by Michael Bodey

ARTIST Steve McQueen has deftly transferred to the silver screen with his film about Bobby Sands.

Steve McQueen should be comfortable with adulation. The British visual artist won the Turner Prize in 1999, sharing the spotlight with a high-profile artist who knows how to pull focus, Tracey Emin. He has also been selected as Britain's representative at next year's Venice Biennale.

But nothing could have prepared him for last year's Cannes film festival, where his first feature, Hunger, received a rapturous response.

"We were just overwhelmed by it, coming virtually straight out of the editing room and then showing it to a room of 1000 people," he says smiling.

"It was my first time in a suit, my first time in Cannes and this happened. It was unfamiliar but fun, and you wouldn't want it to happen any other way of course."

At the festival, McQueen's work received a standing ovation and later the Camera d'Or prize for the best first-time filmmaker. And so began a continuing run of prize-plucking at film festivals across the globe.

McQueen's bracing film, about the last six weeks of the life of Provisional Irish Republican Army hunger striker Bobby Sands, promptly won the inaugural Sydney Film Prize at the Sydney Film Festival and the media-judged Discovery Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, among others.

Hunger is a deft transition to feature filmmaking, although not so surprising given his inventive, if occasionally esoteric, short films. McQueen is known primarily for this film work although he has worked in sculpture and photography. Even so, a chasm remains between the visual arts and mainstream feature filmmaking. McQueen ignored it.

"You say the same things but you're saying them differently," he says. "Ultimately it's all about the idea and how it can best be translated is secondary because what form it can best reach the public, you'll find it."

He finds feature filmmaking relatively easy because it surrounds him with experts. "Anybody who says filmmaking is hard should be shot," he says. "They give you a cup of tea and before you finish it there's someone there to take it away from you and you're basically left alone to make your work and all these people are there to help you."

Nevertheless, Hunger suggests someone in touch with the film medium and its capacity to provoke an audience. And the artist himself comes with the warning, communicated by ever-fearful publicists, that he could be a prickly interviewee if provoked by inane questioning.

That fear dissipates quickly when he paints himself as a man of the people, albeit one who doesn't bother with false modesty when asked whether he was surprised that an audience understood his novel film.

"Yeah, but I always thought they would because I respect my audience," he says.

"I really respect them and I get the impression a lot of filmmakers think their audience won't really get it. Financiers don't think the audience will get it, meaning they will try and make the obvious changes in the film or whatever but I'm not interested inthat.

"Basically people want to be engaged, they don't want to be spoon fed, they want to think, they want to work and they want to be rewarded.

"And that's what they will get from this film, and other films which are similar, although there's not a lot of them unfortunately that get made."

Hunger is a unique film in the already over-populated and over-worked genre of prison movies.

One of the only things it has in common with Caged Heat or The Shawshank Redemption is the iron bars of prison cells. "Yeah, it's interesting, it's just the way it's been told, I think," McQueen agrees.

The film is semi-experimental, lacking a strict narrative arc beyond the six-week deterioration of Sands's body and the minds of many people around him. It doesn't abide by any screenplay structure. Some viewers have also claimed that Hunger largely ignores the political and religious maelstrom raging outside the walls of Northern Island's Maze prison -- also known as Long Kesh -- in 1981.

McQueen, a good-humoured 39-year-old, says he aimed to shake audiences out of their stupor and "penetrate someone's armour".

"I wanted to make a film that was very visceral, and get into the body somehow so there would be a much more direct reaction to what they were watching," he says. He does so with a number of scenes that are numbing in their intensity or degradation: where Sands and his fellow prisoners used, as McQueen describes it, "their bodies as weapons", or in some of the more off-putting scenes, their bodies' excrement.

McQueen is hardly a sensationalist. There is an alarming matter-of-factness to the scenes. The film contains little dialogue other than an extended static scene of more than 15 minutes between Sands (played with unerring conviction by Michael Fassbender) and a Roman Catholic priest (Liam Cunningham).

"It is so simple and I was trying to get people's maximum attention," McQueen says of the affecting scene.

"I wanted to create something that was very intimate, and our ears are much more alert and eyes are much more sharper just using the simple form of two people talking and not cutting."

The impact of what are clearly well-considered choices of style and content still confounds McQueen though. He pauses when considering whether he is surprised the film has shocked some audiences.

"Yes, I'll be honest," he says. "Shock? I feel like Sid Vicious: 'Yeah great, fantastic, I'm shocking.'

"It's a difficult question. You want it to (cause) a reaction but I'm quite surprised. Horror films and things like that don't get that reaction maybe because people can't believe what they're watching."

Despite its distance from 1981, Hunger has a heightened contemporary resonance after Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. That adds to the film's impact, McQueen says, because Sands's protest occurred "right in the middle of western Europe, so maybe that familiarity makes it quite shocking." Yet younger generations remain unaware of the significance of the political protest. McQueen, who was a child at the time but distinctly remembers the event, wanted to "give it some voice".

"I think it's the most important thing that's happened in British politics in the last 40 years, much more important than the Falklands War as far as I'm concerned," he says.

Yet he says he doesn't "really care" if the film is politicised.

"I identify as much with the prison officers as I do with the prisoners," he says. "Absolutely. And depending on what circumstances you're in, (that determines) what you do as a human being. I'm not judging, not at all.

"It's not good or evil, it's about situations and what happens in that situation is the ordinariness and the extraordinariness."

Nor will McQueen engage in the broader debate about Irish-English relations. He says he's only interested in the film.

"The story is very interesting but my focus is on the people," he says. "I'm more interested in the people than the politics. Politicians take care of the politics, arts will take care of the people."