It took Steve McQueen a long time to make a film about Black life in Britain. He’s best known to American audiences as the director of the star-studded “Widows” from 2018 and “12 Years a Slave,” in 2013, for which he became the first Black director of a best picture Oscar winner. When “Small Axe” began development, the project was pitched to the BBC as conventional television, telling one story over six hours or so (Amazon signed on as a producing partner last year.) “To get my foot in the door, it started off as a sort of episodic situation,” McQueen said in a phone interview from Amsterdam, where he’s lived since 1997. “But then I realized they had to be individual films because there’s too much interesting material.”

Source: New York Times November 11, 2020 09:56 UTC