When you’ve got a name like Steve McQueen, you have our attention. Even if you’re British and black. And when your previous film “Shame” was as critically acclaimed as it was, and “Hunger” stirred things up as well, and you’ve already got a reputation as collaborative, unflinching and ready to show ugly things at their ugliest, actors will flock to you.
McQueen’s bio-pic “Twelve Years a Slave,” a true story of a free black man kidnapped in the North and sold in the South, drew Chewitel Ejiofor as its star, McQueen’s muse Michael Fassbender as a slave owner, Brad Pitt, Paul Giamatti, Alfre Woodard and Paul Dano. A very good trailer for what looks like a much more conventional McQueen movie. “Twelve Years a Slave” opens in October.