Michael Fassbender & Steve McQueen Share their SHAME

It’s hardly surprising that while talking about a film like SHAME, that deals with a bold frankness about sex, that star Michael Fassbinder should invoke both Freud and Jung, the latter he portrays in another film this year, A DANGEROUS METHOD. The conversation was short, but covered why director Steve McQueen considers silence so honest, Fassbender’s consideration of the complexity of sex, and why the film was set in America, not the UK.

SHAME is a frank and brutally honest portrait of Brandon, a sex addict whose compulsion has, ironically, isolated him from life. An crisis erupts when Brandon’s emotionally fragile sister, Sissy, played by Carey Mulligan, shows up on his doorstep with nowhere else to go. Intimacy, sexuality, and boundaries all come into question as the two revisit old wounds and create new ones. The film has earned high praise and an NC-17 rating. McQueen directed from a script by Abi Morgan,