Powerful memoir fires dark history

Ever since 12 Years a Slave was unveiled to rapturous reviews at the Toronto Film Festival everyone has been talking about the remarkable source material, a memoir by a free-born African/American named Solomon Northup who survived a dozen years of abuse and bondage at the hands of Louisiana plantation owners.

Solomon, a professional musician and a married man with children, was enjoying a good life in pre-Civil War upstate New York when he was approached by a pair of entertainers to join their troupe and go on tour.

After a night of carousing Solomon woke up in chains and on his way to New Orleans where, along with other kidnapped free-born black men and women, he was sold into slavery, the beginning of a journey of Dante-esque horrors which he was fortunate to survive.

However, when British director Steve McQueen set out to realise his dream of an epic drama about slavery centred on the thousands of free-born black people who were abducted and enslaved, he had never heard of Solomon Northup and his book, which was first published in 1853.

"Ten per cent of African/Americans lived free in the northern States of America and in Canada. So I liked the idea of a native American being kidnapped instead of someone who arrived on a slave ship because everyone in the audience can identify with him," McQueen tells me over the phone from Los Angeles.

"The script, which I was writing with John Ridley, was going along slowly, so my wife (historian and critic Bianca Stigter) suggested we look into first-hand accounts of those who'd suffered that fate. She found this book 12 Years a Slave and it was amazing.

"It completely surpassed what we were writing. Every turn of the page was a revelation," says McQueen, 44, a Turner Prize-winning visual artist and filmmaker who forged a distinct aesthetic in his unblinking examinations of men being plunged into the depths of despair in Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011).

"Every page read like a script, the language, its vividness, everything. And I thought to myself 'How come I had never heard of this book before? This is crazy, it should be required reading.' From the moment I read it I knew I had to make 12 Years a Slave into a film."

After he had his story the next step was finding his Solomon. For McQueen, who forged one of the great director-actor relationships with Michael Fassbender and who again takes a key role in 12 Years a Slave, the only actor he could conceive playing Solomon was fellow Brit Chiwetel Ejiofor. Although little known outside London stage circles, Ejiofor is one of the most highly regarded actors of his generation and, when given parts in movies, is often the best thing in it (Dirty Pretty Things, Children of Men, 2012).

"Chiwetel is a great stage actor with a wonderful voice but we needed for him to communicate without words. We wanted the audience to see what he was seeing as he comes face to face with the obscenity of slavery.

"So we had him study the films of Buster Keaton and Rudolf Valentino, greats of the silent cinema who had to express so much through their eyes," McQueen explains.

While he and his co-writer Ridley stick closely to Northup's memoir - "80 per cent of the dialogue comes from the book" - the invented parts reveal why McQueen is regarded as one of the best directors working today.

The sequence that leaves anyone who sees the film reeling, in which Solomon is left to dangle on the end of a hangman's noose for what seems like an eternity, comes straight out of the book, McQueen explains.

His idea was to have the other slaves continue working in the background and not paying a scrap of attention to the choking man. "We wanted to show that the cruelty was not extraordinary," he says. "Slavery was an integral part of American economic success and power."

This and many other gut-wrenching sequences is why 12 Years a Slave is the frontrunner for this year's best picture Oscar (it has already won the Golden Globe and a swag of other awards).

Gravity and American Hustle are laying down solid challenges in one of the strongest line-ups in the history of the Oscars, with so much quality to choose from that wonderful pictures such as Blue Jasmine, Inside Llewyn Davis, Saving Mr Banks, Rush and Prisoners did not make the cut (and that is with the best picture category again expanded to nine).

However, the combination of artistic ambition and seriousness of purpose should see 12 Years a Slave follow Schindler's List, to which it has inevitably and accurately been compared, best the impressive list of contenders and be anointed the year's best movie on March 2.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of McQueen's achievement is that this hugely ambitious film, which features some of the best actors in contemporary cinema (add to those mentioned Brad Pitt, Paul Giamatti, Benedict Cumberbatch and Paul Dano) and is sumptuous in its recreation of antebellum America, was made for just $US20 million and shot in just 35 days (by way of comparison the average modestly scaled first-time feature shot around Perth takes about as long).

"It's closer to $15 million if you count the tax concession," McQueen laughs. "When you have that small amount of money you can't afford to faff around. You have to do a lot of scenes with just one take."

As steeped in history as 12 Years a Slave is - and the period details are meticulous - there's another aspect of the story that fascinated McQueen.

"I always thought this film was like a fairytale," he explains, likening Solomon's seduction and abduction by a pair of trickster slave traders to what happens to Pinocchio when he encounters the conniving con men in Walt Disney's classic cartoon.

"I always looked at it as something akin to that, where the two guys come and seduce Pinocchio and lure him into the circus. When we were writing the script the Brothers Grimm and their very, very dark stories were always on the top of my mind."

While McQueen is enjoying the plaudits flowing his way for such a magnificent achievement, he is most pleased about the role the film is playing in putting this dark period of human history on the agenda and reminding us that the misery of many black communities has its roots in the abuse they endured.

"It's a huge event in world history that lasted 400 years and is barely remembered. There is a kind of global amnesia. Yet we are surrounded by evidence of its impact - in broken homes, in crime, in drug addiction, in bad grades at school. It is not a coincidence. It can all be traced back to what to this monumental injustice."