Despite being hot off his Best Picture-winning 12 Years a Slave, director Steve McQueen has been mum about what his next film project would be. That is, until now, as it has been revealed McQueen is going to give Paul Robeson, the actor/singer/activist best known behind the song "Ol' Man River," his big screen due.
Word on the new project comes from The Guardian. McQueen first announced the idealized film when speaking at the Hidden Heroes awards in New York. The filmmaker first discovered Robeson at age 14, he told the crowd, and has considered bringing the man's story to a large public something of a passion project.
“His life and legacy was the film I wanted to make the second after Hunger," he said. "But I didn’t have the power, I didn’t have the juice." Hunger was McQueen's first film, released in 2008, starring Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands, an imprisoned IRA hunger striker. “It was about this black guy who was in Wales and was singing with these miners. I was about 14 years old, and not knowing who Paul Robeson was, this black American in Wales, it seemed strange."
"So then, of course, I just found out that this man was an incredible human being," McQueen added.
All that is known about the film at the moment is Harry Belafonte, Robeson's friend and peer, is involved in the project in some form or another. Belafonte was the man who awarded McQueen with the Andrew Goodman Foundation's Media Hero award Monday night.
Who will play Robeson and when the movie will come out or even roll in front of camera is still up in the air at the moment. All that is known is that McQueen is finally getting the chance to make the movie he wants to make.
"We’re very fortunate that we’re on a roll together to make this dream a reality," the filmmaker said. "Miracles do happen. With Paul Robeson and Harry Belafonte, things have come full circle.”
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