Smash hit

“It’s the stress,” she grumbles, but there’s no elaboration. The floating self-portraits were done by hanging herself from the roof, then removing the supports digitally, as I suspected; but a conventional harness would have pressed into her flesh, leaving bruises and indentations. So she got in a man known as Master Rope Knot, an S&M rope specialist, the best in the business, who ties people up in ways that leave no marks. I guess he gets plenty of work from the Conservatives, I quip. It was bloody painful, she insists. What are the floating self-portraits called, Sam? Escape Artist.

All this is beginning to add up to a theme. Trapped fox. Floating body. Escape Artist. In addition to the White Cube show, she has a single coming out soon that she’s recorded with the Pet Shop Boys downstairs, in which she trills lightly to a disco beat in the manner of mid-period Kylie. And as if that wasn’t stepping far enough away from the confines of the art world, there is also her film, which begins shooting in February. Ah yes, the film.

This summer at Cannes, she made her debut as a proper film director with a charming 15-minute short, Love You More, which was selected for competition in the Palme d’Or. Starring the gorgeous Andrea Riseborough — who startled me mightily by popping up on BBC4 a few weeks later playing the young Mrs Thatcher in The Long Walk to Finchley — it’s the story of a 15-year-old girl who goes out to buy the new Buzzcocks single and brings home a boy she meets in the record shop for a sizzling display of underage naked passion.

As a result of Love You More, she was “bombarded” with Hollywood offers with names like Keira Knightley, Brad Pitt, Naomi Watts attached. She turned them all down. “I knew I wanted to make a British film,” she says. “And I wanted to make something that shook me to the core inside. My agent in LA thought I was a complete prima donna. Because I didn’t have the pressure of having to do something quickly, I just knew I’d know it when I read it.”

After ploughing through 200 scripts, she was finally sent Nowhere Boy, the story of John Lennon’s childhood, adapted from the memoirs of the Beatle’s half-sister by Matt Greenhalgh, the writer of Control, last year’s fine biopic about Ian Curtis of Joy Division. Nowhere Boy will be filmed by Seamus McGarvey, her usual collaborator, who shot Atonement and whose dense romantic textures are a perfect match for her elusive and poetic story lines. But McGarvey didn’t film Sigh, the extraordinary new work that will form the centrepiece of her White Cube show.

Sigh confronts you with a 56-piece orchestra playing a new tune composed by the Art of Noise’s Anne Dudley — without any instruments. The absence of violins, flutes, cellos forces you to look extra closely at the players and their movements. So, it’s another rescue mission: a set of neglected humans are being saved from the anonymity of the orchestra. It’s what Taylor-Wood does best. Treasuring every moment of existence. Her own. And everyone else’s.

Sam Taylor-Wood’s Yes I No is at White Cube, Mason’s Yard, SW1, from Friday, with Escape Artist at No 1 The Piazza, WC2; her single, I’m in Love with a German Film Star, is out tomorrow; her short film Love You More, backed by Film4, will be screened at the London Film Festival on Friday and October 27; and she will be the subject of ITV1’s The South Bank Show on November 16

Other art films

Turner-winner Steve McQueen’s debut film, Hunger, has already won awards at the Cannes, Sydney and Toronto film festivals. Out on October 31, it follows the final weeks of the IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands, who died in the Maze prison, Belfast, in 1981.

It has confidence and maturity, clear evidence of McQueen’s track record as a creator of striking video installations. He brought in the Irish playwright Enda Walsh to write the script.

The photographer Duane Hopkins, whose Better Things, about young drug addicts, also premiered at Cannes, wrote his own screenplay. Hopkins says he visualised his dying drug-taker before shooting a single frame. His next film will be about the underclass in Britain, living on the breadline.

Predictably, Jake and Dinos Chapman are plotting a very different route for their first feature: a comedy about the art world. The brothers plan to write and co-direct, as the Coens do.

Richard Brooks

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