to answer to but himself who makes films about Black men and women—such as Widows, his 2018 heist film starring Viola Davis—is, to state the obvious, a Hollywood exception.

“I remember when I told him what I thought the approach to the character would be, one of the things was, ‘How should I wear my hair?’ ” Davis told me on the phone. “And I remember he didn’t really engage in that conversation so much. I hung up and then he called me back two minutes later and said, ‘Why can’t you wear your hair?’ ”

“I don’t think people see me as the woman I am,” Davis went on. “I’m sexual, I’m funny, I have heart, I have empathy, people find me attractive.... It’s like people didn’t see beyond my thick lips and thick nose and dark skin and what that represented to them, which is none of the things that are attributed to being a woman. But with Steve, I found someone who saw me fully.”

After speaking to collaborators who’ve known McQueen for years, there emerged a portrait of an uncompromising but deeply human artist making work for the screen. He’s an outsider in Hollywood who operates on his own time frame and schedule.

“I felt like I needed a break—as Daniel Day-Lewis says, ‘I need to let the tide go out before it could come back in again,’ ” said Ronan, on the phone in September. “I’d say to my agent, ‘There’s only certain people that if they called, I’d come back,’ and Steve is one of them.”

He is, his actors and crews say, very collaborative and open but also direct in his needs and desires. He’s frank, and oftentimes, quite funny. Despite the fact that they were shooting a film about a distraught mom in an urban battlefield, Ronan said, “I had such a laugh with him, and I ripped the piss out of him all the time.”

Lupita Nyong’o, who won an Oscar for her performance in 12 Years a Slave, called him surprisingly playful but said that a McQueen set, or at least the one she experienced, was also a sacred place. “I felt safe. I felt protected from the outside. Of course, it was a very, very vulnerable role to play, and he ensured that the set was a space that could do that.”

McQueen is Hollywood atypical in his efficiency.

“Meetings that might take two hours on another project take place in 15 minutes,” said Blitz producer Anita Overland.

“The majority of the time, he would get what he needed in that one shot and then he would wrap for the day,” Ronan said. “I’ve never worked with a director like that before. He’d wrap like five hours early, and we’d all be sort of like…you couldn’t quite trust it when you heard it, because that literally never happens on set. Never.”

A few weeks after our breakfast, McQueen reached out to say he wanted to hop on the phone again. He was back in Amsterdam, though he would return to New York in a few days to finish the installation of his show at Dia. He was in a good mood and started talking about why so many people in Manhattan walk around in gym clothes—McQueen, speaking British, called them “yoga costumes”—and about the very real problem of how many dogs there are defecating on the New York sidewalks.

“I think if I was doing the movie tomorrow, in the periphery of the conversation would be dogs squatting to shit,” he said, laughing. “Because now, it’s fucking croissants or whatever, it’s part of the landscape.”

All great material, but he also wanted to further discuss his inspiration for Blitz. He initially said, at the Crosby, the first germ came while researching Small Axe, his 2020 Amazon anthology series. McQueen had come across an archival photo of a boy at a railway station carrying a suitcase. Actually, though, it went further back to his tenure as a commissioned artist during the Iraq War, and, actually, earlier than that, to his teens going to dance parties and art museums in those repurposed London warehouses and factories. It all came down to questions, literally existential ones, he had about his West London origins.

“The only reason I’m in London is because of the war,” he said. “My parents were asked, invited, to come over to rebuild the UK after the war. So my own existence is because of what happened. You don’t have to dig too deep to get a connection.”

McQueen’s father was from Grenada, and his mother was from Trinidad. Growing up, young McQueen mostly just loved playing soccer. He’s still a Tottenham supporter. His dyslexia and a lazy eye set him apart at school, as did the general racism of ’70s and ’80s Britain. He found early that he loved drawing, that he could always make an image when he put pen to paper.

He went to various art schools and graduated from Goldsmiths in 1993 with a degree in painting. From there he decided to pursue an MA from a film school and ended up at NYU as New York was enjoying its reputation as a hotbed for independent filmmakers.

“Actually...I wanted to go to La Fémis,” McQueen admitted. “I wanted to go to French film school, but I couldn’t speak French. So I thought, Okay, you know, Spike Lee or Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese. New York, like, okay, that’ll be the second-best bet.”

It didn’t quite work out. He still remembers one professor asking him bluntly, “What are you doing here?” He dropped out, but not before he experienced the freedom that comes with holding a camera. When he returned to England, he was asked to participate in a group show at the Royal College of Art curated by master’s students. The work selected was Bear. Only after McQueen’s father and grandmother arrived at the opening did they discover that it was a 10-minute-long, black-and-white film of two naked men wrestling, and that one of the men was McQueen.

The work was fierce, immediate—a gut punch in an art gallery, harder to achieve than one would think. It was something then wildly out of vogue in curatorial and academic circles: video art that didn’t care a whit about semiotics. Word spread around London immediately, prompting new work to be shown in a temperature-taking survey of young artists called the British Art Show, alongside Sam Taylor-Johnson (who has gone on to a different kind of Hollywood career, helming Fifty Shades of Grey), Chris Ofili, Gillian Wearing, and others. By 1996, McQueen had his first museum solo show, at the age of 26, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

McQueen had earlier met Okwui Enwezor, a Nigerian editor of a journal about African art who would go on to become one of the most important curators of the past half century, before his death in 2019.

“I was 24 years old, at the ICA bookshop, and I remember what he was wearing completely,” McQueen said. “He had a denim jacket, a nice beautiful shirt, and he had a satchel across his right shoulder, like an old British schoolbag over the right shoulder.”

Thus began a conversation that led to McQueen’s participation in Enwezor’s edition of the Johannesburg Biennale, examining the role of art in a post-apartheid world. Visiting Johannesburg led McQueen to the TauTona mine (known as Western Deep), then one of the deepest gold-mining shafts in the world, burrowing nearly two and a half miles into the ground. The resulting work, Western Deep, was chosen by Enwezor for inclusion in his groundbreaking Documenta 11.

“That was one of the most important relationships in Steve’s career: his bond, his relationship with Okwui,” said Rose Lord, a managing partner at the Marian Goodman Gallery. “It’s extremely difficult for him that Okwui’s not around anymore, and there’s so many things that he feels that Okwui prepared the way for which are now coming to fruition.”

They stayed close, even after Enwezor stepped down from his position as artistic director of Haus der Kunst due to ill health. In March 2019, McQueen was visiting the curator by his hospital bed in Munich, and the ailing Enwezor was talking about a future essay, yet to be written.

“I visited him a lot of times, and on the day of his death as well,” McQueen said. “So we had this conversation about abstraction in his hospital, he was thinking about writing an essay for this show I was doing at the Tate—I didn’t, we didn’t, get there. I didn’t want him to write it because he was, he wasn’t, you know, well enough at that time.”

By the late 1990s McQueen was the hottest artist in Britain. He was nominated for the Turner Prize, going up against Tracey Emin, whose work My Bed had scandalized London and provided the Fleet Street tabloids plenty of art-forward fodder. The bookies had Emin as a 6-4 odds-on favorite, but the prize went to McQueen.

“I was rather totally upset, actually,” McQueen said. “As soon as that situation happens, it’s like, ‘Oh.’ It’s not fulfilling.”

He was pursued by the legendary gallerist Marian Goodman and traveled to New York to meet with her at the headquarters on 57th Street. At the time, her roster included Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, John Baldessari, William Kentridge, and Lawrence Weiner.

“I was a bit cocky,” McQueen said. “And then someone handed me the list of the artists in the elevator. And as the elevator door closed, I thought, Oh my God, fuck, I didn’t know nothing. Then we toured the gallery and that was it. Marian’s beautiful. She saw me.”

In London, where he needed representation as well, he met with a young dealer named Thomas Dane, and while having dinner, McQueen announced that he wanted Dane’s gallery to represent him. There was one problem. Dane didn’t have one.

“I had nothing,” Dane told me. “I had no structure to represent him. I was deeply thinking, What do I do? That’s Steve. That’s who Steve is. That’s Steve. He made that decision because he has incredible instinctual awareness or just antennae, everywhere in a sense.”

“Not much more to it,” McQueen said when I asked him to verify the story. “Sometimes you sense a person and that was it, and I’m grateful that he did that—and I think he hasn’t done too badly.”

The Turner meant something else totally new: conversations with those who hold the purse strings in the entertainment industry. McQueen had an idea for a movie—a movie movie.

“Basically, the subject matter said it needed to be a film,” he said. “I wasn’t looking to make a film but the subject matter needs to be a film.”

The idea of an artist of McQueen’s stature switching sides, even temporarily, prompted endless discourse among the art world’s high priesthood.

“I remember very vividly having a conversation with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, an artist who I’m very close to, when Hunger came out,” Morgan said. “We were all like, ‘Steve McQueen, our idol, is making a feature film.’ It was like, ‘Oh, we could do that too?’ but then being almost outraged that he’d made a Hollywood film. It was like, ‘What?’ It has narrative. It has famous or potentially famous movie stars in it. It’s not what we were expecting at all.”

Hunger is a searingly unsentimental portrait of Bobby Sands, an IRA member who died at age 27 in 1981 after a 66-day hunger strike at Maze Prison. In the mid-2000s, current Shed artistic director Alex Poots had a gig putting together performing-arts programming for Nicholas Serota at the Tate and had worked with McQueen on various projects. Poots introduced the artist to Jan Younghusband, who ran the arts-related production budgets for Channel 4, the public-owned British television concern. Younghusband managed to raise 1.1 million British pounds for what would become the movie.

McQueen asked the Irish playwright Enda Walsh to cowrite the script and did copious amounts of research with producers. But in terms of actually shooting the movie, McQueen had never given direction to an actor before.

“The first time I was on a movie set was on my own,” he told me. “I did that deliberately, because I didn’t want to have anyone’s habits, I wanted to find out my own. The first shot I shot was when a prison officer is executed, when he goes to the old people’s home and he’s executed in front of his mother.”

He had no idea if the film would connect with audiences, if he could apply the core tenets of his art films into something that works as a full-length narrative.

“I thought, Okay, this could be the first film and my last film. But when it happens, I’m going out with two guns blazing, so let’s do this,” McQueen said.

It worked. “My God, Steve is brilliant, and the way he directed me was brilliant,” Fassbender said that year at Cannes. Shame, a portrait of a depraved sex addict played again by McQueen’s beautiful muse Fassbender, was shot in New York during the spring of 2011.

Next came 12 Years a Slave, which, even with his by-then sterling bona fides, involved a lot of studio convincing.

“When we made [it] the conversation about slavery wasn’t really topical in a way,” McQueen told me. “I remember very clearly going to these execs, and I remember having this conversation. I said, ‘Mate, you know what? I’ll make a film about slavery. It’s almost like slavery didn’t happen.’ And then we made some noise with that, thank goodness.” He followed with Widows, a high-profile collaboration with author Gillian Flynn, coming off the smash adaptation of her book Gone Girl, with a spectacular cast: Davis, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell, Robert Duvall, Daniel Kaluuya, Cynthia Erivo, Elizabeth Debicki. Critics mostly shrugged, and it failed to connect with viewers or at least live up to the hype that preceded it. (After a lukewarm opening, it did eventually make $76 million at the global box office against a $40-something-million budget.)

When asked at the time whether he was disappointed by the returns, McQueen laughed and said, “Well, yes, obviously. One would want it to be better, but it is what it is.”

In our second conversation, McQueen spoke about his time in a combat zone during the Iraq War, commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to make an artwork based on his experience, deploying to Basra and staying for six days in 2003. While there, he hung out with British soldiers and talked to them about why they enlisted, why they would die for queen and country.

“What was touching for me was the normal guys, the Jacks and the Geralds and the Marcuses, who I was with—they were from all over the UK,” McQueen said. “It was one of the first times ever in my life—in fact maybe it’s the only time—I’ve actually felt some kind of patriotism. I was with all these people all over the country as a group, and there was a kind of camaraderie. If you had been from Newcastle or Sheffield or London or Sunderland or Liverpool or wherever you were in the country, that you were together, bonded together by this unfortunate situation.”

The episode sparked an inspiration to make a World War II film with a ground-eye view: “I wasn’t interested in Monty, I wasn’t interested in Churchill, I wasn’t interested in Eisenhower.” When he came across that photo of a small boy by the train tracks with a suitcase, he started to build the character of George, a nine-year-old, one of the children sent en masse to the countryside as the war ravaged through a London where civilian adults were trying to go about their lives under the constant threat of air raid sirens. George’s mother is Ronan’s Rita; his father is a Black immigrant, out of the picture for reasons we later come to understand. George escapes from the train ferrying him upcountry and embarks on a Homeric quest to find his mum.

It’s a disarmingly simple plot, one that really does seem suited for McQueen in blockbuster mode—an idiosyncratic artist-director making a big-budget, big-tent VFX-filled Hans Zimmer–scored war epic, released by Apple Original Films, the movie arm of one of the world’s biggest corporations.

“He’ll always take something and slightly move the goalposts,” Ronan said. “That’s what sets him apart from other directors: His artistry really is a part of how he tells a story.”

Overland, the producer, experienced that too and said, after working with McQueen on Small Axe and then Blitz, he has a way of behaving on set that runs so at odds with anyone else working in the industry.

“I guess it sounds a bit corny, but it’s like free jazz,” Overland said.

In July, months before Blitz was set to be released in theaters, I settled into a private Tribeca screening room to watch the film.

The opening sequence includes a bomb careering through the sky, the camera focused tight on it, as if it were Charlotte Rampling’s eye or Fassbender’s indelible waterfront scream in Shame. We also see London firefighters rushing on a burning building freshly bombed, struggling to get the hose on to douse the flames in water. When the water comes, the hose snaps to life with a shock—the coil bursts into the sky like a living, feral creature. The firefighters try to pounce on the rampaging hose. The flames climb higher, bombs make pockmarks out of an ancient city’s blocks, bricks fall to the ground like rain. It’s a scene of such abstract and human intensity that it left me shaking in the empty theater. It is, in other words, great art—and great moviemaking.

Apple, which only in 2022 became the first streaming service to win a best picture Oscar with CODA, is banking on Academy voters thinking the same.

Matthew Dentler, head of features at Apple Original Films, appeared to be more personally invested in the picture than your typical studio head at a company with a $3.6 trillion market cap. He started discussing the project with McQueen “a couple years ago” and through the process they would text and call each other, bouncing off ideas. Dentler was at McQueen’s opening at Marian Goodman last September in LA. He’s hoping there’s time for a day trip during his next New York visit so he can make it up to Beacon to see Bass.

“Obviously, we’re proud of the film, it’s been a rewarding experience to work with him and the team on this film—but I think also what’s been fun is getting to become friends with Steve,” Dentler said.

The first trailer for Blitz dropped the same day that Dia’s Chelsea galleries opened for the season with three McQueen artworks, and there was a party for members that night. McQueen completed Bounty, a new installation of a few dozen photos of flowers in Grenada, quickly. He had gone to the island in July. In the same gallery was something much older: Exodus, which McQueen told me was technically his first film, even if he sat on it and didn’t show it until the late ’90s. I had heard about the piece. Apparently it came about when, during an amble through London carrying a camera, the young McQueen spotted two West Indian men in smart bowler hats carrying potted palm fronds and followed them, losing them only when they got on a double-decker bus. Was that true?

“Yeah, that’s basically it,” McQueen said, staring at his first video playing on a loop on a ’90s-era block TV. “I just saw these guys and started following them around.”

Most of the crowd that night gravitated toward Sunshine State, which had debuted in slightly grander form two years earlier at the HangarBicocca. In Chelsea it was a two-channel video installation projected on both sides, starting with two depictions of a smoldering sun that cuts to parallel scenes from The Jazz Singer, Hollywood’s first film with synchronized sound, about a cantor’s son from the Lower East Side who starts singing jazz and eventually finds Broadway fame. But when Al Jolson’s character starts applying the blackface that he wears onstage, his face disappears, and McQueen’s voice wafts through the room.

“My father was called Philbert, a very Victorian name, and one of the last things he told before he died was a story…” McQueen says, the plummy disembodied voice hanging over the film.

The story he tells is this: When he was a young man, Philbert McQueen traveled from Grenada to Florida on a job picking oranges, and one night after work McQueen’s father went to a bar with two other workers. When they walked in, everyone froze. The bartender told them he didn’t serve Black men. He didn’t use that phrase. One of the orange workers hit the bartender over the head with a bottle, and they fled into the night as the patrons chased after. McQueen’s father hid in a ditch, heard two gunshots, and stayed until morning, terrified, when he returned to work by himself.

“He never spoke to me about it before, until when he was going to pass,” McQueen had told me back at the Crosby Street Hotel.

In the gallery, Matthew Barney listened, mouth agape. Louise Lawler sat with the gallery director Philipp Kaiser, who works at Marian Goodman, and Swofford, McQueen’s agent at CAA, was standing with Stigter as Joan Jonas stared deep into the monitor. After a few loops of the film, it was time to leave for dinner, and in the next room, McQueen was surrounded by the flowers of Bounty. The night before, there was a dinner too. The next day he had to fly to Milan, and in two weeks he’d be in London for the premiere—and in New York the next day for the film festival, and Los Angeles the day after that.

Eventually, I found McQueen staring at the minute-long Exodus. “I love work, I just don’t love all the promotion,” he said.

He turned away from the monitor to look at me.

“As I told you, I’m not good with small talk,” he said. “All I have is my work, my family, a few friends you can count on one hand. I’m not good with small talk. All this small talk, you just have to cut it off.”

This story has been updated.

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