Outrageous but memorable, Alexander McQueen was not just a fashion world icon, he was a cultural icon. Whether gracing the covers of The Face or Dazed and Confused, McQueen was a fashion visionary. In his new documentary, director Ian Bonhôte and co-director/writer Peter Ettedgui bring together exclusive home footage and in-depth interviews with those closest to Lee Alexander McQueen, taking us into his extraordinary life and career. McQueen celebrates the artist and fashion icon, and tells his story with intimate detail, allowing the viewer to truly appreciate his artistic vision.
I caught up with Peter and Ian to talk about their thrilling documentary. Read our chat below.
Whether we follow fashion or not, we know the name Alexander McQueen. We’ve seen his outfits, we know his work or at least know of his impact on culture. What’s your first memory of McQueen?
Peter: It was opening the pages or seeing tabloid articles about the bumsters and the scandal caused by them, or seeing a headline about the latest, outrageous show. I remember Highland Rape and the sensation that seemed to cause. On the other hand, I remember my dad who was Joseph Ettedgui of the Joseph stores in London who was one of McQueen’s early champions after Isabella Blow took him to one of the earliest shows and then my dad saying, “You’ve got to ignore all of that noise because this man is the most extraordinary tailor and cuts clothes like no one else.” I remember all of that. I remember that McQueen was at the center of the scene in London. He had tentacles in Brit art and was very much a poster child for the Cool Britannia moment. Those are my early memories of McQueen.
Ian: In my case, it’s slightly different. I moved to London in 1997 and my earliest memory of McQueen was the reason for my desire to move to London. I finished my A-Levels and moved to New York to study filmmaking. While I was there, I only stayed for a term. New York was great and I loved it, but I was always worried about working afterward and London was the place to be with the music, movies, music videos, and fashion. McQueen, Galliano and so many cool things were coming out of there and as a 20-year-old young man, I moved to London and was soon working in club visuals and creating visual montages. I worked in a club on Oxton Square right next to McQueen’s studio, you could actually see right into it. I was almost like a fanboy, not that I was spying on them, I knew about them. You have to remember that with all the fashion publications like Dazed and Confused were mixing music, fashion and arts. He was constantly on the front page. He was the embodiment of Cool Britannia. So, when you’re a young immigrant, a foreigner and you completely immerse yourself. I’d go to the movies and go clubbing and immerse myself in the culture. He was a great inspiration and compared to Peter, I love fashion and I follow fashion. I don’t adhere to the business side of fashion, but the creative side of fashion is as much an art form as photography and film.
When you’re watching McQueen, you have such intimate subjects involved, telling you their story. Was it easy to get that access?
Peter: It was initially incredibly difficult. what happened when we got together to make this, we knew we wanted to tell the story through the point of view of his work because he always said, “if you want to know me, look at my work.” We knew that and we had a treatment and a visual picture around the shows. We got the money very quickly to make it and we were all ready to go and it was like tumbleweed because we could not persuade anyone to come on board. Very early on the brand said they didn’t want to co-operate with us. The fashion world is a small world and if the brand wasn’t involved then they shouldn’t get involved.
Then the family, who have seen so much of the sensationalistic stuff written about their beloved brother, they were wary about coming on board and it was difficult to persuade people to come on board. What happened was that we started meeting people who knew Lee early on in his career, like Rebecca Barton, Alice Smith who was his de facto agent. We were so nervous we wouldn’t get anyone else and we talked about his entire life with them just in case those were the only people who talked.
Word got around that we were approaching the subject in a way that was very respectful to Lee and true to his work. More people began to agree to at least talk to us and consider interviews. Sometimes those interviews went on for months before we got a yes, other times it happened faster. It was a slow process. Our most important interviews were the last interviews we did. Janet (Lee’s sister), who is so important in the film, that was our last interview. About a month before we locked picture.
Ian: That’s the story of the contributors to the film. Even now, there are some people who think we were not the right people to make the film. I find it interesting because it shows how difficult it is when someone takes their life. It’s a huge responsibility when you are an outsider to his circle or even outside the fashion industry. I’m really proud of the film we made and I hope people realize we made it with the best intentions in mind. We don’t claim to know Lee and have never said it. We do think it’s good to have that objectivity to be able to not shy away from the difficult aspects, but also not to whitewash it. At the same time, we took the approach of the work.
I think we both feel we tried our best to present the right portrayal and to be respectful.
Peter: There’s another part of me that thinks, the contributors we wound up with, we feel they are part of the family now. We feel that they tell the story and that they don’t leave any gaps. They were very candid with us. In certain cases, they went more than the extra half mile and you see the emotion on their faces. That’s a tough thing to do when you’re sitting with your best friend and to reveal it that way. When you’re on camera for an international audience, that took a lot of courage. We totally understood why some people didn’t want to come on board and we were so grateful for those that did.
Were you surprised by what some of them brought to the table because at that point you’ve earned their trust?
Ian: We had done our research and there was a lot of things out there. We’re not promoting the film saying, “You will learn the truth and we have this amazing secret.” That’s not how we made the film.
In some cases, we knew there were difficult subjects. In terms of Gary, we were very close to Gary. He actually designed the poster. What surprised me was the way he said things. When you interview people, they’re not actors and it’s not about delivery. We let people talk. Gary felt like sharing a few things and when he shares these things that he does, you can see it’s really cathartic for him. He has his own ups and downs and felt that making the film helped him. It was amazing to have this platform for people to talk about.
Peter: We’ve had a few of our contributors who wrote to us having seen the film write and say, “thank you for including us and seeing the film has helped us come to certain terms with things that have halted us since Lee took his life.” So, I think that’s definitely true with what Ian was saying.
We had to earn their trust, particularly with the family. with Sebastian Pons and Mira Chai Hyde who were very close colleagues and friends. Those people were aware that they were the key to telling the story.
Although they had spoken to journalists in the past, they had never appeared in any previous program or documentaries about McQueen. It took a long time to with their trust and we knew we had to do that.
With Janet, she wanted to meet us initially. Ian had initially built up the close relationship with Gary. They met a few times, they talked about Gary coming on board and being in the film.
Then, we had this meeting scheduled together with Gary and Janet said she wanted to come along. She wanted to make sure that Gary was doing the right thing. She wanted to meet us and that we would do Lee justice. That was the spirit in which we first met. It wasn’t that we were going to do an interview with her because she made it quite clear that she didn’t want to do an interview.
What happened was that we built up a relationship with her and we met her two or three times and kept her very much included. We were very candid about what we wanted to do with the film and why we wanted to make it. At the end of the day, it was Janet who got on the phone to us and said, “If you would like me to contribute a little interview to the film, I’d be very happy to do that. Would you like that?” Ian and I weren’t Machiavellian about it, it wasn’t the end goal. We weren’t trying to twist her arm to do it so it was fantastic that it came from her.
That’s so amazing.
You can see in her eyes she’s haunted by this story. It was a really remarkable interview and story.
I love it. It’s taking us inside your world. Between their stories and your own research, what was the main point you wanted to get across?
Ian: I think we wanted to present the closest portrait to him as possible. I think so much has been written about the shows at the MET and the V&A. We had already celebrated the artistry and the genius, not to say we didn’t want to portray that, but Peter has used the expression, we wanted to peel the layers back and reveal the man behind the creativity. I think you always have humans behind everything that is achieved out there. We are all very similar with doubts and we all have issues and going on a journey to analyze and to look into the life of a complicated person and his journey from humble beginnings to being the pinnacle of the fashion world, you don’t have many young, Gay, East London boys reaching those heights. You learn so much about the human condition, you learn about struggle, doubts and the importance of friendship.
For me, it was an interesting learning process.
Peter: I think we wanted to reveal that through the work. Amongst all, these archives of material whether it was the books or the exhibitions, you either had the fashion itself being celebrated. A lot of the books went into every detail of Lee’s life exploring the drugs and the lifestyle in a detail. what worries me about that approach is it slightly obscures seeing the man and the work. We wanted a simple structure that allowed you to see what made him tick and how important his work was to him.
We met with Phillip Treacy who was very open about talking to us about Lee, he said, “What you have to realize is half the stuff written about him in the tabloids was true. He wouldn’t have had time to do his work. I knew Alexander (Philip calls him that) very well and I always saw him working. He was someone who worked non-stop and that drove him.”
That’s what we wanted to present in the film, it wasn’t the fact that he was working, it was that he was exploring himself and his emotional world and his complexity through his work and that he was producing moments that were incredibly dark that spoke to his childhood trauma and wanting to scandalise and shock and prick the whole pretentiousness of the fashion bubble, and explore his feelings of isolation on one hand.
We really wanted a structure to show the rainbow of emotions that produced that work and the moments of joy as well as the darkness.
Let’s talk numbers, how many hours did you have in total?
Ian: I don’t know hours, but in terms of archives, we approached 200 sources of archive and settled on 150 sources. We probably conducted 2 or 3 hours of interviews with 30 contributors. The way we made the film was we shot everything and started editing. It was not an easy process. We didn’t have one place to get everything. We were either filming or creating the 3D skulls, reopening the edit.
Peter: It was joyful but also a pain in the ass, we’d be getting things in and re-open the film. We’d got amazing interviews of Lee two weeks before we locked and so we had to re-open practically every chapter of the film to work this material in and it was a joy to do that.
It was like a detective agency. It was the two of us, our archive producer, and the researcher, the four of us were trying to find scraps. There’d be a picture of Lee’s friends and someone had a video camera and we’d be like, Who’s camera is it?” Are the tapes available? We’d see two seconds in a youtube clip and we’d find these now defunct production companies who followed the fashion scene in the 90s before the age of Instagram and social media and they’d gone around with the designers and shot every important show. We’d try to track those archives down in London, Italy, and Paris and in New York. It turned out that Net-A-Porter was very quietly developing their own archive. It was a detective process and so we’d hunt through them to find material w knew they must have had.