Steve McQueen on George Floyd, Racist Inequality in the UK and His New Series, 'Small Axe'

Is Sir Steve McQueen Britain's greatest living film director? His Bafta, Oscar and Turner Prize make a very compelling case. Over a 30-year career, he's conquered the worlds of art and commerce, making films that are as challenging as they are popular, and working in every imaginable medium. Born in London in 1969, McQueen broke through in the British arts world in the early Nineties. His short art films Bear (1993) and Deadpan (1997), which won him the Turner Prize in 1999, were followed by mainstream cinema success with the films Hunger (2008), Shame (2011), the Oscar Best Picture-winning 12 Years A Slave (2013), and Widows (2018). Now he releases Small Axe, an anthology series of five feature-length films for the BBC which focus on moments of revolt by Black Britons against discriminatory systems. They cover the late Sixties through to the early Eighties, which to McQueen were "a golden age of resistance". McQueen joined us at this year's Esquire Townhouse @ Your House in partnership with Breitling, in discussion with Esquire Editor-in-Chief Alex Bilmes, to talk about the project and much more.