“Racing is life, everything that happens before or after is just waiting.” The phrase, pronounced by the legendary actor Steve McQueen, sums up his passion for motorsport captured in the documentary “The man & Le Mans.”
Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna portray the protagonist of “Bullitt” as a lonely man who sacrificed everything for a dream: to get the audience to sit behind the wheel of a racing car and make them feel the excitement of speed.
That was the purpose of the film “Le Mans” (1971), which McQueen was to produce and star in, under the direction of his mentor, James Sturges, who had launched him to fame with “The Magnificent Seven” (1960) and “The Great Scape” (1963).
But things got complicated to the point that he ended up losing not only control of the film, but also his marriage to Neile Adams, his friendship with Sturges and his partner at Solar Productions, Bob Relyea, and to some extent his innocence.
“He realized that he was human or, as someone says in the film, Steve thought he was an indestructible Hercules and discovered that it was Icarus getting so close to the sun that his wings melted and he fell,” explains Clarke, in a telephone interview from London.
And he also lost his love for Hollywood, he became disillusioned with the profession. He made good films afterwards, no doubt (‘The Towering Inferno’ or ‘An enemy of the people’), but his connection to Hollywood disappeared, ”he adds.
Clarke describes McQueen in this period as “a Shakespearean tragic figure” in stark contrast to the tough guy image and nickname “king of cool” that he had publicly forged.
According to the documentary, which began its public journey at the Cannes Film Festival last year and is now available for sale on DVD, what unleashed the nervousness during the filming was that there was no script and that the deadlines were lengthening at the same time as the budget skyrocketed to more than $ 7.5 million.
The authors of the documentary believe that McQueen – born in 1930 in Beech Grove, Indiana, and died in 1980 in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico – was a misunderstood pioneer, ahead of his time who sought authenticity above all else.
“In the same way that ‘Gravity’ tries to convey the sensation of being in space, 40 years earlier McQueen wanted to seat the viewer behind the wheel of a racing car and make them feel the speed, the danger, the excitement,” he explains Clarke.
«He wanted a sober film, with little script. If you see ‘The Revenant’ something similar happens, there is hardly a script, it is a film about what it is like to fight for survival in a frozen United States of the 19th century, it tries to put you in the position of someone who is fighting for his life. Something like that McQueen was looking for.
He did not succeed one hundred percent, because by losing control of the production, the Hollywood bosses imposed a more argumentative film, and replaced Sturges by Lee Katzin and screenwriter Alan Trustman by Harry Kleiner. But the racing scenes as they are reflected are something unique.
“These dangerous scenes would not be allowed to be shot today,” says Clarke.
The film includes unreleased footage from the shoot and home videos of some of the drivers, as well as McQueen’s original voice taken from different recordings in which he talks about his vision of cinema and the ins and outs of “Le Mans.”
You could say it was a cursed movie. But the truth is that almost everyone who has participated in the documentary with their testimonies – from Adams, whose heart was broken by McQueen, to pilot David Piper, who lost his leg in an accident on set or Trustman, who saw his Career was sinking to defend the actor – they do not seem to speak bitterly, but rather compassionately.
“Time heals everything, I don’t think any of them felt cursed,” says the director. EFE
Steve McQueen, the man who dreamed of speed
