Steve McQueen on Widows: Art, Race, and Women Who Fight Back

By Kristina Moskalenko and Maria Korolkova (Pasholok)

Steve McQueen’s Widows Opens London Film Festival with Power and Precision

This year’s BFI London Film Festival opened with Widows, the bold, brilliant new film from Steve McQueen—Turner Prize winner, CBE, Oscar recipient (12 Years a Slave), and arguably Britain’s most important director since Hitchcock.

Expectations were sky-high. McQueen didn’t disappoint.

“I was gripped by the story of women trying to survive in today’s world.”

Widows follows four women who, after the deaths of their criminal husbands, take the unfinished heist into their own hands. In a world riddled with corruption, prejudice, and racism, that’s only the beginning.

McQueen doesn’t offer clean choices. His characters live in gray zones, forcing the audience to go with them—like it or not.

He’s a director who confronts what others avoid. Shame explored emotional emptiness in the age of casual sex. Widows tackles racial, gender, and class stereotypes with clarity and fire.

The cast—led by a magnetic Viola Davis—is flawless: four women from different worlds, united only by circumstance and determination.

“No one thinks we’ve got the balls to pull this off,” says Davis’s Veronica. It’s the film’s unofficial tagline—and mission statement.

McQueen was inspired by a Thatcher-era TV show he watched as a child. That memory—of women defying the odds—shaped the film. But Widows isn’t nostalgia. One scene may echo Ocean’s 8, but this is no caper. It’s sharp, real, and laced with style and substance.

S7 met McQueen in London, ahead of the premiere, to talk art, women, and power.

“Art is art,” he says. “For me, it was like going from writing poems to writing a novel. Different form—but the tools are the same.”

Kristina Moskalenko: Steve, the plot is based on the British TV series of the same name from 1983, which you watched as a child. But the series is set in London. Why, as a native Londoner, did you move the setting to present-day Chicago?

Steve McQueen: I wanted the story to happen in a big Western city where the issues I wanted to explore really live and breathe — politics, economy, class divides, gun violence, racial and religious tensions.

Kristina Moskalenko: That’s quite a serious list. Were any other cities in the running?

Steve McQueen: Honestly, I only thought about Chicago. I first visited 22 years ago when I had an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. My wife was there for the Democratic Convention at the same time. That’s when I saw how politically alive the city is, how those tensions and conflicts are always present. It felt like the right place for the story.

Kristina Moskalenko: Widows is a film about strong women. Did you try to put a political or social message into this movie?

Steve McQueen: I’m interested in art, history, politics — they always inspire me and give me strength. But Widows isn’t about women’s rights or empowerment in a direct way. It’s a story about four women from very different backgrounds trying to survive in today’s world. If you look back at the great actresses from the past—Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn—they played incredibly strong women decades ago. Women don’t need me to make them strong. I’m just telling their story.

Kristina Moskalenko: You won the Turner Prize in visual arts. Was it difficult to switch from artist to filmmaker?

Steve McQueen: Art is art. For me, moving from making video and installations to film was like moving from writing poetry to writing a novel. Different forms, but the same tools. Poetry needs to be precise and concise; a novel lets you build a more complex world. It’s the same feeling, just expanded.

Kristina Moskalenko: Your films usually deal with complex and borderline issues that not everyone dares to speak about. Where does this courage come from in a world that wants clear answers and entertainment?

Steve McQueen: I’m just a very sensitive person. Besides, I believe that being an artist and a journalist is especially important today. They are the ones responsible for what people know about the world and what they think. I always tell the truth and believe there are only two things worth living and dying for: love and justice. When I work, I dive into these two values like jumping off a diving board into a pool, without looking back. I think life is about empathy. If you’re hurting, I hurt too. If women constantly face sexism, it hurts me as well because I can’t live in such a world. If I encounter racism, then others are unhappy too, because we all live in society. When you’re Black and living in the West, you start getting interested in politics early on because you keep asking: what, how, and why? I’m curious about what different people go through. That’s why I often stay silent and just listen.

Kristina Moskalenko: What problems do you see in the modern filmmaking process?

Steve McQueen: I’m not interested in thinking about that. I’m interested in life, not the film industry. I use cinema as a way to talk about how we live today. Or at least I want to believe that’s how I use it. I constantly think about where we’re going, how the world fragments, how “special interests” become motives for all sorts of crimes, how gangster values take over. But don’t think I want to make political treatises. It’s important to make people smile. You can make love stories about politics!

Kristina Moskalenko: Do you have a sense of what awaits us in the near future?

Steve McQueen: We’re slowly marching nowhere, and we all know it. I don’t understand why as a society we’re still not sounding the alarm, but as an artist, I try to speak about it. I’m not sure if the audience notices, but I have to keep trying to speak out. That’s all I can do.